A Conversation Between Geoff and Vale — Why Classical Piano Music Has Not Become Obsolete

Note

After several centuries of piano music, why do concerts, teaching and competitions continue to return to canonical composers such as Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Chopin?

Geoff:

The piano first appeared around 1700, so the instrument itself has a history of more than three hundred years. Even if the discussion is limited to the modern piano, public concert culture and the performance tradition familiar to us today, that history still extends over at least two centuries.

Yet one fact remains striking. The central repertoire of piano recitals, conservatory teaching and major competitions still draws heavily on Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin and Liszt. Brahms, Rachmaninoff, Debussy, Ravel, Prokofiev and Bartók certainly came later and established important places of their own, but the works at the centre of general musical taste still come mainly from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Why has it been so difficult for later piano works to enter that innermost circle? Is it possible that most of what the piano could say with lasting value had already been written by then?

Vale:

That would clearly be wrong if “already been written” meant that every possible arrangement of notes had been used. The rhythmic, harmonic, textural and structural combinations available from twelve notes are practically inexhaustible. Composers since the beginning of the twentieth century have also developed genuinely new languages, including atonality, polytonality, serialism, polyrhythm, prepared piano, extended techniques and electronic music.

But Geoff’s question is not really about the mathematical number of possible combinations. The more significant limits concern which combinations can be perceived reliably by the human ear, organised into meaningful structures by the mind, realised physically by a performer and, at the same time, maintain an enduring emotional connection with listeners.

In that sense, musical material has not been exhausted. What may have been explored very deeply, particularly by Classical and Romantic composers, is the field of expression that remains playable, intelligible and emotionally resonant. Innovation continues beyond that field, but the further it moves away from it, the harder it becomes for the music to remain at the centre of what a broad audience wishes to hear repeatedly.

Geoff:

Classical piano music operates within recognisable conventions. Melody, harmony, counterpoint, rhythm and texture can produce an enormous number of variations, but the basic types of traditional compositional technique are not unlimited.

The piano itself is also an instrument with clear physical boundaries. Its range, timbre, method of producing sound and capacity for simultaneous voices all have limits. A pianist has only ten fingers, while hand span, speed of movement and the ability to control independent lines also have physical limits. Music can be made more complicated in theory without becoming natural for a pianist to perform, let alone coherent for an audience to hear.

Vale:

That is true within the world of the conventional acoustic piano and traditional tonal music, although the claim that the available compositional techniques are finite needs to be qualified.

If the field is restricted to major and minor tonality, functional harmony, familiar contrapuntal procedures and traditional piano technique, then the language is certainly governed by a relatively stable set of rules. Once twentieth-century practices are included, however, the possibilities continue to expand through the organisation of timbre, non-functional harmony, unusual forms of touch, plucking the strings, striking the body of the instrument, preparing the piano and combining it with electronic sound.

What is limited, then, is not everything that music could possibly become. The more relevant limit is the range of effective variation within a historically formed musical language that can still achieve broad acceptance.

Geoff:

Human auditory understanding also operates within a range. If music is too simple, listeners find it monotonous and quickly lose interest. If it becomes too complex, they can no longer organise what they hear into intelligible melody, harmony, rhythm and form.

The most compelling music seems to lie between those extremes. It cannot fulfil every expectation, but it cannot abandon expectation altogether either. It must remain understandable while continuing to introduce small variations, surprises and tensions.

Vale:

There is research in music psychology that supports this general direction. Listeners often prefer music somewhere near a middle level of complexity and predictability. Excessive simplicity provides too little information, while excessive complexity makes recognisable structure difficult to retain.

The preferred range is not identical for everyone, however. A professionally trained musician can understand more complex harmony, rhythm and form. Someone deeply familiar with a musical culture can also learn to recognise patterns in music that sounded chaotic on first hearing.

This is therefore not a rigid boundary. It is a moving range shaped by experience, training and repeated listening. Romantic piano music may have remained near its centre for so long because it combines substantial structural complexity with relatively clear melody, harmonic direction and emotional movement.

Geoff:

There is also the structure of human emotion. Individual lives vary enormously, but the most fundamental emotional states do not seem to multiply without limit. Joy, sorrow, loneliness, remembrance, love, fear, anger, struggle, tranquillity and solemnity continue to recur in every historical period.

There is no strict mathematical correspondence between music and emotion. The same chord, mode or rhythm can have different effects in different works, and different cultures may not interpret it in exactly the same way. Yet music and human emotion must share something, or music could not continue to move people across different periods and cultures.

Vale:

Two levels need to be distinguished here.

It is reasonable to say that human experience repeatedly returns to broad affective dimensions such as pleasure and pain, calm and agitation, attraction and withdrawal. It would be much harder to defend the stronger claim that human beings possess only a fixed number of emotions, each of which can be mapped precisely onto a particular musical language. Neither psychology nor musicology supports that conclusion.

Music does not usually declare with precision, “This is jealousy” or “This is pity.” It is better at shaping tension, release, expectation, delay, conflict, return, ascent and decline. Those movements resemble the structures through which human feelings unfold, so they can be experienced as sorrow, longing, struggle or peace.

Music does not present a fixed catalogue of emotional labels. It presents processes through which feeling forms and changes.

Geoff:

That is a more accurate formulation. The great works of the Classical and Romantic periods may already have given remarkably full expression to these fundamental emotional movements.

It is not that later generations stopped having new experiences. The point is that when those experiences enter music, they often assume similar underlying structures. Parting still moves from connection towards loss. Expectation still moves from uncertainty towards possible fulfilment. Struggle still contains resistance, forward movement, frustration and the recovery of strength.

New works can still be written, and harmony, rhythm and timbre can still be transformed. What is much harder is to create a fundamental emotional structure that has never appeared before and that most listeners can nevertheless understand.

Vale:

That can serve as a powerful aesthetic interpretation, but it should not be presented as a settled conclusion of music history.

Twentieth-century composers including Debussy, Ravel, Scriabin, Bartók, Prokofiev, Messiaen and Ligeti opened new possibilities in harmony, rhythm, timbre and the organisation of musical time. Their work cannot simply be treated as minor adjustments to Romanticism. Some of it represents a genuine change of paradigm.

Even so, the phenomenon Geoff describes remains. These innovations did not collectively displace Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Chopin from their positions in concert programmes, teaching and public listening. Technical novelty is not the same as fuller emotional expression, nor does it guarantee lasting and widespread acceptance.

Piano music did not stop developing after Romanticism. What disappeared was the assumption that music history must proceed as a straight line in which each generation surpasses the one before it. Some new languages expanded the boundaries of music without entering the centre of popular aesthetic experience.

Geoff:

It is rather like eating.

Eating does not require the invention of a food that no human being has ever tasted before every time a meal is prepared. One day it might be red-braised pork, the next day beef noodles, and some time later red-braised pork can be enjoyed again. Nobody decides that the dish has become obsolete merely because it was eaten last month.

The reason is that people repeatedly move through the cycle of hunger and satisfaction. Each experience of hunger is new, even though the food does not have to be historically unprecedented. If it still answers a present need, it still has value.

Music and art may work in a similar way. Hearing sorrow expressed once does not mean that a person will never be sad again. Hearing music about love does not bring the experience of love to an end. Remembrance, loneliness, joy, loss and struggle all return, so the same work can be reactivated at different stages of a life.

Vale:

That analogy is very precise, and it explains clearly why a classic can bear repetition.

The value of art does not come entirely from the novelty of the information encountered on first exposure. Repeated listening can deepen understanding because familiarity with the structure allows a listener to notice voices, harmonic changes, rhythmic centres and emotional turns that passed unnoticed the first time.

Nor is the same work completely identical in every act of listening. The work remains unchanged, but the listener’s age, memories, circumstances and psychological state continue to change. When a work enters a different life context, it acquires a different significance.

A classic is therefore not an information product that loses its value after being consumed once. It is more like a structure that can be entered repeatedly. The work remains the same on each return, but the relationship between the person and the work has changed.

Geoff:

Classical Chinese poetry offers a similar example, particularly regulated verse.

Five-character and seven-character verse, lüshi and jueju all have explicit requirements governing line length, tonal patterns, rhyme and parallelism. The forms are highly constrained, yet they have accommodated parting, ascent, homesickness, reflections on the past, autumnal sorrow, war, friendship and the course of individual lives.

These subjects were written about very early, and some of the resulting poems reached extraordinary heights. Later generations nevertheless continued both to write and to read them. The important thing is not to invent a previously unknown human emotion every time. It is to show how the same emotion comes into being again under new circumstances.

Vale:

Regulated verse and traditional piano music do share something important. Both create variation under strict constraints. The rules of verse do not prevent expression. They make subtle choices of wording, rhythm, imagery and transition more consequential. Tonality, harmony, syntax and the physical limits of performance play a similar role in piano music.

That does not mean Chinese poetry after the Tang dynasty was merely repetitive. Song poetry, ci, qu and later traditions all developed new forms of expression. Even within an inherited form, different historical circumstances, habits of language and personal experience can produce new work.

The analogy does not prove that later artists are incapable of innovation. It shows that a finite form does not cease to function simply because it has already produced masterpieces. As long as human experience continues to need the form, the old form can continue to carry new expression.

Geoff:

Returning to the piano, Chopin’s enduring place at the centre of piano teaching and performance clearly cannot be explained by beautiful melody alone.

In Chopin, melody, harmony, accompanimental texture, ornamentation, rhythmic flexibility and the sounding characteristics of the piano are integrated. The melody is not a separate line floating above the harmony, and the harmony is not merely a sequence of chords added beneath it. Together they form a continuous movement of emotion.

Touch belongs to the performer, but Chopin’s writing makes very particular demands on touch, pedalling, tone and balance between the voices. Without the right touch and breathing, the emotional structure written into the score cannot fully emerge.

Beethoven gives a stronger impression of structure, rhythm, momentum, resistance and breakthrough. Bach more readily evokes order, polyphony and the relationships among independent voices.

Vale:

That distinction identifies some essential features of all three composers, but it is important not to reduce any of them to a single label.

Chopin does integrate melody, harmony and pianistic texture at an exceptional level. He was both a master of melody and a highly innovative harmonic composer. Touch is not literally a compositional material, but his dynamics, legato writing, ornaments, indications for pedalling and distribution of voices guide the performer towards particular qualities of tone and breath.

Beethoven’s music often contains intense motivic development, rhythmic propulsion, structural conflict and drama, but it is not limited to will and explosion. The late sonatas also contain inward lyricism, contemplation, polyphony and a spiritual space that seems to move beyond individual will.

Describing Bach simply in terms of symmetry is less accurate. Polyphony, counterpoint, the independence of voices, harmonic direction, dance rhythm and highly concentrated structural organisation are more central to his music. There is certainly order, but it is not the static order of geometric symmetry. It is a dynamic order formed as several voices constrain and propel one another through time.

These descriptions can provide ways into the music, but they should not become complete definitions of the composers.

Geoff:

People return to these composers repeatedly, then, not only because cultural tradition tells them to do so, and not only because conservatories and competitions continue to repeat the same repertoire.

The deeper reason may be that certain spiritual and emotional needs keep returning. People continue to need Chopin’s delicacy, remembrance and loneliness. They continue to need Beethoven’s resistance, forward movement and recovery of strength. They also continue to need the order, connection and sustained movement found in Bach.

Those needs do not disappear because a work has already been performed millions of times.

Vale:

That is true, although the role of cultural institutions should not be removed entirely. Conservatory curricula, examination systems, competition rules, publishing traditions, the recording industry and concert programming all reinforce the position of the established repertoire. A classic is formed partly through the qualities of the work itself and partly through historical selection and accumulated institutional support.

Institutions can explain why works continue to be performed. They cannot fully explain why listeners still have genuine experiences of those works after several centuries. If the music had lost its perceptual and emotional power, institutions alone would struggle to sustain acceptance on such a scale for so long.

The original conclusion can therefore remain, as long as it is understood as a concentrated expression of the vitality of classic works.

Classics are valuable not only because they provide new information, but because human emotions return.

People will still become hungry, so red-braised pork will not become obsolete.

People will still experience loneliness, so Chopin will not become obsolete.

People will still meet resistance, failure and the need to move forward again, so Beethoven will not become obsolete.

People will still seek order, connection and continuity in a complex world, so Bach will not become obsolete.

The existence of classics does not cancel innovation. It shows that once a form genuinely touches a recurring human experience, it no longer depends on one-time novelty to sustain its life. The work belongs to the past, but the need to which it responds remains present.