“What kind of music do you write?”
Every composer gets asked this. The difficulty is finding an answer that gives a useful picture without starting a lecture.
We need genre tags. We use them whenever we encounter something new: compare it with something we think is similar, give it a name, then file it away. The reference does not have to be accurate. It only has to give us a handle.
“Classical music” appears to do that.
But the label carries more than sound.
What “classical” brings with it
For one person, classical music means Mozart. Their picture may owe as much to Amadeus as to the music itself: wigs, candles, feverish dictation and that laugh.
For another, it means a concert hall and its etiquette. Sit still. Do not talk, stand, dance or move too visibly with the music. Applaud when the piece is over—but make sure it really is over.
That association has a basis. In much of the UK and US concert tradition, the convention is to remain seated and quiet while the music is playing. It is much like watching a play or a film. Movement, conversation and unsolicited participation interfere with somebody else’s concentration.
For somebody else, “classical” simply means boredom.
Where is the beat? Where are the lyrics? What am I supposed to follow?
These reactions do not reveal a failure in the listener. They reveal the material the listener has encountered. Most of us understand a genre through the small and accidental sample that has reached us.
Many people love the popular classics: music with its emotions worn openly, already familiar from films, adverts and public occasions. It is much rarer for me to meet someone whose reference point is a complete Ring cycle or the music of Shostakovich.
The label gives us a handle. It does not guarantee that we are holding the same thing.
A quiet audience is not an indifferent one
The supposedly passive classical audience is not always passive.
At an opera, people may cheer while the music is still sounding. A soprano or tenor reaches the top note, holds it, and the audience erupts—possibly to the chagrin of listeners who want to hear what comes next.
I experienced this during Turandot at the Arena di Verona in 1992. The venue is a first-century Roman amphitheatre, used for opera since 1913. Before the performance, the audience follows the Arena’s tradition of lighting small candles.
After “Nessun dorma,” the audience burst into applause and cheering. The opera was supposed to continue. Instead, the conductor stopped the orchestra, waited for the response to die down, then resumed.
At the Metropolitan Opera, I encountered the opposite tension during the final bars of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung. The curtain began to descend while the orchestra was still controlling the release of the pianissimo ending.
For part of the audience, the curtain was the cue to applaud. Another section immediately shushed them. They wanted to hear those final notes disappear.
Nobody there was indifferent. They disagreed over the precise moment at which listening should give way to response.
Even applause changes meaning between cultures. When I performed in Denmark with the Christ Church choir, the audience applauded in synchronisation. Elsewhere, the same sound might be heard as a demand to leave the stage. There, it carried the force of a standing ovation.
There is no single classical audience, just as there is no single experience contained by the word “classical.”
What does the label describe?
Sometimes “Classical” means a historical period associated with composers such as Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.
Used more broadly, “classical music” can encompass centuries of Western concert music. Gregorian chant, Bach fugues, Mozart operas, Wagner’s music dramas and the symphonies of Shostakovich do not share one sound.
Written notation is part of the connection. A score can carry decisions about pitch, rhythm, structure, instrumentation and expression across centuries.
But that boundary leaks too. Classical musicians have improvised. Jazz musicians use notation. Orchestras play concert music, film scores, games, popular arrangements and works that resist any useful genre label.
The closer we look, the less the word behaves like a definition.
Does “film music” help?
“Film music” sounds clearer, particularly for a composer working in Los Angeles.
Then another set of questions appears.
Does film music describe a sound, or does it describe where the music is used? A film score might be orchestral, electronic, improvised, built from songs or close to sound design.
John Williams writes orchestral film scores whose concert-hall influences are easy to hear. Shostakovich wrote both symphonies and music for films. The same musical language can appear in a cinema, concert hall, game or planetarium.
“Film music” tells us something about the music’s job. It does not necessarily tell us what the music sounds like.
The simplest useful answer
In Hollywood, we have settled on a more practical introduction:
I write orchestral music.
It gives people something they can hear in their imagination: strings, brass, woodwind and percussion, combined through instrumental colour.
It does not describe everything I write. It does not resolve the argument over genre.
It gives the conversation somewhere to begin.