On 5 January of this year the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, one of Germany's leading newspapers, informed its readers about the ‘jubilees of 2014’. Two of these anniversaries were musical ones: fifty years ago, in 1964, The Beatles triggered ‘an incurable hysteria’ in the USA, with five singles occupying ranks one to five on the Billboard Hot 100 of 4 April; the author of the article attributes to The Beatles' music ‘a basic cultural joy, an optimism, an aesthetic that is so undeniably upbeat that we long for the future promised by that present, as when we watch “Mad Men”’ (38). The other musical anniversary related to two composers born three hundred years ago, in 1714: Christoph Willibald Gluck, ‘the child of a forester from the Upper Palatinate’ who composed ‘104 rather mouldy operas and three magnificent ones’, and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, who wrote ‘170 piano sonatas and a book on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments that is still useful today’. These rather arrogant comments begin with the remark that someone born in 1714 who wished to become a world-famous composer had been dealt ‘a bad hand’, for ‘a giant ([J. S.] Bach) marched in front and was followed by three more (Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven), so that later the term “Kleinmeister” became necessary to describe the gulf between them’.

Several thoughts ran through my head when reading this: first, that 2014 might be called the year of the ‘eighteenth-century Kleinmeister’, considering that Gottfried August Homilius was born in 1714 and Johann Friedrich Reichardt died in 1814; second, that the common feuilleton view of eighteenth-century music history is obviously still dominated by a concept of heroes' tales; third, and most disquietingly, I wondered whether there is any historical connection between The Beatles as paragons of twentieth-century popular music and composers like C. P. E. Bach, Gluck, Homilius and Reichardt as supposed eighteenth-century ‘little masters’ of classical music.

What made me wonder about this last point in particular was the author's felicitious identification of the joyful, optimistic and upbeat aesthetic of The Beatles' music that is still palpable today. When did this aesthetic arise? Are there any lines we can draw between mid-eighteenth-century ‘non-heroic’ music history and twentieth-century popular aesthetics? This is the target of the following small thought experiment.

For Germany's leading musicologists of the 1960s through to the 1980s to ask questions like these would have been impossible (see Michael Fuhr, Populäre Musik und Ästhetik: Die historisch-philosophische Rekonstruktion einer Geringschätzung (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2007)). In 1977 Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht (Musikalisches Denken: Aufsätze zur Theorie und Ästhetik der Musik (Wilhelmshaven: Noetzel, 1977), 208) was convinced that popular music is Unterhaltungsmusik or light music; that it is ‘not aesthetic music’ or is ‘the music without aesthetics’. In 1984 Carl Dahlhaus (‘Ist die Unterscheidung zwischen E- und U-Musik eine Fiktion?’, in Musik zwischen E und U, ed. Ekkehard Jost (Mainz: Schott, 1984), 16) showed at least some understanding of the provocative power of popular music and the close link between classical-period aesthetics and social distinction:

The string quartet and the symphony, Dahlhaus believed, are the great achievements of late eighteenth-century Viennese classical music. They belong to the realm of ‘heroic’ composers of this age – Haydn as the supposed ‘inventor’ of the string quartet; Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven as masters of the classical symphony – while the ‘non-heroic’ region has been metaphorized as the huge flock of ‘little masters’ fenced in between Johann Sebastian Bach and the Viennese classics on the large but scraggy meadow of ‘pre-classical’ music. Of course, today every music historian – or at least every specialist in eighteenth-century ‘art’ music – would refuse to label C. P. E. Bach and Gluck as Kleinmeister; on the other hand, the public perception of these composers and the reception history of their works since the early nineteenth century has put them at a clear distance from the above-named heroes. Those who know and esteem Die Israeliten in der Wüste, Wq238, or the highly expressive F minor keyboard sonata by C. P. E. Bach, Wq57.6, or an opera like Gluck's Ezio are less than the happy few – at least in Germany and in good old Europe generally. So on the one hand there is this separation between ‘heroes’ and ‘non-heroes’ in the realm of classical music, and on the other a separation between ‘classical’ and ‘popular’ music. In my opinion, these phenomena cannot be regarded separately because they both belong to one Western musical culture.

When did the great division between ‘great’, ‘sublime’, ‘heroic’ art and ‘non-heroic’ art that is ‘merely’ pleasing occur? Johann Nikolaus Forkel is a good place to start if you are looking to find the origins of the whole separation between ‘E-’ and ‘U-Musik’, between serious art music and merely entertaining popular music. Consider Forkel's narrative of Johann Sebastian Bach's visits to the Dresden opera house together with his son Wilhelm Friedemann (Ueber Johann Sebastian Bachs Leben, Kunst und Kunstwerke (Leipzig: Hoffmeister and Kühnel, 1802), ed. Christoph Wolff and Michael Maul (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2008), 60; English translation from The New Bach Reader: A Life of Johann Sebastian Bach in Letters and Documents, ed. Hans T. David and Arthur Mendel, revised and enlarged by Christoph Wolff (New York: Norton, 1998), 461):

Or look at Forkel's characterization of C. P. E. Bach (Ueber Johann Sebastian Bachs Leben, 56; The New Bach Reader, 458):

The popular realm that in Forkel's view is at least associated with C. P. E. Bach encompasses the non-heroic region, the region of non-sublime art that is addicted to fashion (‘Mode’) and is slave to the dominating and ever-changing taste of the crowd, betraying the ideals of great art in favour of commercialized craftmanship (Ueber Johann Sebastian Bachs Leben, 88; The New Bach Reader, 478):

For Forkel the history of music culminates in Western polyphony, specifically Handel's fugal choruses and Johann Sebastian Bach's instrumental fugues. Yes, Forkel's concept of music history is Eurocentric, fraught with the ideologies of colonialism and the conviction that there is an absolute musical beauty deriving from man's nature and gaining consciousness in Western art music (compare Frank Hentschel, Bürgerliche Ideologie und Musik: Politik der Musikgeschichtsschreibung in Deutschland 1776–1871 (Frankfurt and New York: Campus, 2006), especially 25–48), but it is also a document of the distinction between merely popular, time-dependent, ‘non-heroic’ music and elitist, timeless, ‘heroic’ art music, a distinction that is still in our heads today – or at least in the heads of many German journalists.

Forkel's construction of great and timeless polyphonic art music is not the way the century he was born in thought about music. Quite to the contrary, the early eighteenth century's concept of composition was characterized by a flexible alignment between music and a constantly changing ideal of taste whose standards had to be mediated and renewed again and again in public discourse (see several contributions in Musikalische Norm um 1700, ed. Rainer Bayreuther (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010)). Just how narrowly the terms of these ‘negotiations’ were set is revealed by Johann Mattheson's remarks on the delayed edition of his violin sonatas published in 1720 under the title Der brauchbare Virtuoso. He had composed them three years before, Mattheson explains in his Preface, and noted that his current music was ‘already somewhat more galant’ (‘schon etwas galanter’): that is, in a more modern style. So his own sonatas struck him as outmoded – after only three years! Publishing music in the eighteenth century was of course a business, and Mattheson's statement must be seen in part as a commercial strategy of self-stylization in which the composer portrays himself as a galant thinker at the forefront of musical developments.

Of course, all these issues represent aspects of the ‘non-heroic’ eighteenth century as a culture of galant communication and conduct constantly searching, establishing, defining and redefining distinctive features that were regulated by the public and by economic principles (concerning the literary realm see Dirk Rose, Conduite und Text: Paradigmen eines galanten Literaturmodells im Werk von Christian Friedrich Hunold (Menantes) (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), especially 1–32). And of course this is one of the lines that can be drawn between eighteenth-century ‘non-heroic’ music history and popular music in the twentieth century, since a critical public and a forceful ‘billboarding’ were inventions of the early eighteenth century.

Within the context of a galant ideal of communication (that constituted not a ‘style’, but an act-oriented habitus; compare the books of Bayreuther and Rose already quoted), we encounter sharp criticism of learned counterpoint in Germany around 1700, echoed a half century later in France in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's attacks against fugal feats as ‘evidence of barbarity and poor taste’ (‘évidemment des restes de barbarie et de mauvais goût’: Rousseau, Lettre sur la musique françoise (Paris, 1753), 44; Rousseau, òuvres completes, volume 5 (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 308). He also attacked polyphony as the great false path of Western civilization; see the final passage of his article on harmony in the Dictionnaire de musique (Paris: veuve Duchesne, 1768), 241–242) and the Lettre sur la musique françoise. As early as 1722 Mattheson (Critica Musica (Hamburg: Mattheson, 1722), volume 1, 345) formulates an idea of melody that elevates the emotional efficacy of simplicity over the contrapuntal way of thinking: ‘Eine blosse / bewegliche / von einer schönen Stimme gesungene / Melodie / wozu nur etwan ein ganz simples accompagnement kömt / hat mehr Kraft über die Herzen / als alle gekünstelte Harmonien’ (A plain, moving melody sung by a beautiful voice to a very simple accompaniment has more power over hearts than all artificial harmonies).

‘Simplizität’ (simplicity) is a keyword in eighteenth-century aesthetics (see Karsten Mackensen, Simplizität: Genese und Wandel einer musikästhetischen Kategorie des 18. Jahrhunderts (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2000), and has remained a challenge for all those who seek the pecularities of musical beauty beyond the Western idea of polyphonic complexity. ‘Simplicity’ is above all an aesthetic of reduction to the essential; therefore it needs a foil of more complex phenomena against which it can be judged as a reduction, and a frame of values or convictions that justifies the special appreciation or pre-eminence of a reduced-art concept.

Let me explain what we might call the triangular concept of simplicity through an early eighteenth-century example. In 1706 Lecerf de la Viéville wrote his Comparaison de la Musique italienne et de la Musique françoise (edited in Pierre Bourdelot and Pierre Bonnet, Histoire de la musique et de ses effets, volume 4 (Paris: Jean Cochart, Etienne Ganeau and Jacques Quillau, 1715)). The text was part of the musical querelle des nations that had raged since the later seventeenth century, and an answer to Abbé Raguenet's Paralele des Italiens et des François en ce qui regarde la musique et les opéra[s] of 1702 (Paris: Jean Moreau). Viéville defends the ideal of French church music against modern Italian music, characterizing the French motet as ‘expressive, simple’ and ‘agréable’ (58); these terms define a pattern of conduct and an aesthetic ideal of ‘bienséance’ (decency) marked by narrow, lean formulations and a special reservation against emotional extremes (62–63):

Owing to its moderate character, the motet can act on the listeners in a balancing way and thus can serve as a tool of religious and social regulation; listening to motets helps the subjects to live together in harmony (91):

So the motet, like the ballet de cour and the tragédie lyrique, is integrated into the doctrine of French absolutism as an educational and political instrument. The paradigm of this kind of ‘simple’ church music is the motets of Michel Richard Delalande, while the negative foil against which the motet is shaped is the Italian church music of a composer such as Giovanni Bononcini. High expressivity and emotionality, richness in dissonance, sharp contrasts and extreme changes in tempo, texture and metre, coloratura vocal writing and rich ornamentation – all these features of Italian music stood against Lecerf's ideal of true church music and were therefore held by him to be unnatural.

Another example comes from the end of the eighteenth century. I remember one of my colleagues who was of the opinion that C. P. E. Bach's Heilig, Wq217, was a shocking example of musical trash – all those superficial harmonic effects and an overload of mere sound and strong dynamic contrasts, disgustingly simple music, cheap showmanship! Obviously he heard the piece with ears conditioned by Johann Sebastian Bach's church music. In the eighteenth century, Johann Friedrich Reichardt formulated a different view of the Heilig. In his Musikalisches Kunstmagazin (Berlin: Reichardt, 1782) he praises the harmonic shifts expressing the alternation of earthly and celestial choirs as great and overwhelming, because this means is so simple (85):

C. P. E. Bach as the great genius of modern church music! The concept of simplicity has its roots in the tradition of Christian ‘sermo humilis’ (ordinary speech) as well as in Longinus' theory of the sublime. But it seems to me that the eighteenth century was the first epoch of Western music history that drew on this concept as the foundation of musical poetics and to define musical quality. The eighteenth century discovered in simple melodic formulae a source of unlimited pleasure and expression in all realms of musical creativity. And isn't it true that popular music of more recent times deliberately reduces its harmonic, melodic and polyphonic devices, a procedure that, when combined with upbeat rhythms and electroacoustic sound architecture, produces the music's particular qualities in a way accessible to everyone? So this is the second line I dare to draw from the ‘non-heroic’ eighteenth century to modern popular music: the idea of melodic simplicity as the central tool of expression and pleasure.

My third and last point brings me back to the article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung characterizing The Beatles' art as joyful, optimistic and pointing toward a positive future. An image that cropped up in my mind when reading it was the dust jacket of the German edition of Jean Starobinski's L'invention de la liberté, 1700–1789 (Geneva: Skira, 1964; simultaneously published in English as The Invention of Liberty, 1700–1789; German translation as Die Erfindung der Freiheit, 1700–1789 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1988)). It reproduces Francesco Guardi's painting La mongolfiera (Balloon over the Canale della Giudecca in Venice), which shows a large group of people immersed in the pleasures of watching a distantly flying gondola held in the light blue air by a huge yellow balloon. For as long as I have known this wonderful book, and I have read it again and again, the painting has appeared to me as a kind of metaphor for the outwardly serene music of composers like Telemann, Hasse, Vinci, Graun and Johann Christian Bach (the Bach son whom Forkel placed at the greatest distance from his father: ‘Der Bachsche Originalgeist ist … in keinem seiner Werke zu finden’ (The original spirit of Bach is … not to be found in any of his works; Ueber Johann Sebastian Bachs Leben, 57; The New Bach Reader, 458)). In one of the most revealing passages of the book, Starobinski compares the aristocratic ‘pursuit of pleasure’ with the pleasures of imagination enjoyed by a strengthening bourgeoisie (Die Erfindung der Freiheit, 54; The Invention of Liberty, 54):

This open-ended, optimistic look at the world built upon and tied to the quintessentially secular category of pleasure, constituing ‘das Wunschbild einer auf den Grundlagen der Natur und der Vernunft neu aufgebauten Welt’ (‘hope in a world reconstructed according to Nature and to Reason’; Die Erfindung der Freiheit, 54; The Invention of Liberty, 54), was invented in the early eighteenth century. And the aesthetics of The Beatles' music can be read as a kind of popular actualization of the eighteenth-century philosophy of pleasure. You don't have to quote John Lennon's ‘Imagine’ at length to understand that the utopia this music dreams of is essentially equivalent to the improvement of humanity promoted by the Enlightenment; in both cases the target point is the self-determined individual living in a society that makes this self-determination possible.

So all in all there is no reason to mock the eighteenth century's ‘Kleinmeister’ while elevating The Beatles over all earlier music, as the author of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung article does, because important dimensions of the group's aesthetic and social foundation came into being in the century when ‘non-heroic’ composers dominated the scene (other dimensions, of course, came from elsewhere; a complex conceptualization of popular music, especially pop music, has now been worked out by Diedrich Diederichsen in Über Pop-Musik (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch 2014)). On the other hand, there is good reason to celebrate the anniversaries of composers like C. P. E. Bach, Reichardt, Gluck and Homilius – not as heroes, but as phenotypes of a century that saw fundamental changes in the aesthetics and social anchoring of music.