Can we compare popular and classical music? Schubert, Katy Perry, and the role of asymmetry

Can We Compare Popular and Classical Music?

Musicians trained in the Western classical tradition increasingly face a fundamental question: Is it possible to compare a pop song with a classical composition? Do they share common values or structural principles that make such a comparison meaningful? Since the turn of the millennium, several thoughtful studies have explored these issues, demonstrating that raising such questions is indeed worthwhile.

Two Contrasting Perspectives

Classical musicians have at least two main attitudes toward this question. In Who Needs Classical Music?, Julian Johnson argues that classical works possess distinctive values that most popular music lacks. He rejects the idea that musical preference is simply a matter of taste, insisting that classical music differs from popular music because it never functions as background noise — it demands effort, concentration, and patience. For Johnson, the richness and complexity of classical artworks allow them to raise metaphysical questions and push us beyond our limits. He suggests a technical comparison is possible. Reflecting on the relationship between classical and popular music and their approaches to entertainment, he writes that “from the perspective of classical music, therefore, a pop ballad of the 1950s is perplexing not so much because of the simplicity of the musical materials, which might be compared in some respects to the simplicity of Schubert, but precisely because the ballad was written in the 1950s and not the 1820s.” What makes this statement intriguing is not its historical objections but rather the way it places these two genres side by side as technically comparable.

A different position emerges in Nicholas Cook’s Music – A Very Short Introduction. Cook adopts a more pluralistic approach, less concerned with pitting these musical worlds against each other or asserting classical music’s superiority. He suggests that even within the Western tradition, where works are precisely notated, composition actually takes place in performance — a reminder that notation has its limits and that neglecting the performer is misleading. By placing notation alongside the practices of pop, jazz, and non-Western music, Cook argues that the main difference between classical music and these other traditions is that the latter are performer-centered and not rooted in the Western model of notation. This holds true, he maintains, even if jazz standards and baroque basso continuo share some notational similarities.

Symmetry and Structure: Schubert Meets Katy Perry

Whichever perspective one finds more appealing, it is clear that popular music’s features can be described using analytical terms drawn from classical music — at least on a technical level. Some musicians believe that technical comparative analysis leads to aesthetic conclusions; others do not.

Johnson is not alone in placing Schubert alongside popular music. Music experts often regard Schubert’s songs as precursors of pop songs, especially in terms of form. Examining Schubert’s Auf den Wasser zu Singen alongside Katy Perry’s 2016 hit Rise reveals important aspects of both works.

Schubert’s three-and-a-half-minute setting of Leopold Stolberg’s poem from 1823 paints a delicate portrait of a small boat drifting across a calm lake. The poem’s speaker contemplates the passage of time during sunset, rocked gently by the waves. Katy Perry’s Rise, by contrast, is a powerful electronic anthem with lyrics about victory and overcoming opponents; NBC Sports used it during the 2016 Summer Olympics.

At the macro-structural level, both pieces are relatively simple. Perry sings a verse-prechorus-chorus structure twice (equivalent to 2xABC in classical terminology) with a short extension of the final chorus. Schubert uses strophic form — the same music for each verse, setting an eight-bar piano introduction and a two-bar close aside. Looking closer at the inner articulation of these main sections reveals strikingly different approaches to symmetry.

The Perry song — like many pop songs — consists entirely of eight-bar sections, leaving no room for asymmetry at the level of bar organization. This is complete symmetry. The Schubert lied also shows a pull toward symmetry, a legacy of Viennese Classical formal thinking, but its bar-pair articulations are often ambiguous, and it is not always clear whether a bar belongs to one pair or another. While symmetry functions as a principle in Schubert’s formal thinking, asymmetry is equally essential to the music.

Harmony, Meter, and Texture

Rise’s harmonic language also demonstrates implacable symmetry. Written in E-flat minor, it uses only three additional chords: C-flat major, G-flat major, and B-flat major. These four chords cycle through the song like a kind of chaconne. Ryan Sargent, Social Media Manager for MakeMusic, Inc., describes the harmony as simple but powerful, calling it the song’s most successful element. Schubert’s song, while harmonically plain (though containing more than four chords), deploys its chords asymmetrically, creating tension between the micro-structural articulation of bar-pairs and the harmonic articulation, producing two parallel but different dimensions.

The relationship between time signature and melodic rhythm also differs markedly. Schubert’s 6/8 meter follows the text’s rhythm; every note falls on the correct beat, creating flexibility that emerges naturally from the meter itself. Perry’s song uses 4/4 — effectively the only time signature pop songs employ. Melody and meter do not align neatly, producing a different sort of asymmetry, but always in relation to a constant pulse. This contrasts with Schubert’s micro-structural asymmetries, which emerge from literacy and allow for design without constant reference to an unvarying beat.

The solo voice and accompaniment relate differently in each piece. In Schubert’s song, the piano part resembles an Impromptu and could stand alone meaningfully, even though voice and piano form a coherent unity. In Rise, the voice and accompaniment — a layer of electronically created sounds — are less independent. Paradoxically, the accompaniment, though it may seem the most compositionally complex element, would hardly make sense without the melody.

Mutual Influence and Critical Engagement

Popular music’s structural debt to classical forms is clear at the macro level, and pop’s influence on contemporary classical composers is equally undeniable. That influence becomes most visible when we can grasp the difference between the two worlds. Thomas Adès’ Ecstasio, the third movement of Asyla — a symphony in all but name — alludes to a traditional symphony’s third dance movement while borrowing material from 1990s disco. The implacable bar-pairs characteristic of disco are present as a foundation, but they are constantly questioned and overwritten by Adès’ more asymmetrical formal thinking, as he adds extra bars and shifts time signatures. This approach extends to the movement’s macro form: an enumeration-like plan similar to disco tracks played in sequence, yet one that creates subtle connections between themes and even allows for recapitulation.

While disagreeing with his modernist stance, it is worth affirming Johnson’s observation that a distinguishing feature of classical music is its critical treatment of material. Whatever influences or materials it takes up, classical music applies a compositional imprint inherited from tradition. When a classical composer uses material inspired by popular music, that material becomes subject to critical questioning in light of historical past.

Literacy as the Decisive Difference

This critical attitude is possible because of classical music’s deep roots in literacy. The asymmetries present in classical works — even when a visible impulse toward symmetry exists, as in Schubert or the Viennese classics — are made possible entirely by the practice of notation. Popular music’s asymmetries differ fundamentally: even where melodic or accompanimental asymmetries appear, constant pulsation remains, and all asymmetry relates back to meter. This points to a tradition rooted in improvisation, or as Cook puts it, an essentially performer-centered tradition.

The Importance of a Symmetry

The most decisive difference between Western classical music and popular music, then, is technical and can be grasped through technical terms. This view is confirmed by observing how both traditions are sometimes shaped by similar tendencies. Classical music — much like Katy Perry’s song, which was written by a group of people beyond Perry herself — is increasingly project-oriented and collaborative. Contemporary classical composers are often just one element among many, with commissions dependent on a manager’s taste and the occasion, echoing eighteenth-century practice when composers worked for courts.

As Richard Taruskin writes in his Oxford History of Western Music, the unifying foundation beneath classical canon’s vast heterogeneity — its wonderful generic variety — is literacy: the fact that these genres have been disseminated through writing. This medium enables everything classical music treasures and allows it to assimilate the most diverse influences. In theory, anything is possible in classical music. The Western classical tradition’s critical thinking, rooted in composition, guarantees its independence and relevance. From this vantage point, studying and reflecting on the materials and tendencies found in popular music can prove fruitful and inspiring for classical musicians.