It is difficult to write music history while it’s happening, where the significance of so many events is difficult, often impossible, to weigh. Hindsight is a wonderful boon to weighing history.

My thesis in this post is that we need a better and simpler way to understand the large swathes of 20th – 21st century classical music — for those uncertain, that’s the period when classical music started to go increasingly whacky (or ‘Squeaky Gate’!). All too often study of these periods is dominated by focus on the ideology of modernism. While this is clearly very important, and crucial to understanding these periods, it is hardly dominant above all else.

Below, I will simply outline what I believe to be three better descriptors for the period, with some brief justification. You will not find a scholarly treatment here, but I believe that if someone wished to they could take this further and make an academic case for it.

Descriptor 1: The Eclectic period (20th Century – Present Day)

Rather than focusing on various forms of musical modernism, which have indeed been a glaring feature of 20th – 21st Century music, I believe it is better served by the word Eclectic. Why? Because Eclecticism seems to be genuinely a near-universal characteristic, unlike Modernism. In opposition to Modernist music there were a number of more neo-classical musical movements (including works by Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Vaughan-Williams, Britten, and others, all of whom themselves made forays into Modernism). However, what seems to be true everywhere is that composers were attempting to forge a more distinctly individual path, and to draw on an ever-changing range of influences. Musical approaches were different to the point of being alien to each other — the serialism of Schoenberg, with its quest towards mathematically elegant control and design, cannot be easily harmonised with the neo-Folk music of Vaughan-Williams and Holst.

Hence Eclectic seems a good word to attempt to sum up the long period. The 20th century onwards has been the age of burgeoning individualism — politically seeing the emergence of modern liberal democracy with its emphasis on individual freedoms and rights, and also seeing the rise of easy Global Travel, trade, and multiculturalism. It is not that composers during this period have always been individualistic, as there is still much mutual learning and collaboration. But they have nearly always been eclectic, with ever-changing influences, and a selection of methods and approaches that are individually fulfilling and only secondarily desiring to connect to Classical Music’s body of tradition.

Descriptor 2: The experimentalist-classicist spectrum (20th Century to present day)

If Eclectic is a good general word, a more specific technical phrase would be the experimentalist-classicist spectrum. What this means, quite simply, is a spectrum between the most experimental musical approaches and the ones most based upon older Classical Music Tradition.

This is, of course, mainly about stating the obvious. It is clear that there are many musical works, from the 20th Century to the present day, that are based on older Classical Music Tradition. Most grade books are full of this music — and for the large part, so are most films. You have the neo-classical music of Stravinsky early in the 20th century, and the very classical music of Alma Deutscher being written today. It is also obvious that there are a large number of works that are middle-ground: both experimental and classically traditional in different ways.

Yet if it is stating the obvious, often the obvious goes rather unmentioned. Most musicians I know associate the 20th and 21st centuries with experimentalist music. It is often assumed that if you are talking about music from this period, you are talking about experimentalist music. And it strikes me that we are therefore focusing the period on the music that both performers and listeners are less likely to admire!

There is, of course, much music that is boringly classically traditional, which is often no more appealing than unpleasantly experimental music. But this is exactly why I think it is much more productive to focus attention on the spectrum between experimentalism and classicism, and on where composers lie between it. We will identify a much wider range of musical thought if we do so.

Descriptor 3: The Film Period (c. 1940 – present day).

My dating may be suspect here — of course, films have been around for much longer. But I’ve wanted to capture a rough date when soundtracks started to emerge as a form of classical music in their own right, and I chose 1940 for no better reason than remembering Vaughan-Williams and Walton’s creation of film music, and working of this music into their own classical works.

My point in using this descriptor is slightly different to the other two. I don’t believe it to be near-universal of classical music from the period, but merely increasingly dominant. This means it is the same kind of term as “modernism”, which I disparaged earlier! I am aware of the contradiction, and mainly want to pose a provocative point: which is that if we are going to describe the period on the basis of a musical approach which is far from universally accepted, Film Music seems like a more enduring choice than modernism. It is, after all, the music most often chosen by Classic FM to represent contemporary classical music. And, more seriously, it is often what I most encounter non-specialist listeners choosing to listen to at home, and to go to in the concert hall — and note that it is far from musically conservative, as film soundtracks often feature practical uses of modern and experimentalist musical methods. It is also the most popular form of music that is also long-form.

One thing Classical Music has traditionally not been is anti-popular. The Classical Tradition is evidently not about populism — its long history of patronage, specialism, and scholarship stand against this. But for most of its history, it was also music which was written for social functions, and for concerts, which required a broader appeal to participants and listeners. And it is clear to me that film music is better fulfilling these purposes than most other contemporary equivalents — not only in its appeal to participants and listeners, but also in patronage and in specialism. It is scholarship that stands alone, and prefers to categorise the last century of Classical Music by that which the most number of people are most unpersuaded of.