Page 156 - ESSENTIAL LISTENING TO MUSIC

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In music, the term genre simply means the type or class of music to which we listen (see also Chapter 1). The string quartet is a genre of music just as are the opera aria, country music ballad, twelve-bar blues piece, military march, and rap song. When we listen to a piece of music, we come armed with expectations as to how it will sound, how long it will last, and how we should behave. We may even go to a special place—an opera house or a bar—and dress a certain way—in gown and diamond earrings or black leather jacket and nose rings, for example. It all depends on the genre of music we expect to hear. If you change the genre, you change the audience, and vice versa.
In the age of Haydn and Mozart, there were five main genres of art music: the instrumental genres of symphony, string quartet, sonata, and concerto, and the vocal genre of opera. Whereas the sonata, concerto, and opera emerged dur- ing the Baroque era, the symphony and string quartet were entirely new to the Classical period. Thus we begin our exploration of Classical genres with the in- strumental symphony and quartet.
The Symphony and the Symphony Orchestra
A symphony is a multimovement composition for orchestra lasting about twenty-five minutes in the Classical period to nearly an hour in the Romantic era. The origins of the symphony go back to the late-seventeenth-century Ital- ian opera house, where an opera began with an instrumental sinfonia (literally, “a harmonious sounding together”). Around 1700, the typical Italian sinfonia was a one-movement instrumental work in three sections: fast–slow–fast. Soon, Italian musicians and foreigners alike took the sinfonia out of the opera house and expanded it into three separate and distinct movements. A fourth move- ment, the minuet, was inserted by composers north of the Alps beginning in the 1740s. Thus, by mid-century the symphony had assumed its now-familiar four- movement format: fast–slow–minuet–fast (see “Form, Mood, and the Listener’s Expectations” in Chapter 8). While the movements of a symphony are usually independent with regard to musical themes, all are written in a single key (or set of closely related keys).
As public concerts became more common during the Classical period, so the symphony increased in popularity. The larger public halls accommodated more people, and the bigger audience enjoyed the more robust, colorful sound of the Classical orchestra. The four-movement symphony was the best format by which to convey that sound. The fact that Haydn composed so many (106), and Mozart (given his short life) an even more astonishing number (41), shows that by the end of the eighteenth century, the symphony had become the foremost instrumental genre, the showpiece of the concert hall. All but a few of Haydn’s last twenty symphonies were composed for public performance in Paris and London, and Mozart’s last four symphonies were intended for public concerts that he himself produced. His famous G minor symphony (1788), for example, was apparently first performed in a casino in central Vienna (Figure 9.1)—that’s where the people were and that’s where the money was. So dominant did the
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