A question about music

[andrewducker]

What was the last piece of classical music to enter the popular consciousness that *wasn't* from a movie, TV show, computer game, etc?

Comments

[symbioid]

Cage's 4'33"?

IDK if that counts as "popular consciousness". I mean it's hip and hip folks know/make jokes about it, but is that "popular"?

The other thing I can think is maybe Rites of Spring?
I was gonna say Vangelis? But then realized most people know his work from Movies.

Philip Glass, but also a lot of his popular stuff is movie based.

Is Glass's "Einstein on the Beach" popular? That's the hard question to me what is "popular"?

Wendy Carlos's Switched on Bach count?

The other one that IMO felt pretty popular was Clint Mansell's "Lux Aeterna", but again: from Requiem from a Dream.

[cosmolinguist]

I would say definitely there's something more recent since Rite of Spring, like for some reason the first thing that comes to mind is Shostakovich who was Soviet-era of course.

It really depends on what we mean by "the popular consciousness," and also "classical," but post-WWII I think western art music had branched out into jazz and musicals and less like what people would think of as "classical".

[cmcmck]

Tavener's 'Song for Athene' perhaps which got used at the Princess of Wales's funeral.

Maxwell Davis's 'Farewell to Stromness'?

Stuff by Ludovico Einaudi?

Trouble is that there are so many possibilities.

[cosmolinguist]

You've got me thinking about this now so apologies if I end up leaving a lot of comments here as I come up with different things.

Right now my assertion is Aaron Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man (1942).

It is in movies and TV shows and stuff, but I don't think it's known for any one instance in particular so I'm saying that that counts (I'd argue the same for Holst's "Mars" from The Planets but that's like 35 years older).

[cosmolinguist]

I told diffrentcolours about this and he reckons it's William Orbit's version of Adagio for Strings which was a top-ten single. But I think it wouldn't have been as popular if people didn't already know it and the original is from 1936. :)

[calimac]

I don't know if it's the last, but Pachelbel's Canon made a huge splash in the 1970s without association with any media except its own recordings, and is still pretty well recognized.

[cosmolinguist]

Ooh that's a very respectable option!

[mellowtigger]

With those restrictions, the best chance might be holiday/religious music? The last one I remember is already a quarter-century old since the big popular splash. It's orchestral only, but maybe that doesn't count as "classical"? Carol Of The Bells, though, is older than we know for sure, which is definitely classic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHioIlbnS_A (Trans-Siberian Orchestra - Christmas Eve / Sarajevo)

[angelofthenorth]

Do you include advertising in that?

[conuly]

How are we defining "classical music" here?

[andrewducker]

The Potter Stewart approach.

[gingicat]

Heh.

[mountainkiss]

How are we defining “enter the popular consciousness” here?

[juan_gandhi]

Mozart's Turkish Dance, was popular on electronic watches, many years ago.

[daweaver]

I'd argue a weak case for Górecki's third symphony, "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs".

For some reason, the public's imagination was utterly caught by a 1992 recording by the London Sinfonietta with soprano Dawn Upshaw.

Sold a million copies, and a million copies of really slow folk songs performed to sonorous strings. Wouldn't surprise me that 900,000 copies haven't been played this century.

And yet it sold a million, the work features in films, there have been rave covers ("Gorecki" by Lamb) and a re-working by Beth Gibbons of Portishead. It's made *some* cultural impact.

[andrewducker]

That's a pretty good case!

[bens_dad]

Do any of these count ?

Ravel's 'Bolero'. Popularised by Torville and Dean dancing/skating to it.

Hooked on Classics A medley of classical hits; the single version was top ten in the UK and US in 1981-2.

Beethoven's "Ode to Joy", when the EU made it its anthem.

Is The Last Night of the Proms a TV show ?
(Strictly speaking it is the televising of the concert festival of a radio channel.)

---
Not really popular, by numbers, but I did go to a night club in Cambridge and heard Carmina Burana and some Handel (Water Music perhaps), one of them in two different versions, on the same night !

[darkoshi]

Ludovico Einadi's 2006 "Divenire" album is what came to my mind first, as I have it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divenire

I believe I first heard it played on the radio program "Echos", but that there was also a TV show with him and the orchestra performing it.

This is a famous song from 1994 which was used in a Delta commercial; not sure if you would consider it Classical:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adiemus_(song)

I think this famous song from the late 1970s would fit your criteria too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_Box_Dancer

[gingicat]

Do you mean something popularized recently or something written recently?

[andrewducker]

Interested in either.

I'm mostly thinking that at some point Classical Music stopped being mainstream - it only hits the popular consciousness because it's attached to something famous.

You might hate Taylor Swift, but chances are you've heard one or two of her songs. At some point new classical music stopped being like that, as far as I can tell. I'm curious when that happened.

[gingicat]

Because it's you, I know this is genuine curiosity rather than a value judgment.

This got long and somewhat rambly, my apologies. I started organizing it and then looked at the clock - I must go log in to work.

I think that popular music has always been attached to something. For example, in European/Western culture, we have the written record of Gregorian chant and church motets being attached to religious music, usually by taking all the not-perfect intervals (keeping just fourths, fifths, and octaves) out of local popular music, and that went back to popular music where those musicians improvised on the church music. Since the popularization of music on the radio (and then Spotify and YouTube and so on) the popularity of music has been largely influenced by what gets airtime, so of course most people know classical music from movies.

Classical music as currently defined is entirely European or European-influenced, and is usually sung, played by an orchestra, includes violins, includes piano, includes French horns, includes double-reed instruments, or some combination of the above. (I'm thinking of art songs, string quartets, string quartets plus other instruments, brass ensembles that aren't specifically big bands... it's broad and yet not.)

After Bach, European musical intervals and structures are very standardized and entirely analyzable as algebra and basic physics.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_series_(music)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_of_fifths
Current pop music tends to be based around the three major chords that can be made out of any set of octaves/keys.

(Interestingly, the further east and south you go in Eurasia, there are more minor keys, with chords and intervals that don't fit into this rigid mathematical structure. A lot of the older melodies common to Ashkenazic synagogues are based on both Eastern European minor keys and Western European harmonic structure.)

From what little I know of non-European (or European-influenced) music, much of it also started out as religious songs. When you go south to Africa, you get amazing polyrhythms such as five beats against four beats, or seven beats against twelve, or even more complex. And originally that analysis comes from European folk music collectors sitting down with a timer.

As far as current popular music goes, I am a terrible person to ask because I rarely listen to radio stations with commercials, which is where most of the current pop music is, and I generally only listen to the radio in the car. I did happen across Luke Combs singing "Fast Car" on a country station and was delighted to find out that he had Tracy Chapman's blessing. Loved the 2024 Grammys and was also pleased to find out that Megan Thee Stallion (whom I was familiar with mainly from being able to Shazam my neighbor's loud music *through the shared wall*) is actually pretty good.

I grew up listening to records and radio in my parents' home in the 1970s and 1980s, so my music listening was assorted classical music, country music, the Beatles, and whatever folk music they'd picked up along the way. I was probably the only five-year-old who loved Missa Luba or even know that it existed. (I preferred the A side which was actually local music from the Congo - Wikipedia says it was written down in the city of Kamina.) I went to the LaGuardia High School of Music and the Arts in the mid-80s and learned classical music in school, jazz from my outside-of-school flute teacher, and Tom Lehrer and the Greatest Hits of the 60s from my friends.

[andrewducker]

"I think that popular music has always been attached to something."

I'm not entirely sure I agree. The latest Taylor Swift album isn't connected to a specific current event (like the 1812) or a movie, or a TV series, or a computer game. The only big thing it's connected to is "Taylor Swift has a new album out".

The point being that people encounter it for its own sake, because they like the music for its own sake (or like Taylor Swift already, because they liked previous music she'd made).

Whereas, much thought I love Vader's Theme, and think that the Star Wars music is really well done (for example), I'm not in any way convinced that "The latest album of John Williams music" would be getting any airplay. Because orchestral music doesn't occupy that place in popular culture any more. It's not like when, for instance, Rhapsody In Blue premiered when people were enthusiastic about it as its own thing, it was incredibly popular, sold lots of copies, etc. And not because it was associated with something else people loved, but just because it was a really good piece of music that entered the popular psyche.

[jducoeur]

Whereas, much thought I love Vader's Theme, and think that the Star Wars music is really well done (for example), I'm not in any way convinced that "The latest album of John Williams music" would be getting any airplay.

On the one hand, you're probably correct. But this does remind me that the primary reason I was passionate about going to see Phantom Menace was because "Duel of the Fates" (which dropped a bit before the movie) was so great. I was rather disappointed that the movie didn't live up to the music IMO.

[andrewducker]

It is a fantastic piece of music and one of the standouts of the movie.

[bens_dad]

If I have heard one or two of Taylor Swift's songs it is though a movie, TV show, computer game, etc. but it hasn't enter my consciousness, even though she has.

How else would something get into the popular consciousness these days ?

I am as likely to go to a classical concert as one of Taylor Swift's (not just because the ticket would be easier to get hold of).

[danieldwilliam]

I'd make a pitch for Zadok the Priest as used in the most recent British Coronation(s).

[danieldwilliam]

Or Nessun Dorma from Italia '90.