If you're an iPhone owner who subscribes to a local symphony orchestra or has a favorite Brahms concerto, you'll fall in love with Apple Music Classical instantly. If you’re an iPhone owner smitten with U. Srinivas’ electric mandolin recordings of Carnatic instrumentals, you might have a harder time.
The new app by Apple comes free with an Apple Music subscription and is Apple's first separate, stand-alone music app, featuring everything we've come to expect from the company—a great user interface that lets you search for your favorite composer, era, and instrumentation, helping you dive into the history of Europe's sounds. You can treat yourself to cataloged versions of the world's best symphony orchestras, small ensembles, and soloists. The music is available in lossless quality, in perhaps one of the few genres where high-end audio systems can reveal the difference, thanks to strings and other high-frequency instruments en masse. In short, if the history of Western music is your jam, the app is great.
But to my own experience as a trained musician, and talking with experts, Apple Music Classical in its current form has an adjective problem. If you are to believe the name of the app and the content therein, the so-called classical music is primarily Western. For a global company like Apple, which intends to spread this app throughout the world—Apple Music Classical is available everywhere Apple Music is except for China, Japan, Korea, Russia, Taiwan, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Pakistan—that's an oversight. But it’s still one that can be fixed.
Music history, genres, and labels are among the most divisive elements of any Western conservatory education. I recall myself, a jazz drummer, barely passing a semester of music history that began in Europe about a thousand years ago with chanting monks and ended in America about a hundred years ago with Igor Stravinsky.
But as I'd go back to my practice room and work on age-old rhythms from West Africa, India, and beyond, I asked an obvious question: Where was the history of these kinds of music in my class? I quickly realized the manner in which music is taught to Western musicians and the general public—especially what we label as classical music versus what gets absurdly labeled as “world music”—is lazy and incomplete, and it discounts many of the world's oldest musical traditions.
“I myself always call it Western classical music,” says acclaimed modern composer Reena Esmail, whose own music is featured on Apple Music Classical and is influenced by both Western classical and Indian classical traditions. “It's funny, because often I'm in a space where people don't realize there is other classical music, and they're like, ‘well, what do you mean, Western classical music?’”
Many of us, myself included until the music conservatory, broadly assume we know what classical music is, based on a caricature. We think of music with strings, reeds, horns, maybe an opera singer, and maybe some old person with a baton to lead it all. But when you dig into it, the term classical is fraught with complaints, many of them from inside Western classical circles.