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::If they are elementary facts on that order, why did AliceBG just correct one of them? You appear to have been mistaken.
::If they are elementary facts on that order, why did AliceBG just correct one of them? You appear to have been mistaken.
::I added the template rather than looking for citations because I know relatively little about music, so I wouldn't have the first clue of how to look for sources or interpret them well. I am, however, capable of seeing when there are assertions without any sources. If people aren't allowed to use that template, why do we have it?--[[user:TomMoore|<font color="#000066" >Tom Moore</font>]]<sup>[[User talk:TomMoore|fiat justitia ruat coelum]]</sup> 22:07, 9 June 2008 (EDT)
::I added the template rather than looking for citations because I know relatively little about music, so I wouldn't have the first clue of how to look for sources or interpret them well. I am, however, capable of seeing when there are assertions without any sources. If people aren't allowed to use that template, why do we have it?--[[user:TomMoore|<font color="#000066" >Tom Moore</font>]]<sup>[[User talk:TomMoore|fiat justitia ruat coelum]]</sup> 22:07, 9 June 2008 (EDT)
==Classical vs. Popular (redux)==
TerryH, there's a lot of valuable insight on this page, but one anachronism in the "history" section weakens the article.
While the "popular vs. classic" dichotomy is real today, it's a stretch to say that it holds true for any time period before 1850 -- there's a very good reason for this date, which I'll get to in a moment. It is especially not accurately applied to the Renaissance or the Baroque.
A more useful distinction which definitely existed from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment and beyond is "sacred vs. secular." The Baroque terms "sonata da camera" and "sonata da chiesa" illustrate this dichotomy well (see discussion in [[chamber music]]). Bach's cantatas are divided between sacred and secular as well. And as other editors have challenged before, no one considered a concert to be a serious affair until the canonization process took hold after 1850. Beethoven related gleefully in a letter after the performance of the 9th symphony that the Viennese audience burst into spontaneous applause after the surprise entrance of the timpani in the second movement, implying that it was nothing unusual for the Viennese public. It's also worth mentioning that the majority of music in those days was written for private performances or salons. I'd add to that the Italian opera tradition, which was never an elitist affair: Google the term "cognoscenti" to get an idea of what I mean.
The reason I use the cutoff date of 1850 is because the revolutions of 1848 and 1849, while failures, had the effect of freeing up public expression. A colleague of mine did research into Viennese newspapers, and discovered that in the week after the revolution, there was literally a tenfold increase in the number of public concerts. Populist-oriented "revolution" music was part of that explosion, and included elements that set the stage for a real popular music tradition in Germany and Austria. The other thing that happened in the decade after the revolution was the establishment of a Germanic musical canon. In the decade of the 1850's many of the great orchestras and conservatories were founded in Europe, and their repertoire/curriculum started to resemble the classical canon we have today.
It is possible that some of the seeds for popular music were sown earlier, but with the political repressions in the early half of the 19th-century, there were severe restrictions on public gatherings, which included concerts. Thus, a complete picture is hard to come by.
That being said, there were always of course "songs," like the "Twinkle, Twinkle" example you used. Of course they've always influenced composers, but it's a bit odd to call them "popular music" as such. Did they feed into the eventual pop music genre? Certainly, but it's not the most reliable historical model for talking about earlier music. [[User:JDWpianist|JDWpianist]] 19:18, 7 April 2009 (EDT)