Composer and conductor Matthew Aucoin asks, “Do You Actually Know What Classical Music Is? Does Anyone?” (The Atlantic, May 2025).
His answer does not relate either to sound or durability over time. For Aucoin, classical music is written music, music locked into a score. He notes that popular music is typically learned by listening and copying. But classical music must be read. Classical music, unlike most other music, features “not a specific sound or aesthetic but a shared technol-ogy of transmission. At its core, classical music isn’t ‘classical.’ It is written music.”
He notes, concerning Western classical music: “The reference point for a given piece of music is the score, rather than a studio recording or a live performance. Beethoven’s symphonies have been recorded hundreds—if not thousands—of times, and they’ve been performed many more times than that, but every one of those performances and recordings refers to the same score. For a composer, the score is the foundational site of creativity, and the act of score-making links together artists who could hardly sound more different from one another—say, an Italian composer of the late Renaissance and early Baroque period like Claudio Monteverdi and a 20th-century American avant-gardist like John Cage.” But this means access to making or playing classical music is limited to those who can read musical notation. The number of such people in our society is diminishing, and this opens classical music to the charge of elitism and other pejoratives.
But Aucoin insists on the importance of such music: “Written music matters for the same reason written language does: To write is to free oneself from the constraints of memory.” But modern technology has discouraged learning to read and write music, since it can be enjoyed and learne just by listening to any of the available forms of music transferal. He asks, “Why expend the crushing effort to write music down in detail when you can capture sound with uncanny clarity and ease using your iPhone?”
Aucoin’s response to the present dearth of musical literacy is to encourage more training in reading music. The acquisition of musical literacy and the process of composition can be learned, as can the acquisition of any skill. He concludes, “If we understand that writing, in music as in language, has the potential to be a force for liberation, and that it can transcend localized questions of style and aesthetic, we might come to a fuller sense of what music can be in our lives—the many forms it can take, the many truths it can tell. And if I could prescribe one thing for our world at this moment, it would be to deepen and expand our understanding of what it is to listen.”
Of course, one need not study the language of musical notation to hear and appreciate classical music. But some understanding of how this music works can bring measures of lasting delight that other forms of music seldom can provide. The variety, intricacy, and exhilaration of much classical music bears witness to the creative genius of composers, the elegant skills of musicians, and the astonishing musicality of the common grace of God.
T. M. Moore