Classification, Music Store

Historical Context

In the 19th century—before radios and records—music sales depended on word of mouth, print reviews, concert promotion, and sheet music. Classification of sheet music in stores was alphabetized by composer, popular performer, or purpose. Popular songs were the highest-selling retail sheet music, followed by school materials and holiday songbooks.

Until the early 19th century, in the United States there was practically no distinction between so-called classical music (sometimes referred to as art music) and popular music. Well-known traveling troupes performed a stylized mix of comedy, show tunes, and popular songs. Gradually, European tastes for “exalted” music—music grounded in romanticism and religious traditions—spread to America. Wealthy patrons created and funded nonprofit symphony orchestras that specialized in exalted music intended for a high social class of listening audience. Concert halls patterned programs on exalted European models and gradually segregated from popular entertainment such as vaudeville (traveling variety shows). This socioaesthetic hierarchy led to opera and dance companies, radio and recording industries, and university curricula; by the mid-20th century the aesthetic supremacy of the classical genre was widely accepted and firmly entrenched.

This paradigm began to erode by the 1940s, and by the 1960s the explosion of popular music sales changed the face of the music recording industry. By the 1990s the industry was employing a holistic, nonhierarchical perception of genre classification. It created specialized subdivisions within each genre—including classical—for niche audiences. In the music industry today, classical music refers to a broad simplification of historio-musicological categories; it generally encompasses everything from the Renaissance through the Late Romantic and Impressionist periods (roughly from the mid-16th until the early 20th centuries). Igor Stravinsky's 1913 masterpiece Le Sacre du Printempts (The Rite of Spring) generally marks a stylistic transition from classical to what is still sometimes generally referred to as “20th century” music. Today, the term art music may include classical, 20th century, neoclassical, serial, atonal, and beyond. In any case, genre delineations have always been fluid; they depend on the purposes of individual institutions such as record stores, concert halls, music libraries, and archives.

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