Why do so many pieces of classical music have only a technical name (Sonata #5, Concerto 2 in A minor, symphony #4, etc.) instead of a “name” like Fuhr Elise or Eine Kline Nachtmusik?

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I can only speak for myself, but this makes it really hard to keep track of the songs I like. I love listening to classical music but if you asked me my favorite artists I would have difficulty telling you specifics.

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Anonymous 0 Comments

There are a lot of good answers already in this thread. I’ll add one other factor.

A great deal of classical* music was written for functional purposes rather than to call attention to itself as a composition in its own right. If your main job is as the kapellmeister of a cathedral, you might bang out fifty pieces a year to give your choir and organist something to work with. We only notice if you’re JS Bach, because he was good enough at doing it that you’d want to listen to it a second time. If you’ve ever heard random background music in a commercial that was strangely compelling—and here I mean pure background stuff, not pop songs licensed as a jingle—that’s Bach born at the wrong time.

Ditto a lot of chamber music. The Prince-Archbishop of Wherever is too posh to re-use a waltz for his next soirée, so he has his pet composer make a new one. Is it great? Eh, doesn’t matter, it gets the job done. The analogy here is house music today. A lot of it is brand new in any given week, or recycled from bits of other stuff (also a good analogy), but nobody’s expecting Skrillex-quality** stuff from some rando in Tulsa.

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* my inner musicology professor is screaming at me for using this term, since the Classical period was only a small part of what we normally mean by the artsy-fartsy stuff that runs from Bach to Bartok.

** yeah I said it

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