A week ago I was asked, “What is the difference between a musician and a classically trained musician?” For the life of me I couldn’t find a good, straight answer. It’s music…. maybe a different style but that knowledge could easily be transferred from one to the other. I learned how to play the classical guitar and have transferred that knowledge over to my electric. A pianist could do the same as with many wind instruments. Transferring the piano skills to keyboards or wind instruments …

Essentially Modern Popular Music is a (d)evolved variation of the Classical Music Lieder, Art Song or likewise. A Lieder, as defined by Essentials of Music, is “German for ’song’; most commonly associated with the solo art song of the nineteenth century, usually accompanied by piano.” The obvious difference is that instead of piano, artists are using a number of instruments in addition or or in replace of the piano. Also the format of songs versus traditional lieder divided the two even further especially with the lack of variations in most …

With our condensed history lesson in Classical Music vs. Popular Music: Where Music Parted Ways we discussed how and why Popular Music and Classical Music parted ways. Popular Music began to venture itself away from Classical Music in many forms including culture, notation, instrumentation, etc. However, in many ways these two entities are still actually very close and only have but a few things separating them. To expose the similarities we must also look into the differences.

There seems to be a misconception with music lovers and in the music community that Classical Music and Popular Music are two entirely different beasts. To be fair, Classical Musicians tend to think of
Popular Musicians as “lesser musicians” or “lesser composers” and Popular Musicians and Songwriters tend to think of Classical Musicians and Classical Composers as up-tight nazis who don’t understand what music is truly about. But who says they are truly different or have to be different? And at what point do we draw the line …

For years there has been a friendly feud between members of the Classical Music Community: vocalist and instrumentalist. The only difference Between these two “factions” is the instrument used; one is man-made the other is organic. Their education is generally the same with emphasis on their chosen form of sound production and they read roughly the same music. So what divides them within? What drives them