If most music lovers were asked to identify the defining characteristics of their favorite genre—jazz, folk, rock, hip-hop—I would guess that they might simply say, “Well, it sounds a certain way.” It’s music, they might go on, that tends to have a particular rhythmic feel, or that usually features, say, the saxophone, or the electric guitar, or the sitar. Presented with exceptions to these patterns—what about a cappella jazz ensembles? what about “unplugged” rock albums?—most listeners would likely offer some variant of I know it when I hear it!
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But, counterintuitive though it might seem, I don’t think sound is always a helpful way to understand genre. I’m a composer and conductor in the field that’s broadly known as Western classical music, a term that’s routinely applied to radically different idioms across more than 1,000 years of musical history. Within this huge array, you’ll find the engulfing sonorities of William Byrd’s choral music; the intimate revelations, too private for words, in chamber works by Franz Schubert and Anton Webern; the majestic topography of Jean Sibelius’s orchestral landscapes; and, more recently, a multitude of works by composers as different from one another as Chaya Czernowin, Tyshawn Sorey, and Thomas Adès.
The unruly and elusive entity known as classical music does not sound like any one thing, and the sheer abundance of the tradition might invite the conclusion that trying to define it at all is a hopeless exercise. But that would be a mistake, especially at this moment. Like every other sector of cultural life, classical music has been roiled over the past decade by intense debates about the field’s ongoing lack of diversity, among performing artists, composers, and leaders of musical organizations. The stakes of these discussions—which have involved charges of Eurocentrism, head-in-the-sand elitism, even white supremacy—have at times felt existential, given many institutions’ financial straits. Maintaining a 90-piece orchestra is generally a money-losing proposition in America today, and as a result, classical-music organizations lean heavily on private donations. Why, many onlookers have asked, should an orchestra or opera company gobble up millions of dollars from wealthy sponsors to subsidize the salaries of musicians who mainly perform music by white men from centuries past, music for which (judging by ticket sales) demand is limited? What is classical music, whom is it for, and what about it is worth defending?
Our answers to these questions will depend on what exactly we love about this music, and what we care about preserving, enriching, and expanding. Claiming that classical music deserves a prominent place in American culture merely because we want to safeguard a particular sound, style, or cultural or ethnic lineage—“music that sounds like Brahms,” or “music from one of three Central European countries”—would be a losing cause.
But a better answer is out there. Rather than defend the “classical” in classical music, I want to champion a particular creative process. What links Hildegard von Bingen and Kaija Saariaho, Johann Sebastian Bach and George Benjamin, is not a specific sound or aesthetic but a shared technology of transmission. At its core, classical music isn’t “classical.” It is written music.
By “written music,” I mean music that comes into being through the act of composition. Music from practically any tradition can, of course, be written down. If you’re a Beatles fan, you can buy a collection of Beatles sheet music, and if you want to plunk out your favorite jazz standard, you can order a copy of The Real Book, which contains the essential harmonic and melodic information for hundreds of well-traversed tunes. (Both a Real Book and a 1,136-page tome called The Beatles: Complete Scores are sitting on my piano as I write this.)
Though all music can be documented and experienced in multiple ways—scores, recordings, live performances—one approach to distinguishing musical traditions is to ask which form a given tradition treats as authoritative. It would be odd, for instance, to claim that a collection of printed scores constitutes a definitive document of the Beatles canon, because the unquestioned reference point is the band’s studio albums. My Beatles compendium proudly declares its own contingency: Printed on the front cover is an all-caps proclamation that its pages contain FULL TRANSCRIPTIONS FROM THE ORIGINAL RECORDINGS.
In other words: albums first, scores later. Taylor Swift’s 2019 decision to rerecord her earlier albums was a potent gesture, even a radical one, precisely because in pop music, the studio album typically possesses an authority upon which all subsequent iterations—whether live performances or written transcriptions—are based. Only by returning to the studio could Swift achieve control over her master recordings and literally set the record(s) straight.
Jazz musicians and aficionados tend to have a different perspective. Even though certain albums (Kind of Blue, A Love Supreme ) have attained the status of holy relics in the minds of many listeners, I think most jazz lovers would agree that the genre is not defined by the worship of specific studio recordings. Fans are more likely to value the evanescent moment of live performance, with its potential for spontaneous expression, for the very reason that a familiar tune can sound different every time it’s performed. A major artist such as Miles Davis might have performed and recorded a certain song—“My Funny Valentine,” for example—many times throughout his career, and there’s no reason to automatically treat a particular performance as the authoritative version. In spite of The Real Book’s name, jazz musicians rarely consider the printed score to be “the real thing” either. No self-respecting jazz musician would play a Real Book score exactly as written.
Western classical music is an unusual case. 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. Even an extreme case, such as Cage’s famous 4’33”—a work in which performers refrain from playing their instrument for four minutes and 33 seconds—depends on its score, a simple and playful set of written instructions. (In fact, to a greater degree than most notated music, 4’33” is inconceivable as a work of art without those directions.)
If we let ourselves be guided by this basic question—which musical artists regard the score as a creative starting point?—we arrive at the broadest and most welcoming definition of “classical” music. All kinds of unexpected affiliations and affinities emerge beyond music that’s typically thought of as belonging to the tradition. Many of the big-band masterpieces of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, for instance, strike me as indistinguishable, in their creative genesis, from orchestral works by Igor Stravinsky and Aaron Copland that were being written around the same time: They are notated in exquisite detail, usually for large ensembles, and Strayhorn’s gorgeously balanced wind and brass voicings remind me in particular of Stravinsky’s. To my ear, Strayhorn is a symphonist at heart. His work—in its fundamental writtenness—has more to do with that of many so-called classical composers than it does with, for example, that of an artist like Ornette Coleman, a free-jazz master who ostensibly hails from a tradition that is continuous with Strayhorn’s, but whose method could hardly be more different.
Written music matters for the same reason written language does: To write is to free oneself from the constraints of memory. It’s possible, in a novel or an essay or a nonfiction narrative or a book of poems, to devise an aesthetic structure full of details, depths, and digressions that would be far harder to construct in a purely oral storytelling tradition, one in which verbal transmission works through either memorization or improvisation. When you write, you don’t simply set down your thoughts; in the process of writing, your thoughts are transformed, and allowed to assume a newly complex shape—the miraculous scaffolding that emerges from the accumulation of thoughts on the page.
Our world is awash in written language, but not written music. The musical genres that dominate mainstream American culture are all more or less oral traditions. Most pop songs can be taught through verbal communication (Play this chord, then that chord ) and demonstration (Here, listen; the melody goes like this). In the 19th century, by contrast, the best way to widely disseminate a piece of music was to write it down; many music lovers in the emerging middle class had at least basic proficiency as singers or instrumentalists. If you were such a music lover, you might buy scores of the latest songs or chamber music so that you and your friends could read through them around the piano at a party.
Audio recording, which emerged in the second half of the 19th century and became ever more inescapable in the first few decades of the 20th, changed the landscape. The technology is its own kind of writing, a direct transcription of sound itself. And by cutting out the intermediate step of translating one’s musical ideas onto the page, it forged new pathways of transmission—radio broadcasts, records, CDs—and exponentially sped up the process through which music could be shared. To be clear, I think audio recording is a miracle; a world without recorded music is unimaginable to me. But, because a musician no longer had to be literate to gain worldwide acclaim, the technology had the collateral effect of sidelining musical literacy.
The influence on the music itself was transformative. Mainstream music was soon pervaded by miniature forms that could be memorized—the four-minute song, not the 40-minute symphony. Reading and writing music once again became an activity for specialists, a modern-day equivalent of medieval monks laboriously copying out illuminated manuscripts. Sure, any kid who takes piano lessons or plays in their school’s concert band will still learn the fundamentals of musical notation. But our culture doesn’t offer many incentives to stick with notation as a primary means of creative expression. Why expend the crushing effort to write music down in detail when you can capture sound with uncanny clarity and ease using your iPhone?
Whether the turn away from musical literacy was inevitable is open to debate; recording technology enabled not only music but also spoken language to be broadcast worldwide, yet verbal literacy was spared a similar fate. Doomsayers warned for decades that radio and TV would eclipse books, print media, literacy itself—but the written word is as prevalent today as it ever was.
We should be wary of the seemingly unassailable cultural preeminence of oral musical traditions because, in music as in language, the medium shapes the message. Mainstream musical culture privileges brevity and harmonic simplicity; I’m surely not the only composer who has had the songwriter Harlan Howard’s peerless definition of a country song, “three chords and the truth,” quoted at them as a kind of challenge. (Bob Dylan and Bob Marley didn’t need more than a few chords to make musical history; why do you? ) The very act of writing down a piece of music can be viewed with suspicion. In a 2018 interview with The Guardian, the multidisciplinary artist Christian Marclay offered a dispiritedly reductive version of this perspective. “I don’t write notes. I can’t read or write music in the traditional way,” he declared. “I’m not one of those fascist composers who says, ‘Play this!’ ”
This is a curious claim. I’ve never seen authors called “fascist” simply because they insist that we read their words one after the other, in the order they wrote them. And yet Marclay’s misplaced scorn for notated music reflects implicit assumptions that a lot of us carry around: Because relatively few people can fluently decipher the gnomic hieroglyphs of musical notation, the thinking goes, the music that’s transmitted that way must itself be forbidding, abstruse, redolent of ancient hierarchies.
But what I love about the act of writing music down is precisely the freedom it affords. Though a piece of music is a temporal structure, composing it takes place not in real time, but outside time. The process is one of unearthing sound by delving into silence. A composer can make certain musical discoveries only after weeks or months spent inhabiting an imagined sonic world, just as a writer might experience certain epiphanies only years into work on a book. In music, as in language, you can learn a lot about yourself by wrestling with a blank page.
All of this is made possible through the elegant, limitlessly expressive writing system that is musical notation, which is as miraculous as the alphabet itself, and can be used for purposes every bit as varied. Notation doesn’t just open the way to the creation of unbounded musical universes; it also enables astonishing forms of human communication. An orchestra, a chorus, a jazz big band, a marching band—these are complex macroorganisms whose inner workings require formidable feats of interactive precision, all of which depend on information encoded in a written score. I can’t think of another comparably intricate form of social coordination outside the military.
Musical literacy is a highly specialized skill; to become a fluent reader of music, a student needs to be given the kind of focused instruction that not all public schools have the funding to provide. Exposure to music education, beyond the rudiments, all too often becomes a question of whose family can afford expensive private lessons. We can react to this fact by feeling guilty about it, and letting notated music be tainted by its association with elitism, or we can push for an expansion of musical education. We all understand that to teach a child to read and write is to endow them with potent means of expression and self-discovery. Why should musical literacy be any different? Even a basic grounding in musical notation can transform a child’s sense of what can be communicated to another human being, especially—and this is crucial—if notation is treated as a tool of creativity rather than simply an unpleasant test of the ability to play all the right notes or else.
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.
This article appears in the May 2025 print edition with the headline “What Is Classical Music?” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.