“You’re talking about 1,000 years of music, all under some sort of genre heading,” says composer David Ludwig, Julliard’s director of music. “You’re talking about Gregorian chant, you’re talking about opera, you’re talking about works by living composers, something one of my composition students wrote yesterday.”
Within Western conservatories and in musicology, classical music refers to a specific era of composition (as opposed to, say, Western music of the Early or Late Romantic, Baroque, or Renaissance period). In the 1880s, those who used the term used it to explicitly exclude romantic music.
Aside from the issue of labeling all the music of the West under the same cloak of “classical”, Ludwig and Esmail agree that the term is too derogatory for the music of other nations as well. Both composers have infused Western Classical and other traditional styles into their compositions, and neither considers any particular tradition to be superior to another.
“I have worked between Indian and Western classical traditions,” says Esmail. “Many times people think that all Indian music is folk music. They don’t realize that Indian music has classical traditions, because the word classical is associated with Western classical music. However, you won’t find Indian Raga in the Apple Music Classical app, despite the name being “classical,” even if you’re in a place like Mumbai.
metadata madness
The reason Apple gave Western classical music its own app is metadata: little bits of information attached to each song that make it easy for listeners to find the songs they want to listen to. that’s partly why Apple bought Western classical music streaming service Primephonic in 2021.
The problem with serving non-pop music from anywhere in the world is that more specific data is required to find it. Where modern pop music is generally performed exclusively or nearly exclusively by the original composer or artist, classical music from around the world has been performed and recorded by different people over time. Searching for “talk now” in the standard Apple Music app makes it easy to find Taylor Swift’s Speak Now album. But it’s harder to find Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 5” performed by the Berlin Philharmonic if you’re looking for the piece itself.
These song titles are usually longer, with various ways of dating each piece in a composer’s life (sometimes written in the title). After years of tinkering, even Apple engineers couldn’t include all the extra metadata needed to properly display Western Classical music in the Apple Music app, hence this derivation. And works. For fans of European music from the last 1,000 years, Apple Music Classical makes it easy to find and listen to your favorite Western classical composers.
Connect a song, a composer, a famous orchestra or an interpreter from the western classical universe and you will probably find exactly what you are looking for. You can even sort by instrument, era (where “classical” also appears), and more. There are stories from famous composers, and some even have custom illustrations at the top of their pages.
However, by not hiring experts or classifying and including other classical music that could also use a custom visual treatment and ease of access, Apple has missed out on countless potential new listeners. Anyone who has studied music outside of the West can tell you that this metadata problem extends to dozens of classical music and their performers.
“Jazz is in exactly the same boat, in a sense, as so-called Western classical music, because the genre is so broad,” says Ludwig. “You are looking for the composer, the performer, the name of the piece. You know, it’s the metadata, right?
Jazz and World Music
Whether modern music like jazz (which the late pianist Ahmed Jamal insisted on calling American classical music), Persian classical music, Indian classical music, or any other traditional musical art form from around the world, which is why many styles and traditions are generally considered as or more complex than their Western counterparts. For those who move between musical traditions, it’s an important opportunity for Apple to accurately display the music of a culture.
“I never like to be in a position where I’m shutting down something that is something where people are trying to get more music to more people,” says Esmail. “I am always in favor of ‘yes and’. If you include Indian classical music in, say, an Apple Classical app, it’s really only going to change who you think is important. Because right now, I doubt Indians are up in arms because there’s no Indian classical music in the app; they probably just don’t think [the app is] important to them.”