Parlour music is a type of
popular music which, as the name suggests, is intended to be performed in the
parlours of
middle class homes by amateur singers and
pianists. Disseminated as
sheet music, its heyday came in the 19th century, as a result of a steady increase in the number of households with enough surplus cash to purchase musical instruments and instruction in music, and with the leisure time and cultural motivation to engage in recreational music-making. Its popularity waned in the 20th century as the
phonograph record and radio replaced sheet music as the most common method of dissemination of popular music. This is the middle and low brow music which
European classical music began to gradually and eventually self-consciously distance itself from beginning around 1790. (1989, p.4, 17-18, 321)
In contrast to the
chord-based classical music era, parlour music features
melodies which are harmonically-independent or not determined by the
harmony. This produces
parlour chords, many of them
added tone chords if not
extended such as the dominant thirteenth, added sixth, and major dominant ninth. Rather, the melodies are organized through
parlour modes, variants of the
major mode with the third, sixth, and seventh emphasized through
modal frames such as the
mediant-octave mode, which uses the third as a floor and ceiling note, its less common variants the
pseudo-phrygian, in which the seventh and often fifth are given prominence, and
submediant-octave mode.
Many of the...
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