Music Theory

How Classical Music Surpasses Popular Music in Expressive Power


27 min read

In at least one crucial respect, the popular music of the past sixty years falls short of the great masterpieces of the classical tradition. Popular music can certainly be aesthetically rewarding in certain ways, and some popular works may even surpass a good deal of classical music on certain criteria. Nevertheless, classical music possesses more expressive possibilities. The finest classical works draw from an expressive palette that popular music rarely matches. As a result, classical music achieves a psychological depth and profundity that popular music seldom attains. No Beatles album reaches the profundity of Bach's St. Matthew Passion. None of Madonna's music can rival the expressive range of Mozart's Don Giovanni. Snoop Dogg's oeuvre cannot compete with Schubert's when it comes to expressive potential. This expressiveness stems from harmonic and other properties that are absent — or present to a far lesser degree — in popular music.

Defining classical and popular music

By "classical music" I mean music from the common practice period, which scholars typically define as encompassing the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic eras — that is, music composed between roughly 1600 and 1900. Much of what I argue can also be extended to the great works of Renaissance polyphony. Classical music in this sense does not include the atonal music of the past century.

Defining popular music is more challenging. Wikipedia's list of popular music genres contains literally hundreds of entries, from African heavy metal to Zouk. What I mean by popular music is perhaps best captured by traditions of music-making traceable to 1950s rock and roll. These traditions have increasingly abandoned certain features of common practice composition, including functional harmony, modulation, and contrary motion. When I speak of popular music, I do not refer to jazz, which in many of its manifestations is an extension of common practice music-making.

While I doubt that popular music possesses a high degree of a certain kind of value — at least relative to the greatest works of the classical canon — I do not endorse the harsh assessments of popular music advanced by Theodore Adorno, Allan Bloom, or Roger Scruton. I have no desire to deny that much popular music has aesthetic value. As Theodore Gracyk has argued, popular music can be valuable in a variety of ways. In some respects, the aesthetic value of the best popular music may even exceed that of a great deal of classical music. My claim is only that by possessing the profundity that results from expressive power, classical music as a whole surpasses popular music as a whole.

My position also differs from that of formalists who have been skeptical about popular music's aesthetic value. Some formalists argue that popular music is inferior because it typically has less formal complexity than classical music. My view, however, is that there is no firm correlation between aesthetic value and formal complexity. Very simple music can be quite lovely — consider the various chant traditions from around the world: Byzantine, Tibetan, and Gregorian. These traditions are often formally simple yet characterized by exquisite beauty. (I also believe that formally complex works can have little aesthetic value; I am, for instance, unconvinced by the aesthetic value of Milton Babbitt's music, formally interesting though it may be.) My position is simply that music's expressiveness tends to be limited when certain compositional techniques common in classical music are not employed. When expressiveness is limited, so too is music's capacity for psychological insight and profundity.

In one respect, my view resembles certain formalist positions. Like formalists, I believe that the sophisticated harmony and counterpoint characteristic of the best classical music contribute to its aesthetic value. I differ, however, in that I do not hold sophisticated harmony and counterpoint to be inherently valuable. Rather, I maintain that sophisticated tonal harmony is an important contributor to musical expressiveness, and that music lacking contrapuntal development is unlikely to achieve a high degree of expressiveness.

The relationship between classical and popular music parallels that between literary fiction and genre fiction — mysteries, adventure stories, romances, science fiction, and so on. Literary fiction offers something that genre fiction, considered as a whole, does not. It can be a source of valuable social, emotional, and moral insights — in short, it can be profound. Experimental evidence now shows that literary fiction, unlike genre fiction, contributes to readers' capacity for insight into character and emotion. This is not to say that popular fiction lacks aesthetic value, but that genre fiction is primarily valuable as entertainment rather than as a source of insight. The same is true, I believe, of popular music.

That said, some popular fiction transcends its genre — I have in mind the mysteries of Dorothy Sayers and the science fiction of Ursula Le Guin. Both authors produced moving and insightful works that bear comparison with excellent literary fiction. Similarly, popular music can sometimes transcend its genre and approach the degree of expressiveness and profundity we associate with the greatest works of Monteverdi, Purcell, and Handel. On the whole, however, this is rare.

Harmonic differences between classical and popular music

A great deal of evidence, both anecdotal and statistical, supports the view that popular music has abandoned many practices of classical tonal harmony. (Jazz, particularly in its pre-1960 period, did not.) Statistical evidence comes from a study by Trevor de Clercq and David Temperley. They analyzed 100 songs from Rolling Stone's "500 Greatest Songs of All Time" (2004), selecting the top 20 songs from five decades: the 1950s through the 1990s. The songs chosen are widely regarded as among the best popular music of the past sixty years, so they likely contain more harmonic resources than run-of-the-mill popular music.

De Clercq and Temperley found several important ways in which popular music harmony differs from common practice composition — particularly the classical music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One difference is the distribution of chromatic roots. In 1950s popular music, I, IV, and V chords account for over 95% of all chords, compared to roughly 79% in classical music. In subsequent decades, popular music departed even more radically. Starting in the 1960s, the percentage of V chords fell dramatically, while the percentage of IV chords became about triple that found in classical music. Strikingly, the percentages of ♭III and ♭VII chords are much higher in popular music than in common practice composition.

The distribution of chromatic roots in common practice and popular music can be seen in De Clercq and Temperley's data:

  • I: 34.6% (common practice) vs. 32.8% (popular)
  • ♭II: 1.8% vs. 0.05%
  • II: 11.3% vs. 3.6%
  • ♭III: 1.1% vs. 2.6%
  • III: 2.3% vs. 1.9%
  • IV: 7.6% vs. 22.6%
  • ♯IV: 1.8% vs. 0.03%
  • V: 37.0% vs. 16.3%
  • ♭VI: 3.7% vs. 0.04%
  • VI: 5.4% vs. 7.2%
  • ♭VII: 0.07% vs. 8.1%
  • VII: 3.8% vs. 0.04%

Several conclusions emerge. The popular music of the 1950s appears rather harmonically impoverished — it is unlikely to owe much of its expressive quality to harmonic characteristics. This conclusion will surprise no one familiar with early rock and roll. The music can be aesthetically pleasing; indeed, empirical evidence suggests that listeners without formal musical training are most pleased by familiar chord progressions, even though they can recognize deviations from standard patterns. Still, few would say that expressive nuance and profundity are strengths of early rock and roll.

Subsequent popular music displays a wider variety of chromatic roots, but this apparent variety is misleading. While the genre as a whole employs chords with a wide range of chromatic roots, individual works typically use a smaller range of chords than is usual in common practice composition. To fully understand the harmonic limitations of popular music, we need to dig deeper.

The different distributions of chromatic roots reflect differing scales and standard chord progressions. Common practice composition uses a diatonic scale, with a standard progression of I, IV, V (or i, iv, v in the minor mode). Given the scarcity of the V chord after the 1950s, this progression is much less common in popular music. Instead, popular music often employs a modal scale. Rock music frequently uses an Aeolian scale: i, ii°, ♭III, iv, v, ♭VI, and ♭VII (with ii° seldom used in practice). The progression i, ♭VI, ♭VII is very standard — examples include Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower," Eric Clapton's "Layla," David Bowie's "1984," "Message in a Bottle" by The Police, and R.E.M.'s "The One I Love."

The Mixolydian scale is also common, with the progression I-♭VII found in songs like The Doors' "The End," Steppenwolf's "Born to Be Wild," and "Fire on the Mountain" by the Grateful Dead. The Dorian scale is frequently employed as well — Styx's "Renegade," Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall," and Santana's "Evil Ways" serve as examples.

The abandonment of classical tonal harmony's chord progressions reduces popular music's expressive capacity. To appreciate why, we must consider Leonard B. Meyer's views on musical expressiveness. In common practice composition, certain chords have strong tendencies to precede certain other chords. Some chords are experienced as unstable, requiring resolution by others. A I chord is typically followed by IV or V, rarely by II or III. A II chord typically moves to V, rarely to I, III, or IV. III often leads to VI, rarely to II or V. These patterns establish musical expectations in listeners.

Meyer's hypothesis was that these expectations are crucial to how music arouses emotions. When expected patterns are followed, listeners experience satisfaction; when patterns are violated, listeners experience frustration. This arousal of emotion contributes to music's expressiveness. When a chord leads listeners to expect a second chord, it is called functional. A chord that does not naturally resolve is non-functional. The creation of expectations gives rise to tension, which is released when resolution occurs.

Empirical support for Meyer's hypothesis comes from a psychological study using six chorales by J.S. Bach. Each contained an unexpected chord — for instance, an unexpected minor chord where a major was expected. The experimenters modified the chorales in two ways: first by replacing unexpected chords with expected ones, and second by replacing them with even more unexpected chords (Neapolitan sixths). Test subjects — well-trained musicians and non-musicians — listened to all eighteen versions while researchers recorded subjective reports of emotional arousal and tension, finger temperature, and EEG results. Perception of tension, subjective emotion reports, finger temperature, and EEG readings all correlated with harmonic unexpectedness. Trained musicians, more familiar with tonal harmony conventions, showed more marked responses, but non-musicians also responded. These findings suggest that functional chords, which establish patterns of expectation, frustration, and satisfaction, contribute to musical expressiveness.

Other research has reached related conclusions. Listeners often report physical responses associated with emotion: shivers down the spine, tears, a lump in the throat, increased heartbeat. Some of these responses are prompted by features found in both classical and popular music — appoggiaturas, for example, tend to arouse tears. But other physical responses are triggered by features found only or much more frequently in classical music. Shivers are associated with new or unprepared harmonies and sudden dynamic or textural changes. More uncommon physical responses are prompted by delay of a final cadence or harmonic or melodic acceleration to a cadence. These physiological findings indicate that certain musical features are experienced as expressive.

Why non-functional harmony limits expressiveness

These considerations bear on popular music's expressiveness because chords in popular music are often non-functional. A given chord in popular music typically does not evoke in listeners the expectation that a particular chord will follow. The chord progression patterns found in classical music are absent from popular music, and popular music does not establish any new patterns of expectation to replace what classicism lost. A chord in popular music can move to a variety of others instead of following predictable paths.

Some popular music does follow an i, iv, v pattern, and it might be thought that this continues to arouse Meyeresque emotions. To an extent, this may be true. However, as Alf Björnberg notes, "the tension-resolution effect of the cadence is weakened by the absence of the leading note in the v chord."

The most direct way to hear the difference is to compare the emotional journey of a Bach chorale — with its carefully prepared functional harmonies that build and release tension — against a typical pop song built on a modal loop. The depth of feeling in classical music does not arise from simplicity but from the deliberate play of expectation and fulfillment that functional harmony provides.

All of this points to a clear conclusion: in at least one respect — expressive potential — classical music holds an advantage over popular music that is both structural and psychological. Popular music can offer immediate rewards: infectious rhythms, memorable hooks, and direct emotional impact. But what it generally cannot offer is the intricate emotional architecture — the deep and complex experience that audiences have long found in classical music. Harmonic sophistication, functional chord relationships, and the myriad ways these resources can be deployed to shape psychological experience: these are the foundation of what makes the masterpieces of the classical tradition not just different, but also more capable of profundity.

casual listener to notice non-functional chords. Every listener will observe that classical music nearly always concludes with a cadence, typically a perfect cadence (V to I). This imbues the music with a sense of resolution and completeness, which enhances its expressive quality. When a classical work does not end with a perfect cadence, it comes as a surprise, and that surprise adds to the music’s expressiveness. Popular music, on the other hand, often fades out instead of ending with a cadence. One reason is that popular music frequently lacks an obvious candidate for a final chord that would provide closure (or whose absence would contribute to expressiveness in another way). Contrary to what one might think, the ending of a pop song is rarely its strongest point.

There is a second way in which popular music harmony is less expressive than classical harmony. Allan F. Moore was among the first to highlight this feature of popular music harmony.[Note reference] Popular and classical music have different distributions of chromatic roots, but the distributions of chords in root position versus inversion are even more divergent. In the popular music sampled by de Clercq and Temperley, 94.1% of chords appear in root position. By comparison, in classical music only about 60% of chords are in root position. It is worth noting, however, that the classical music percentage comes from a survey of the entire corpus, whereas the popular music percentage comes from a study of just the top 100 songs. If only the 100 best classical compositions were analyzed, the percentage of root position chords would likely be lower. If more popular music were included, an even higher rate of root position chords would probably emerge.

The near-exclusive use of root position chords in popular music curbs musical expressiveness. Musical expressiveness, as we have seen, is often understood in terms of creating and releasing tension within a work. Tension can arise from frustrated harmonic expectations, but it can also be produced by other musical events. Fred Lerdahl hypothesized that these events include the use of inverted chords.[Note reference] Experimental evidence confirms this. Various musical phenomena, among them inverted chords, have been found to heighten musical tension, which in turn increases the scope for expressiveness.[Note reference]

The almost total reliance on root position chords in popular music has another outcome. Almost all motion in a popular song is parallel; contrary motion is virtually absent. (Contrary motion occurs when one musical line rises in pitch while another falls.) Musicologist Allan Moore observes that in rock music, “guitar chords tend to be held in a convenient position with the bass and treble pitches possible determinants: inner parts rarely have a linear role, merely existing to fill out the chord.”[Note reference] By contrast, one of the principles of common practice composition is that contrary motion should dominate. (Contrary motion is also frequent in jazz.) I cannot point to psychological experiments that confirm contrary motion boosts a work’s expressiveness, as none appear to have been conducted. Nevertheless, music theorists generally maintain that introducing contrary motion into compositional practice enhances musical expressiveness. By eschewing contrary motion, popular music forgoes a valuable expressive resource.

Next, let us consider the role of modulation in music’s expressive character. Modulation, the movement from one key to another, is widespread in common practice composition and is widely regarded as crucial to musical expressiveness. As early as 1754, Charles-Henri Blainville wrote that modulation “is the source of all of the most delicate and the most striking beauties of music.”[Note reference] I believe this is exactly right. The subtlety of musical expression depends on modulation. The mood of a composition often brightens when it modulates into a higher key, for instance from the tonic to the dominant. Similarly, modulation into a lower key can darken a work’s expressive character. Recent experiments have confirmed that modulation significantly contributes to music’s expressiveness.[Note reference] Given common practice conventions, some modulations are expected, others are unexpected, and still others fall in between. Test subjects listened to specially composed modulations of each type and rated their mood valence (happy or sad; bright or dark), potency (strong or weak; firm or wavering), and pleasantness (pleasant or unpleasant; warm or cold) on scales from one to five. Overall, expected modulations were perceived as strongest and most positive. Modulation from the tonic to the dominant, a highly anticipated shift, was found to be the “happiest.” The study indicated that both trained musicians and subjects without musical training perceived the expressive character of modulations.

Popular music rarely uses modulation; it nearly always stays in a single key or mode. In this respect, it differs from classical music. By avoiding modulation, popular music does without a tool that contributes importantly to the expressiveness of common practice composition.

The contrast between major and minor tonality is fundamental to common practice composition and contributes greatly to its expressive power. Psychological research has long confirmed this.[Note reference] Popular music, in large part, gives up the expressive power of the major/minor distinction in at least two ways. As has been noted, much popular music does not use a diatonic scale but is organized modally. There are exceptions: most early rock and roll was still diatonic and overwhelmingly in the major mode, and some popular music is written in the minor mode. (Pink Floyd’s “Money” is in a minor key.) Still, diatonic harmony and its major/minor distinction have eroded in popular music.

Power chords are another factor that eliminates the major/minor contrast in popular music. The distortion from overloading a signal through an amplifier makes thirds dissonant. As a result, performers of heavy metal, punk, and other genres drop the third from chords, playing only the first and fifth degrees of the scale. This means the chords are neither major nor minor triads. (A major triad is built on a major third; a minor triad on a minor third.) The loss of the major/minor contrast negatively affects popular music’s expressive power. In particular, the absence of the minor mode is an obstacle to poignancy in popular music.

Interestingly, when philosophers or critics single out works of popular music as notably successful, those works often display characteristics more typical of classical music than popular music. Gracyk uses the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” as an example of a popular song that will endure.[Note reference] I agree it is an appealingly expressive song. What makes it so is precisely its use of techniques more typical of common practice composition than of popular music: it employs modulation, chord progressions more akin to those in classical music, several inverted chords, and a contrast between major and minor tonality. The use of common practice techniques seems to be what makes this song more expressive than many others. I take this as confirmation that omitting these techniques in most popular music limits its expressiveness.

The Beatles also produced highly expressive music likely to stand the test of time. Interestingly, they basically adhered to the chord progressions of common practice composition. Their distribution of I, IV, and V chords resembles that in common practice music. The Beatles use modulation more often than many other pop musicians, usually between verse and bridge: the bridge often sits in a key a minor third above the preceding verse.[Note reference] Their chords are more likely to be inverted than those of other pop artists. However, contrary motion remains rare. The vocal harmonies in Beatles songs are overwhelmingly lockstep parallel thirds.

3. Other expressive resources

Harmonic properties are not the only expressive elements in music. Melody, rhythm, tempo, dynamics, timbre, and other features all contribute to the expressive character of musical works. Both popular and classical music use these resources. Consequently, there is no reason to think popular music can compensate for its comparative harmonic poverty through other means. Even if popular music matched classical music in every other respect, its harmonic shortcomings would make it, overall, less capable of profound expression.

However, the situation is worse than that. There is reason to believe that popular music is at a disadvantage not only harmonically but also in some other expressive domains. Here I focus on tempo, rhythm, and melody.

Tempo is an important expressive characteristic. One might think popular and classical music are on a par here, since both can use fast or slow tempi. While a wide range of tempi exists in popular music, the genre tends to use quick tempi for expressive effect. Thrash metal is a case in point: the music of Anthrax, Megadeth, Metallica, Slayer, and similar groups often features extremely fast tempi, sometimes reaching 250–300 beats per minute (bpm).

An experiment suggests that fast tempi contribute less to popular music’s expressive character than to classical music’s. The study correlated tempi with skin conductive response (SCR), a reliable indicator of emotional arousal from music. Test subjects listened to fast-paced excerpts: part of The Cult’s “She Sells Sanctuary” (136 bpm) and part of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 in C-sharp minor (139 bpm).[Note reference] The researchers expected SCR to increase for both, but this was not the case. High tempo led to increased SCR for classical music but not for rock music.

The experimenters hypothesized that fast-paced rock failed to increase SCR because “fast-paced rock was viewed as predictable and somewhat mundane whereas classical music is more expected to be slow in tempo.”[Note reference] In other words, a fast tempo is, in Kendall Walton’s sense, a standard property of rock music.[Note reference] Music at around 135 bpm feels normal to rock listeners, not fast. The inability to raise SCR at these tempi explains why some rock subgenres, such as thrash, push tempi to 250–300 bpm—anything slower won’t be perceived as fast.

Popular music faces another tempo limitation. The tempo of a popular song almost never varies from start to finish. It begins at a certain (usually brisk) pace and maintains it throughout. Classical music, by contrast, typically accelerates and decelerates, with slow, fast, and moderate movements. Some popular songs do vary their tempo, with striking results. One reason Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” is so expressive is that it has the contra-standard property (for popular music) of fluctuating tempi.

The expressive potential of popular music is also restricted by another characteristic: virtually all popular music is in 4/4 time. There are some instances of unusual time signatures: the Allman Brothers’ “Whipping Post” is in 11/4, Jethro Tull’s “Living in the Past” is in 10/4, and Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android” has passages in 7/8. Pink Floyd’s “Money” is in 7/4, and Led Zeppelin’s “The Crunge” is in 9/8. Unusual time signatures appear in several death metal works, contributing to their appealingly unsettling quality. However, the “vast majority” of popular songs are in 4/4.[Note reference] Classical music, on the other hand, uses a wide variety of time signatures. Duple and quadruple time, such as 4/4, are common, but triple time (3/2, 3/4, 3/8) is also widely used and comparatively rare in popular music. (Exceptions include Jimi Hendrix’s “Manic Depression,” Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters,” Jay-Z’s “My First Song,” and Guns N’ Roses’ “You Ain’t the First.”) Compound times like 9/8 and 12/8 are not unusual in classical music but are scarce in popular music. Non-standard time signatures appear fairly often in classical music: John Bull’s In Nomine IX is in 11/4, the last movement of Bach’s Partita No. 6 in E minor, BWV 830, is in 2/1, and in the Goldberg Variations, Variatio 26 features one part in 18/16 while another is in 3/4. Telemann’s Gulliver Suite contains a passage in 3/32 and another in 24/1, and the first version of Schumann’s Symphonic Studies, Étude IX, is in 3/16. Some jazz compositions, including Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five,” use unusual time signatures. The time signature of any composition greatly contributes to its expressive character. By largely limiting itself to 4/4, popular music restricts its expressive resources—there is only so much that can be expressed with 4/4.

One might argue that popular music employs syncopation in ways unseen in classical music. The most common syncope is an accentuated backbeat. In a common practice piece in 4/4, the second and fourth beats are usually unstressed; in most popular music, they are accentuated, typically with the snare drum. The backbeat can vary: a delayed backbeat (accenting the final eighth note of a measure) is common in funk, and a double backbeat (the off beats are played as two eighth notes and accented) also appears, for instance in The Knack’s “Good Girls Don’t” and Blondie’s cover of “Hanging on the Telephone.”

The syncopation in popular music enables melodic rhythms not often found in classical music. The problem is that the backbeat stress is nearly universal. Popular music has not replaced classical music’s varied rhythms with an equally wide variety. Even with its various forms of syncopation—delayed and double backbeats in 4/4—popular music’s rhythmic resources remain more restricted overall than those available in classical music. This imposes a further limit on popular music’s expressiveness.

Finally, I want to discuss melody. Melody contributes importantly to the expressive character of any musical work (at least those that use melody; not all do—melody essentially vanishes from some hip-hop). Unfortunately, melody’s expressiveness is more difficult to study than harmony or rhythm, as it does not lend itself to quantification. Consequently, proving that classical music melodies are more expressive than popular ones is difficult, and I won’t attempt it. I have only two aims here.

The first is to note that melody is unlikely to give popular music an expressive advantage over classical music. Popular music has certainly produced great melodists—Paul Simon, Brian Wilson, the Beatles, and, whatever one thinks of them, ABBA come to mind, as do the Police and Queen’s memorable tunes. That said, the greatest classical composers—Mozart, Handel, Hasse, Tchaikovsky—are unlikely to have been surpassed, even if some popular musicians have equaled them. There is no reason to think popular music’s disadvantages in harmony and rhythm are compensated by melodic strengths.

My second goal is to acknowledge that, while the harmonies

rhythms of popular music are generally simpler and less expressive than those found in the finest classical music, popular melodies can be just as complex. I am thinking here of the tradition of exceptional guitar solos by Chuck Berry, Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, Kirk Hammett, Kurt Cobain, and numerous others. These solos resemble some of the cadenzas played by musicians like Paganini. They are often appreciated aesthetically for largely the same reason: as breathtaking displays of virtuosity and exhilarating joyrides.

The function of music

From these reflections, I conclude that popular music is, overall, less expressive than classical music. Consequently, it lacks the resources that make psychological insight and profundity achievable. Yet it is, almost by definition, popular. One might wonder how we can account for this popularity. My hypothesis is that classical music and popular music are, generally, valued for different reasons.

Empirical evidence supports this hypothesis. A psychological study compared the experience of what the experimenters call “sophisticated music” with experience of various genres of popular music. For the purposes of that study, sophisticated music included jazz, swing, and blues alongside classical. This grouping is not ideal for my purposes, but since these genres tend to share some features of common-practice composition, they form a natural cluster. Those who enjoy this music find their preferred genres intellectually stimulating and a source of information. Fans also reported that they could identify with artists who perform or compose their favored music. I take this to mean they regard music as a form of communication. The experimenters found that devotees of sophisticated music do not look to it primarily for emotional arousal. In contrast, test subjects who enjoy popular music reported that they appreciate it because it places them in a valuable, even ecstatic, mental state. This finding was especially pronounced among fans of electronic music (techno, trance, house, and dance genres).

Other research, centered on adolescents, has found that listeners value popular music for a variety of reasons. The most common reasons include mood regulation, arousal of desired emotional states, formation of self-conception, and building connections with peers. Certainly people listen to classical music for some or all of these reasons as well. Yet it seems noteworthy that seeking psychological insight does not appear on lists of reasons people give for listening specifically to popular music. That said, the research I refer to has focused on adolescents. Perhaps adults listen to popular music for different reasons.

Conclusion

Only when music is subtly expressive can it probe the emotions of which T.S. Eliot spoke. He wrote that, “beyond the nameable, classifiable emotions and motives of our conscious life when directed towards action … there is a fringe of indefinite extent, of feeling which we can only detect, so to speak, out of the corner of the eye and can never completely focus … feelings which only music can express.” Charles Batteux made a point similar to Eliot’s when he wrote that “everyone is familiar with emotion up to a certain point. An artist who depicts only what everyone knows will scarcely deserve the merit due to a historian or a servile imitator … Music and dance, like painting, capture beauties that artists call fleeting and transitory: finely drawn features, sighs, and murmurs that betray depths of emotion, an inclination of the head: these are the features that engage, excite, and revive the mind.”

Classical music, drawing upon the resources of common-practice composition—including functional chords, inversion, modulation, contrary motion, the distinction between major and minor tonality, and a wide range of rhythms—is able, at its best, to express fleeting and elusive emotions and achieve profundity. Popular music does not have the same resources and struggles to attain a precision of expressiveness that can rise to profundity. I want to stress again that, unlike some critics of popular music, I do not wish to deny that it can have considerable aesthetic value. It is seldom valued, however, as a source of psychological insight and consequently is seldom profound. Instead, it is valued for its capacity to provide pleasure and agreeable emotions. (In fairness to popular music, a good deal of classical music also falls well short of profundity. Moreover, popular music seldom aims at profundity.) Those who praise popular music for its psychological depth or insightfulness are using the wrong critical criteria. (The songs of Led Zeppelin have been praised for their “psychological depth,” and Bruce Springsteen’s music has been described as a source of “psychological insight.”) They are lauding popular music using criteria developed to assess classical music. Popular music fares better when it is assessed according to its own criteria.

Popular music can move listeners in various ways. It can regulate moods and arouse emotions. Sometimes we find in popular music complex displays of virtuosity that thrill audiences. This is more than enough to ensure that popular music has aesthetic value. The best classical music, thanks to its greater repertoire of expressive devices, can do something else. It can achieve fine-grained expressiveness that is difficult to attain in popular music. This expressive range may make possible psychological insight and profundity that is, by and large, lacking in popular music.