Music for the Drawing Room

What is drawing room music? Is it anything like music for airports?

Or furniture music?

bump

"Parlor music" is an alternative title. In a lot of 19th-century middle-class homes, a piano was standard furniture in the parlor or drawing room. Before recordings, the mass market for music was for sheet music. So I guess the thread question is what music (if any) is playing the equivalent role today. (Not that I can tell you much about what was played in 19th-century parlors. Light classical? Sentimental ballads? Polkas? Waltzes?)

Elliott Smith.

x-post 19th century parlor music

"The Maple Leaf Rag" by Scott Joplin was the first piece of sheet music to sell a million copies, and it's not an easy piece to play (somehow Joplin still ended up poor and his death didn't even make the papers). Ragtime was pretty huge for a couple of decades at least around the turn of the century and so all that Tin Pan Alley stuff sold a lot. Stephen Foster tunes like "O! Susanna" and "Camptown Races" would probably have been pretty ubiquitous too. And I guess stuff like My Grandfather's Clock, Daisy Bell... ?

As for modern stuff people play on their pianos it's probably things like "Clocks". I think the invention of recorded music pretty much killed parlor music and on a wider level (and here's where I got thinking), changed music from being a communal activity into something professionalised that you have some more distanced, passive relationship with. Which really sucks when you think about it. I mean, 150 years ago, (or in a lot of other times and places come to think of it) pretty much everyone would sing frequently (parlor music, church, work songs, whatever), none of this "I can't sing" bullshit.

There are, of course, lots of good things that have come about thanks to recorded music (the sheer quantity and diversity of music available), but I think we've shifted rather than widened the boundaries of how we relate to music, and it bothers me that we're missing out on a lot. Pretty much the whole of ILX is based on a way of relating to music that's less than 100 years old (ok, maybe 200 years old), and it's overwhelmingly one-way and passive. I like the fluidity and communality of the old way of relating to music, that there are no definitive versions of songs, that music becomes a big part of social life that brings people together. Gigs/concerts/festivals seem so important to me and it's got to be really significant that live music hasn't died out. I think the communal aspect of music can offer this whole other field of experience - music can be more than just the same sort of thing as literature or painting, it can be the same sort of thing as talking or sex.

So anyway, I guess with sheet music that is produced by a small group of professionals you have a step towards the modern idea of music. I guess parlor music was the beginning of the end.