Parlour music

Parlour music, actually having little to do with parlours, is Peter van der Merwe's term for the popular and semi-popular lite-classical and popular, and folk-like music of nineteenth century Europe, "distinct from 'folk' music and uncontaminated by highbrow pretensions." 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 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, modal frames such as floor notes and ceiling notes, and their combinations, such as the mediant-octave mode, which uses the third as a floor and cieling note.

Mediant-octave mode examples

• Beethoven's "Turkish March" from "The Ruin of Athens"
• Chopin's Waltz in Ab, Op.34, no.1 theme
• Alford's "Colonel Bogey" march
• Sousa's "The Thunderer"
• "The Yellow Rose of Texas"
• "Silent Night"
• Wagner's Tannhauser's song
• "Rock-a-bye Baby"
• "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"/"John Brown's Body"

"The Battle Hymn of the Republic" melody beginning

• Mozart's Die Zauberflote, Papageno's glockenspiel tune

Source

• van der Merwe, Peter (1989). Origins of the Popular Style: The Antecedents of Twentieth-Century Popular Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 0193161214.