Why Does Music and Art Evolve the Way They Do?

The premise behind the question is inaccurate. Music did not evolve from symphony to pop songs if anything it evolved the other way around. Pop songs and folk music existed long before symphonic music - troubadour songs, lullabies, church chants, hymns, serenades, and dance music were part of our cultural heritage far earlier.

Music Evolution: From Simple Pop to Symphonic Complexity

Pop songs did not evolve from symphonies but from earlier pop music. For most of human history, folk music was the only music. Both “pop music” and “classical music” evolved out of folk music at different points, with classical music emerging earlier.

Folk music generally refers to music that is transmitted orally, person-to-person. Classical music, on the other hand, refers to music that is notated before performance. Pop music, as defined here, refers to music that is distributed in identical copies, i.e., recordings by commercial means. The evolution of Western classical music can be traced to the Medieval and Renaissance periods, where it tended to evolve from simplicity towards complexity, but every so often a reform movement would come along, taking everything back to simplicity again.

The “Common Practice Period” of classical music began with the Baroque Era, featuring fairly intellectually complex music. This was followed by the “Classical Era,” which was a return to simplicity and clarity as values. Following Beethoven and throughout the nineteenth century, classical composers wrote ever longer and more complex works. This era is termed the “Romantic Era” and includes most of the famous symphonies you might be thinking of. Classical music continued to strive for greater complexity throughout the twentieth century, but it lost a lot of its public face. Many people thought that composers like Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and more contemporary figures like Boulez, Cage, and Carter wrote music that was too abstract and experimental. As a result, twentieth-century classical music never gained the fame of that from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, except for the minimalist movement notable for composers like Philip Glass and Steve Reich.

Art Evolution: From Realism to Abstract Concepts

Art did not “evolve” that way either. Paleolithic cave paintings and sculptures demonstrate that art began with simple depictions. Art has cycled through periods of abstraction, naturalism, and expressionism, repeatedly and in all kinds of combinations and permutations. As the late great Ernst Gombrich pointed out in his book “Art and Illusion,” it may seem that in the modern era at least that the visual artist moved inexorably away from representation and realism toward abstraction, but it is not necessarily so. Several critics argued that this is the inevitable course of modernism, but “It ain’t necessarily so.”

Pop Music: From Sheet Music to Digital Distributions

Pop music, when defined to include a wide range of genres from jazz to metal, includes a lot more than just the pop genre. While complex music certainly exists in these genres, it does not gain the same level of popularity. This is because popular music must have immediate appeal to a lot of different people. The really complex stuff is often the province of subcultures that put extra effort and focus into understanding the music, similar to the educated European upper class that kept nineteenth-century classical music going.

The first pop music was invented in the second half of the nineteenth century, with sheet music for piano and voice marketed to the growing number of upper-middle-class homes that could afford to own a piano. This music is considered the first pop music because it was the first to be marketed directly to the consumer as a commodity. Recording became popular in the twentieth century, and a larger percentage of the population was able to buy recordings directly or at least listen to them on the radio. Recorded pop music has evolved towards our current media market in which hip-hop and EDM dominate among younger demographics.

Conclusion

Music and art continue to evolve in different directions, each with its own complex history and development. Neither evolved straightforwardly from symphony to pop songs, nor from straightforward realism to abstract concepts. Both continue to oscillate between varying forms of expression, driven by cultural, social, and technological changes over time.