Romanticism and late-romanticism, its meaning and psychology

[Gurn Blanston]

Gee, I don't know, Gurn. Why was it necessary for Beethoven to take 75 minutes over his Ninth symphony when Haydn's Ninth only takes 12 minutes?    Why did Beethoven have to be so damned excessive? 

Sarge

The Ninth IS concise. When played properly it is only 59 minutes anyway. Wagner can't clear his throat in 59 minutes.

[Karl Henning]

I knew the original text of the hymn but didn't know the English Hymnal version. It makes even more sense to me now that they used that music for that particular scene.

Sarge

Yes; although probably an anachronism for a film set in the Napoleonic wars, the cultural resonance of the hymn is suitable.

[Gurn Blanston]

Do you imply that you lost interest in Romantic music that you used to like just because you found out it had a programme? I could have understood you not liking the music in the first place (actually that's what I thought), but striking it off your list for that particular reason alone puzzles me greatly.

No, I'm saying that I just got tired of it. When I first started listening to music, I didn't know anything about structure, for example. So I could sit and listen to a nice tune for hours on end. Later on, when I discovered that one could make a musical point and then move on to something else rather than flog it to death, I realized that life was too short to listen to things that really didn't make sense to me. The program aspect didn't really matter that much because I never believed in the concept to start with. I am in the camp of the Absolutists, if you are keeping score. Saying that in the 19th century was a big deal. Saying it now, not so much. 

[Florestan]

The program aspect didn't really matter that much because I never believed in the concept to start with.

You've just said that the concept was known and applied by Classicist themselves. My puzzlement increases. 

[Sergeant Rock]

And then there's Wagner.

What is the cut off for excess in music? Beethoven not excessive but Wagner is? Just the Ring, or Holländer too? And what about literature? Does War and Peace have to be so damned long? How about Dante's Divine Comedy? Surely Tolstoy could have reduced his novel to novella form, and Dante's written a sonnet instead of an epic, right? In art: Should Rembrandt's Night Watch be 2' by 3' instead of lifesize?

Of course the Ninth is perfect. It's what Beethoven wanted, and needed, to create (even though almost all Romantic and Post-Romantic symphonies manage to be much shorter; their composers more concise than Beethoven). We should afford Wagner the same courtesy. He needed that length to say everything he wanted to say, and he's enormously popular today. Not everyone's cup of tea, obviously.

Sarge

[Sergeant Rock]

You've just said that the concept was known and applied by Classicist themselves. My puzzlement increases. 

Yeah, when Haydn wrote the Chaos portion of his Creation...he didn't really mean it 

Sarge

[Florestan]

Either the music will reach me or not .

Indeed this is the only thing that really matters.

[Sergeant Rock]

Tone-painting goes back a long way, simulating bird calls, rising melody for joy, religious zeal, etc., descending melodies for sadness, depression or even something as prosaic as going to hell.  Composers of the Renaissance forward have used it.  However, it is an idea I find fairly trite.

Emotions...trite? Interesting. But it does tell us a lot about what forms your taste.

Sarge

[Gurn Blanston]

You've just said that the concept was known and applied by Classicist themselves. My puzzlement increases. 

Just because they believed in it, doesn't mean I did. Nothing to be puzzled about. And near the end of Haydn's career, programmatic writing went well out of style. Wellington's Victory is not part of that tradition, it is stage music meant to accompany a staged event. It wasn't played in concert with the implication that it was absolute music; there were people on stage recreating a battle, at least in its original incarnation. Now, despite Beethoven's protestations otherwise, the 6th Symphony is more what you are looking for if you want to portray Beethoven as a programmatic writer. But it isn't forward looking, it is backward looking. I would suggest "The Characteristic Symphony in the Age of Haydn and Beethoven" by Richard Will if you want to get a handle on the topic. Damn fine writing. Even at that, the goals of (German) Romantics and Classicists were not the same. One was philosophical and the other was merely representational. I can handle representational.

[Florestan]

Tone-painting goes back a long way, simulating bird calls, rising melody for joy, religious zeal, etc., descending melodies for sadness, depression or even something as prosaic as going to hell.  Composers of the Renaissance forward have used it.

Exactly. Music has always been used for expressing something. I really don't understand why this is so wrong.

[Florestan]

Just because they believed in it, doesn't mean I did.

I see. Even the Classicists had their flaws. 

the goals of (German) Romantics and Classicists were not the same. One was philosophical and the other was merely representational. I can handle representational.

Then you should love Hunnenschlacht. 

[Karl Henning]

Emotions...trite? Interesting. But it does tell us a lot about what forms your taste.

Sarge

Play this — if you can! ; )

http://www.youtube.com/v/6-oHYYaw9jA

[Gurn Blanston]

I see. Even the Classicists had their flaws. 

Well, most of them did, anyway....

[Karl Henning]

Worth pointing out that in his day, Monteverdi played in this arena with Lo stile rappresentativo . . . ?

[some guy]

Hahahahaha ( ), I knew I shouldn't have tried to construct a subtle and intricate argument that requires real reading skills in an online discussion!!

Now who feels stupid?

And to come back the next day to find Florestan trampling through my delicate and cunningly devised structure with hobnailed boots, picking up little pieces of twisted metal and broken glass and saying "This, what is this?" and missing entirely the whole point of that construction.... Well, cripes!!

And how long have I been posting to online discussions to try something on like that? What a maroon.

Well, enough self-flagellation.

Here's the nub of my post from three or four pages back, rescued from the wreckage and presented simply and bluntly and briefly:

There is a relationship between language and music, but it's usually expressed backwards--music is not a kind of language; language is a kind of music.

[Karl Henning]

Urble burble.

[Karl Henning]

Some questions: what are the analogues? Is an arpeggio a word or a phrase? A word, by itself, does mean less than a word in a context. (Does a note, however, mean less by itself than in a context? I.e., does context always add meaning in all cases all the time?)

Let's say, for the nonce, that a note is analogous to a word. We can see right off that even a preposition like "in" or an article like "a" already mean quite a lot more (express a lot more information) than any note. But of course, we have already gotten past the whole issue of music conveying precise information. Or at the very least, sanantonio has gotten past that. But what is it that music conveys? "She walks in beauty, as the night" conveys quite a lot, and most of what it conveys is not by any means information. So music, maybe, is more like poetry than discursive prose. Fair enough?

But still, sit twenty people down in front of the Byron line and there will be basically one idea about what it's conveying. The line has a lot of room for interpretation, of course, but it's not too far a stretch to imagine that those twenty people will agree that there's something attractive about night that is being used to describe a beautiful woman.

Take a short phrase of a piece of music, however. The opening of Mozart's 40th. Take the first twenty notes and the same twenty people. How many ideas do you suppose there will be? How many people won't even be able to come up with anything? How many people will only be able to say something along the lines of "two phrases of ten notes each, same rhythm."

But maybe we're all going about this backwards. Try this thought experiment. Take language as the subject. That's the thing we're going to find out about. And let's use musical metaphors to do it. Suddenly everything seems much easier, doesn't it? Makes much more sense, seems much more natural. Language has lots of musical elements to it. Nice, obvious musical elements. And not just poetry, either, but the most mundane kind of language. Like this wee essay, say!

Sure, you can say that music is like language. You can even write a whole book about rhetoric and music. But it's a bit of a stretch, no? And it seems forced, somehow. Where it doesn't seem forced is in the very places where language resembles music. That's what I find distracting about this particular debate. Not that music doesn't have some sort of relation to language but that this debate consistently has the relationship backwards.

Unfortunately, since music is no less mysterious no matter what anyone says about it, and since the language metaphors have been used for so long to try to understand some of those mysteries, I don't see this debate as ever going away. And while I don't think looking at things wrong way round is ever going to produce any light, just heat, I also don't see anyone giving up the idea that seeing music as a kind of language is a good way to understand music. I don't think it is. And I've spent over fifty years listening to music and studying language, too. I just don't see that the language metaphors explain anything about how music works.

What I think I draw from your post, Michael, is:  Music is a bit like language, in its grammatical and rhetorical organization.  Music is not really like language, in terms of conveying content external to itself.

And the divide between coherence of syntax and coherence of content was illustrated neatly by (was it?) Chomsky, with his classic sentence, "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," which is grammatically clear, but as regards content, nonsense.

[some guy]

What I think I draw from your post, Michael, is:  Music is a bit like language, in its grammatical and rhetorical organization.  Music is not really like language, in terms of conveying content external to itself.

No. What I was attempting to get across was that while music and language have certain similarities, these similarities are not static nor omnidirectional. Music is not like language; language is like music. I agree that music cannot convey content external to itself, but I disagree that music is like language in its grammatical and rhetorical organization.

For example, take these eight words: dog, table, the, scraps, turkey, a, ate, off. Those words don't make sense until they've been arranged in a particular order. Only one order is particularly compelling: A dog ate turkey scraps off the table. (I prefer "A table ate dog scraps off the turkey," myself, but that's just me.)

Take these eight notes: c, d, e, f, g, a, b, c. No matter what order you put them in, you have a musical meaning. We have no feeling listening to f, g, a, b, e, d, c, c that that makes more or less sense than b, a, c, f, c, d, g, e. More importantly, we have no overriding sense that only one arrangement is the right one.

And there is also nothing in music to correspond to tense. The dog ate, the dog eats, the dog will eat, the dog will have eaten, the dog can eat. Nor is there anything in music that parallels the difference between "The dog ate turkey scraps off the table" and "The dog eating turkey scraps off the table."

Of course, the whole idea of one word/one note is clearly absurd in the first place. But I think the point is still the same even if you take a one letter/one note approach, with language just getting more than twelve units of that size.

And the divide between coherence of syntax and coherence of content was illustrated neatly by (was it?) Chomsky, with his classic sentence, "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," which is grammatically clear, but as regards content, nonsense.

Yes, Chomsky. And what I would say is that music has nothing like that divide between different coherences. Language has much more specific restrictions like that divide you mention that music just does not have.

[Ten thumbs]

Seems like it's minuet, courante, sarabande etc. good, and valse, mazurka, polonaise etc. bad.
This is all a mystery to me.

[milk]

Play this — if you can! ; )

This one might be harder to play. And, if you really want to know about the trouble with feelings...
http://www.youtube.com/v/VmO_0tIGo-4