# Classical Vs. Pop/Rock - The Differences



## Guest (Jan 24, 2016)

A friend of mine is fascinated by my obsession with classical music and wanted to understand why it's so different from pop music from a musical analysis standpoint (he's an amateur musician). 

I could think of a few things, which would apply to a most of the classical repertoire. 

It's not about LENGHT because miniatures like Chopin mazurkas or Schubert Lieder can be short like a pop song but still display different characteristics than a pop song. 

1) Harmony and Modulations. Most pop music is harmonically simple, with each song staying in one key and rarely venturing outside of it. More adventurous song writers might included a different key in the bridge, but generally the music stays in 1 or two keys. The harmonic tension is based on the dominant-tonic release but melodies are rarely lengthened to include deceptive cadences. The Beatles have maybe a few songs out of over a hundred that have deceptive cadences. 

So I explained to my friend that for many classical composers, the JOURNEY is more important than the destination. You start somewhere (the tonic), and you'll visit other places (the dominant) and along the way you'll get lost (Modulations during the development section), and eventually you find your way back home (back to the tonic). 

A pop song has something to say and says it, without much fuss. 

2) Contrast vs. Static Music. This principle goes beyond the harmonic differences between pop and classical. And it encompasses modern music. You don't just want to have something to say, but you want to create a contrast between different parts of your theme/idea. I played for him Mahler's 6th Symphony, first movement, with the dramatically contrasting two themes, as an example. Then of course you have contrast between the movements. 

Pop music includes an element of contrast, often between songs rather than within a particular song. But the two elements are not explored, developed and reconciled, in the exhaustive way they are in classical music. 

3) Rhythm. The most obvious difference. Pop/rock is driven by rhythm and tends to be a simple rhythm in 4/4 or 2/2 that is danceable. You rarely hear a 3/4 or 6/8 rhythm or any other rhythm in three beats in a pop/rock song, which is the dance equivalent for classical music. 

4) Melody. A pop melody is generally square (same measure length for each section), and with a limited range, with intervals rarely exceeding a 5th. It stays in one key and is rarely developed. On the other hand classical melodies are more adventurous, can be much longer, modulate, and develop as they go. 

I can think of a few more differences (use of counterpoint, etc.)... to me those stick out. Thoughts?


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## Harold in Columbia (Jan 10, 2016)

What's the difference between this classical piece and this pop song?










One's sufficiently out of date to seem respectable to a certain group of people, the other isn't. Next question.


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

I'm not sure about the idea that pop/rock music is generally based on dominant/tonic tension. To my understanding, it largely replaces so-called perfect cadences with plagal cadences, either from IV or the flatted VII. V is used, but usually not treated as dominant, and other characteristic progressions of common practice tonality are used less frequently than I-V-IV-I or some variant.

I think the most important difference from the way people listen to pop or rock music is the variety in texture and emphasis. In the average popular song (not getting into jazz or prog or such here), you have a strict delineation between melody and accompaniment, and this is maintained more or less throughout a whole song in more or less the same way, whereas in much classical music, the primary focus of attention may be on a melodic line that appears in a variety of registers over the course of a piece (with a reciprocal relationship between melody and accompaniment) or even on multiple melodies occurring simultaneously.


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## EarthBoundRules (Sep 25, 2011)

Dynamic contrast is rarely found in pop music as opposed to Classical. The instrumentation is also usually more constant in a pop song than in a piece of Classical music.


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## dsphipps100 (Jan 10, 2016)

One huge difference is the texture. Pop/rock music is basically a melody with a mostly chordal accompaniment and some kind of repetitive bass ostinato that hardly ever changes. It requires very little mental effort to comprehend it because of its simplicity.

"Classical" or Art music, on the other hand, might go so far as to be completely, 100% polyphonic, where every single part is a melody unto itself, and their interplay weaving around each other generates the harmony. Most classical music doesn't go to this Bach-like extreme, clearly, but most of classical music has some leaning in this direction, to one extent or another.

The bottom line is that the texture in classical music is more advanced/complicated than it is in pop/rock music.

I like to tell people that it's like steak vs. vienna sausage. You can have quick & easy by simply popping open a can of vienna sausage and then sticking those things directly into your mouth and your stomach gets instant gratification. That's the level on which most people's brains operate all the time.

Or you can spend a few days marinating a filet mignon in your favorite sauce, then prepare the grill to have just the right fire, spend the time it takes to slowly, slowly cook the steak, letting it simmer for a good while while the heat penetrates all the way to the steak's core, and then have yourself one of the finest meals that anybody has ever invented on this earth. But most people's brains do not operate on that level. They think life and art are both nothing but vienna sausages.


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## Guest (Jan 24, 2016)

Melody?! You need to come round my house; there's none of that nonsense here!


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## Art Rock (Nov 28, 2009)

Some days I like the filet mignon that is the best of classical music, other days I like the lobster that is the best of pop/rock music. In both genres we also find the sausages, and the fish fingers.


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## Guest (Jan 24, 2016)

Thanks for Mahlerian for noting the plagal cadences of pop. True the standard is I-V-IV-I 
But doesn't blues go back to the dominant7 chord before landing back on the tonic? 
For example "Hey Jude" - Remember (IV) to let her into your heart (I) Then you can start (V) to make it better (I)


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## Harold in Columbia (Jan 10, 2016)

One more point: Enumerating the differences between the Beatles or Kendrick Lamar or whatever, on the one hand, and Chopin or Schubert or Mahler is incoherent. If contemporary pop music has an analog in the time of Chopin, it's Bellini; in the time of Schubert, Rossini; in the time of Mahler, Paul Delmet. But even that comparison is only useful as an aid to understanding what those composers meant to their time and/or what pop music means to ours.

A meaningful statement about the difference between today's pop music and classical music would have to use today's classical music as the point of comparison. In other words, the difference isn't between Chopin and the Beatles, but between, say, maybe Boulez's _Figures-Doubles-Prismes_, Britten's _The Prodigal Son_, or Riley's "A Rainbow in Curved Air" and the Beatles.

(And of course the '60s, and hence the Beatles, aren't actually today any more either.)


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

DoReFaMi said:


> Thanks for Mahlerian for noting the plagal cadences of pop. True the standard is I-V-IV-I
> But doesn't blues go back to the dominant7 chord before landing back on the tonic?
> For example "Hey Jude" - Remember (IV) to let her into your heart (I) Then you can start (V) to make it better (I)


There are lots of variations on the normal blues progression, the version I mentioned is the one I'm more familiar with, though.

I'd say that Beatles music uses lots of both kinds of progression, reflecting the members' interest in blues/rock/pop as well as classical music, and the overall dominance of the subdominant to the more frequent exclusion of V-I cadences has been a more recent thing, and progressions by step have become more prominent as a result of dance music influence.

In Hey Jude, the last section (that everyone remembers) doesn't have any V chord at all.


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## leoravera (Mar 7, 2013)

Harold in Columbia said:


> One's sufficiently out of date to seem respectable to a certain group of people, the other isn't. Next question.


A little caustic... but probably true


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## dsphipps100 (Jan 10, 2016)

dogen said:


> Melody?! You need to come round my house; there's none of that nonsense here!


Well, whichever part of the song(?) the listeners walk away repeating...


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## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

Some more:
A classical work is usually the work of a single person, while often in popular music is a collective effort.
Classical is mainly based on the score, with the advantage that it can be very complex and the limitation due to many nuances can't be reproduced on a piece of paper.
Classical music often uses large ensembles, while in pop music the bands are usually made of few people.
Vocals are completely different, and in popular music there's a lot more variety for different reasons, maybe because popular music is mainly vocal music, and also because the vocal parts are... idiomatic and based on the particular strenghts and weaknessess of the voice of the singer who's usually the one who invents the part.


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## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

DoReFaMi said:


> 3) Rhythm. The most obvious difference. Pop/rock is driven by rhythm and tends to be a simple rhythm in 4/4 or 2/2 that is danceable. You rarely hear a 3/4 or 6/8 rhythm or any other rhythm in three beats in a pop/rock song, which is the dance equivalent for classical music.


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## guilhermeafonso (Jan 26, 2016)

Hey guys! New here, my first post!

I've seen that Mahlerian noted prog out of the picture so far. But I'm researching the subject and I'd like to hear some opinions about it. What differences can we underline between Prog Rock and Classical Music?

To narrow it down, since both terms are very broad in meaning, I'm referring to bands such as Yes or Genesis (already a more symphonic approach of Prog), when compared to common-practice compositional customs.

I've been searching around the net in forums out there, but in many of them a sort of arrogance from the classical listeners is very apparent and annoying... However, both on a John Covach article and Edward Macan's seminal _Rocking The Classics_ there's great respect for Prog's endeavors and the comparison remains strictly on musical grounds.


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## Guest (Jan 26, 2016)

Repetitions more numbing than a Philip Glass concerto.


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## isorhythm (Jan 2, 2015)

Triple meters aren't that uncommon in pop.









 (cover because original not on youtube)





just off the top of my head

and how could I have forgotten one of the great masterpieces of the 00s


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## violadude (May 2, 2011)

For the poetic metaphor answer:

Pop music is like looking at a painting. Everything is displayed for you all at once at the very forefront. Most of what you need to know you can notice within the first 30 seconds (well, maybe this doesn't apply to really great paintings, but ya know...). 

Whereas Classical Music is more like a movie, where everything unfolds over time and there are different forms of expression in different parts of the movie/piece.

I'm still working on this one, but those are the basics.


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## Morimur (Jan 23, 2014)

norman bates said:


>


Trout Mask Replica isn't exactly run of the mill pop music. There are always exceptions.


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## Harold in Columbia (Jan 10, 2016)

guilhermeafonso said:


> What differences can we underline between Prog Rock and Classical Music?


One is that many of the things prog rock fans get excited about - to them, unusual meters and changes in meter and chord progressions - are old news in classical music. The unique achievements in prog rock seem to me to consist mostly in particular ways of playing rock instruments - electric guitar, bass, drums, amplified vocals.


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

L


violadude said:


> For the poetic metaphor answer:
> 
> Pop music is like looking at a painting. Everything is displayed for you all at once at the very forefront. Most of what you need to know you can notice within the first 30 seconds (well, maybe this doesn't apply to really great paintings, but ya know...).
> 
> ...


Why does this idea seem so familiar?


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## violadude (May 2, 2011)

Strange Magic said:


> L
> 
> Why does this idea seem so familiar?


I don't know. I thought I came up with it myself, but apparently someone beat me to it?


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