From the moment I started making music, when I was eighteen, I wondered why there is such a vast difference between classical music and pop & jazz. I know, I’m generalising. There are plenty of listeners who enjoy both styles of music. Some musicians work in both fields. There are classical composers who were inspired by jazz, like Stravinsky and Poulenc. And a lot of rock musicians have been inspired by classical masters, like (the Dutch) Focus and Robin Thicke.
Be it as it may, I still experience a huge distance between classical and pop & jazz. For a long time, I thought it was way of singing, the instruments that are used or the harmonies. But lately more and more I think it has to do with the syncopations.
In the important books on music theory, it is claimed that syncopations occur in all music styles. These are all notes that “part from the regular rhythmic flow”. That is a very broad definition. In this view the accents on the backbeat are syncopations as well. Musicologists probably have good reason to use this definition, but for me as a musician it doesn’t work and as far as I know this is not the way other musicians use this concept. To my knowledge a syncopation is a note that starts before the beat and is not followed by a note on the beat:
If you define syncopations like that, there are hardly any in classical music. I have tested this in a couple of well-known classical choral pieces; motets by Bach and Brahms and chansons by Ravel and Debussy. Much to my surprise there are no real syncopations in these pieces! There are notes resembling a syncopation: tied notes starting on the beat and resounding beyond the next beat. In Bach’s motet Lobet den Herrn it occurs on the word Heiden:
In the second chanson by Ravel, Trois beaux oiseaux du paradis it occurs on beaux and on z-il:
But musicians will agree that these notes do not function as real syncopations.
Let’s compare this to a couple of early jazz songs. The oldest jazz standard I know is the St. Louis blues from 1914. (Written in the same year as the Ravel chanson, by the way.) Directly at the onset, there is a real syncopation on the word see:
In his famous standard I got rhythm Gershwin wrote clear syncopations:
In pop and jazz, we hardly encounter any songs without syncopations. Maybe this is what makes the difference between pop & jazz and classical music. In that case we might describe pop and jazz as ‘syncopated music’! That sounds good!