The dominance of Romanticism

[Florestan]

romanticism = hummable tunes.

Then Mozart is the greatest Riomantic ever,  period. Followed closely by Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini and Verdi.

[Florestan]

(Like kindergarten music)

Melody is the essence of music. - Mozart

[vers la flamme]

Did I say big melodies? You want hummable tunes! Got it, romanticism = hummable tunes.

(Like kindergarten music)

No, man. You were the one who brought up melody 

Edit: I am referring to this post

But what there is in recent music is an interest in melody. I wonder if that's enough for being stigmatised a romantic, and whether anyone would say that these are romantic. Explain your answer in no more than 300 words.

[relm1]

My thought is romanticism is the equivalent of the classic hero's tale in literature.  It taps in to a traditional, shared psyche.  From Joseph Campbell's "Hero with a Thousand Faces", the same story structures repeated across cultures and times.  Our love of stories is simple human nature. Campbell thought that humanity's myths and stories all had common roots and that, by studying those roots, we could learn a lot about life, ourselves, and meaning. The 21st century has stories of heroism, just like people did in the old times.  If this applies to literature, why doesn't it apply to other mediums as well?  Music existed thousands of years ago and though some of it was for dance or ritual, no doubt some of it told stories and those stories were probably not too different from stories of today with different dressing.  Note the ancient cave art - these date as far as 50,000 years.  Some thought the meaning of this art was a prayer for good hunting results or recording what the prehistoric man experienced but I believe these include stories.... narratives.  The reason I think this is it omitted common animals that were easy prey but sometimes included fictional animals that were combinations of various animals.  It was what they imagined, not just what they saw or wanted.  I can imagine these cave dwellers to sit around a storyteller who expressed in protolanguages (pitches, grunts, and acting) a narrative recalling a successful hunt for instance.  Maybe even passing on stories of a hero who faced immense odds against another tribe or predator.  This is the basis of narrative that is the basis of romanticism too.

Many composers believe romanticism is best suited to expressing the full range of human emotion. As a result, romantic composers broadened the scope of emotional content. Music was expected to communicate to the audience, often by using a narrative form that told distinct stories.  Romantic music is most likely best suited to speaking to an audience because it taps into the traditional, shared psyche.  Music history went through phases where audience wasn't that important, populism where the audience is more important than the art, but ultimately there would be a balance.  I also believe it's never wise to build a work around a technique.  I consider serialism a technique.  As a composer, you use it to help propel a narrative so it can be used in romantic music when you need that technique to further the narrative.  If the basis of your work is only that technique, it becomes academic and fine for study or pushing boundaries but will eventually outlive its purpose and be incorporated in a more communicative approach such as romanticism.  Thus, techniques become a way to express something in the narrative.  Same with aleatoric music or any other technique music.  It makes sense that romanticism is the common style.

[Mandryka]

No, man. You were the one who brought up melody 

Edit: I am referring to this post

But not BIG melody!

[aukhawk]

Don't take my word for it. Penderecki himself described his later period as being heavily influenced by late Romantic composers, and I don't think I'm the only one to hear the connection. For what it's worth, I hear, say, Shostakovich as neo-Romantic, too, with lots of parallels with the music of Mahler; maybe you don't, and we can agree to disagree.

Not so much parallel with as explicitly influenced by - notably, in the 4th Symphony (amongst others).  To what extent that makes it romantic is a whole other question.

I wouldn't hesitate to categorise Shostakovich's 5th Symphony, or his 10th, or his 1st Violin Concerto, as Romantic music.

My take on Penderecki - some of what characterised early Romantic music - brash youthful non-conformity (Eroica) - fairly soon got lost and by the mid-late 19thC the music was, well, middle-aged (Brahms).  Later a sense of world-weariness was setting in (Gotterdammerung, Tchaikovsky 6, Mahler 9), and recent Romantic music penned by the likes of Penderecki and Macmillan is just geriatric.

[pjme]

 
Penderecki in 1996 / NY Times
https://www.nytimes.com/1996/10/20/arts/first-a-firebrand-then-a-romantic-now-what.html

'By now I had had enough of the avant-garde,'' he said. ''There was this kind of dictatorship of the Darmstadt school, composers like Boulez and Stockhausen, who were very strict and orthodox. They would not allow other composers to write the music they wanted to write, and only a certain kind of music could be played.''

In the 70's, Mr. Penderecki began a second career as a conductor, and he was forced to restudy the 19th-century symphonic repertory.
''The kind of music I was conducting influenced my own music very much,'' he said. ''During this time I began to have my Romantic ideas, partly because I was conducting Bruckner, Sibelius and Tchaikovsky.'' So the avant-gardist who had broken with tradition found himself becoming a neo-Romantic who absorbed it.
Perhaps because the Third Symphony was written intermittently over the years 1988 to 1995, fewer traces of the old experimentalist crop up. Charles Dutoit doesn't hesitate to label it neo-Romantic.
''It shows his love for Bruckner and Mahler and late 19th-century German music,'' Mr. Dutoit said. ''Also the colors, the darkness of the music: there is nothing flashy or brilliant or virtuosic. He doesn't show off at all, neither as a composer nor as a person.''

Facing a pile of commissions for large-scale works, Mr. Penderecki seems undaunted. ''Big forms fascinate me,'' he said with childlike delight.At present, he is writing a seven-movement oratorio, ''The Seven Gates of Jerusalem,'' for two orchestras, chorus and vocal soloists. Then come those four symphonies. Although his recent orchestral works, like the Second Violin Concerto, have favored a one-movement structure, his Third Symphony, to his surprise, mushroomed into five. As a result, he thinks that his next symphony may ''also be in five or seven movements.''

Mr. Penderecki's commitments to Munich will occupy him into the new millennium. What does he imagine contemporary music will sound like then? Will we return to an age of innovation like that of the early 20th century?

''Absolutely,'' he replied with surprising confidence. ''There were two periods in our century that pushed music forward, the 1920's, and the mid-50's through the 60's, and since then our culture has declined. We will need some fresh ideas, but we don't know where to search for them. There must be a younger generation who will find the absolutely new, something that we are not even aware of.''
and
Certainly, Mr. Penderecki was one of the first composers to return to tonality, although American composers like George Rochberg and David Del Tredici followed a similar path. Mr. Penderecki may have employed the gestures and rhetoric of the 19th century, but his music represented a very personal transformation of Romanticism, not some literal imitation of Tchaikovsky.

[Mandryka]

My thought is romanticism is the equivalent of the classic hero's tale in literature.  It taps in to a traditional, shared psyche.  From Joseph Campbell's "Hero with a Thousand Faces", the same story structures repeated across cultures and times.  Our love of stories is simple human nature. Campbell thought that humanity's myths and stories all had common roots and that, by studying those roots, we could learn a lot about life, ourselves, and meaning. The 21st century has stories of heroism, just like people did in the old times.  If this applies to literature, why doesn't it apply to other mediums as well?  Music existed thousands of years ago and though some of it was for dance or ritual, no doubt some of it told stories and those stories were probably not too different from stories of today with different dressing.  Note the ancient cave art - these date as far as 50,000 years.  Some thought the meaning of this art was a prayer for good hunting results or recording what the prehistoric man experienced but I believe these include stories.... narratives.  The reason I think this is it omitted common animals that were easy prey but sometimes included fictional animals that were combinations of various animals.  It was what they imagined, not just what they saw or wanted.  I can imagine these cave dwellers to sit around a storyteller who expressed in protolanguages (pitches, grunts, and acting) a narrative recalling a successful hunt for instance.  Maybe even passing on stories of a hero who faced immense odds against another tribe or predator.  This is the basis of narrative that is the basis of romanticism too.

Do you think that narratives in music are possible without the idea of a home key and keys more or less removed from it?

Liza Lim once said that form is content, that in her music the only thing she is doing is making a collage of sounds which are designed to give the listener a bunch of different sensations.

Many composers believe romanticism is best suited to expressing the full range of human emotion. As a result, romantic composers broadened the scope of emotional content. Music was expected to communicate to the audience, often by using a narrative form that told distinct stories.  Romantic music is most likely best suited to speaking to an audience because it taps into the traditional, shared psyche.  Music history went through phases where audience wasn't that important, populism where the audience is more important than the art, but ultimately there would be a balance.  I also believe it's never wise to build a work around a technique.  I consider serialism a technique.  As a composer, you use it to help propel a narrative so it can be used in romantic music when you need that technique to further the narrative.  If the basis of your work is only that technique, it becomes academic and fine for study or pushing boundaries but will eventually outlive its purpose and be incorporated in a more communicative approach such as romanticism.  Thus, techniques become a way to express something in the narrative.  Same with aleatoric music or any other technique music.  It makes sense that romanticism is the common style.

There's another way of seeing music, other than the expression of emotion. You could say that, as a matter of fact, there seem to be moments  where the singer or instrumentalist seems to become inhabited by a magic spirit, duende. And the job of a composer need not be to create an emotional theme park ride, but to provide  tools to inspire the performer to get in touch with his duende.

[Madiel]

Acknowledging all of the issues with defining the terms here, it seems to me that the essence is that "Romanticism" is the label given to the last era where tonality was still a major unifying force.

And then some composers went seriously non-tonal. And left a large portion of the listening public behind. For most people, non-tonal music has really only gained a foothold in things like film music, accompanying action rather than being something to listen to on its own.

That's what I suspect is going on here. We tend to hear more recent tonal music as being in some way linked to Romanticism because that's our last agreed tonal reference point. There isn't a clear overarching label to be used for a more modern tonal style.

[relm1]

Do you think that narratives in music are possible without the idea of a home key and keys more or less removed from it?

Liza Lim once said that form is content, that in her music the only thing she is doing is making a collage of sounds which are designed to give the listener a bunch of different sensations.


There's another way of seeing music, other than the expression of emotion. You could say that, as a matter of fact, there seem to be moments  where the singer or instrumentalist seems to become inhabited by a magic spirit, duende. And the job of a composer need not be to create an a emotional theme park ride, but to provide a tools to inspire the performer to get in touch with his duende.

Absolutely narratives in music are possible without home key - I don't think Messiaen adheres to home keys for example but his music is rich in narrative.  There are lots of music that rely on collage of sounds (John Luther Adams) but I think you can think of this as a color that can be shaped over time.  There is still a sense of tension and release which can form a sort of narrative.  For example, the point of maximum tension probably isn't at the start.  If it is, that too can still be a narrative, just not a very interesting one.  Your alternative way of describing music makes sense.

[Mandryka]

Absolutely narratives in music are possible without home key - I don't think Messiaen adheres to home keys for example but his music is rich in narrative.  There are lots of music that rely on collage of sounds (John Luther Adams) but I think you can think of this as a color that can be shaped over time.  There is still a sense of tension and release which can form a sort of narrative.  For example, the point of maximum tension probably isn't at the start.  If it is, that too can still be a narrative, just not a very interesting one.  Your alternative way of describing music makes sense.

Ok. It was AMW's word "heroic" that I was thinking of but that somehow didn't come out in my response. 

What are you thinking of in Messiaen? As far as I know, the narrative is extrinsic to his music, in associated texts. I've never heard any John Luther Adams.

[relm1]

Ok. It was AMW's word "heroic" that I was thinking of but that somehow didn't come out in my response. 

What are you thinking of in Messiaen? As far as I know, the narrative is extrinsic to his music, in associated texts. I've never heard any John Luther Adams.

Hmm, I define heroic as romantic...such as the hero with a thousand faces means architype that is all over literature.  Romeo, Hercules, Perseus, Cleopatra, Odysseus, Rocky, Luke, Ben Kenobi, Dorothy, Scarecrow, etc.  These are all architypes.  They are in all classic stories in some way.  The obvious version of Messiaen would be Quartet for the End of Time and Turangalila Symphony like Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique - a very programmatic (literary) work. 

[Mandryka]

I am really uncomfortable about taking literary concepts - hero in a battle with the world to achieve his objectives etc - and using them to define musical styles. That's because I think that music has no meaning for the listener, the most it can do is force an emotion, and even that may well be learned, cultural. For me, a better analogy than literature for non imitative music is hair styles - hair styles have no meaning, can be simple or complex, and cause an emotional response. No one would talk about romantic hair doos and mean it in the same way as we say that Les Misérables is a romantic novel.

[KevinP]

Funny, but about 30 minutes ago, I highlighted something in Jeppensen's counterpoint book, about how originality equates genius, but that this is a modern idea informed by romanticism. (This was mentioned in opposition to 16th century practices, where the most celebrated composers were those who adhered to the rules so that their music could accessible to the most people.)

I was momentarily surprised, never having considered that as something that stemmed from the romantic period, or, more frankly, never really having considered the possibility that genius didn't automatically presuppose originality. But then the thought of Mendelssohn's Bach revival started giving it credence.

So if true, there's that influence. The well-known modern composers are, arguably, more individualistic than those of the baroque, classical and romantic eras given they that worked in the framework of tonality while the modern composer is expected to forge their own individual alternative to tonality.

A few other points after reading through this thread. Some of the later works being cited are what are sometimes called neo-romanticism, a term sometimes applied to Prokofiev, (some) Shostakovich, Barber, etc.

I'm not defending the term as 'neo-romanticism' pretty much bumps into the actual romantic period time-wise, making it a rather odd term. And yet not a totally useless one. It marks a variety of romanticism informed by other movements.

And 'other movements' is key here. Classicism gave way to romanticism. (Were there other competing movements? Did they get lost in the shuffle of history? or did what looked at the time like completely different trends just get codified as traits of romanticism?) 

I think it's safe to say that the decline of romanticism didn't give way to one movement. Perhaps such large-scale changes never do, hence my questions above. Or perhaps we're yet too close to it. But I suspect the accessibility of recordings (and broadcasting) play a big part. We would dismiss something written today that sounds like 1980s Philip Glass as old hat because everybody's heard it already. But fewer people in the romantic era would have been as hyper-aware of 40-year old music as we are, and they certainly wouldn't have listened to it on repeat until they got sick of it.

Recordings also make today's composer more familiar with the romantic ones, especially with mega-sized box sets and YouTube, and so they may be more influenced by them (just as they can by with composers of classical, baroque, renaissance, etc period).

For that matter, I suppose the influence of romanticism can be more noticeable than the influence of other eras as its much more of a gut punch.

[Florestan]

But this seems an ambiguity. Verse la flamme seems not to have meant a psychological disposition but a core or bundle of features common to music (and maybe other arts) since the early 19th century but not most other eras.

The one begets the other. If you are inclined to Romantic / romantic ideas and themes, you will tend to employ those techniques and methods best suited to express them --- and these techniques and methods are, well, Romantic.

[Florestan]

What other musical era has lasted so long and been so diverse within itself? You have the self-expressive romantics, the literary/nature poets, the nationalist schools, the impressionists, the Mahlerian angst crew, and the salon/light music crew. (EDIT: Forgot virtuoso-composers. I think you could make a reasonable distinction between the art of someone like Mozart and the art of someone like Paganini or Liszt.)

We shouldn't forget that salon/light music and virtuoso music were mercilessly attacked by that paragon of Romanticism, one Robert Schumann. Save Paganini and Liszt (and even these two, with caveats), he constantly mocked and disparaged Thalberg, Herz, Hunten, Kalkbrenner and scores of other virtuosi, targetting both their playing style and their music. He's probably the man most responsible for defending and disseminating the profoundly wrong, but typically Romantic, notion that only music born out of the sufferings of a tortured soul is any worth.

There is yet another Romantic genre you forgot: grand-opera --- and it's again a genre which Schumann lambasted constantly and equally wrongly.

Also, the term "national(ist) schools" is heavily loaded. Those musicologists who created it never used the term "German nationalist music"; for them, German music was simply music or abstract music or program music. But when a Czech or a Scandivanian or a Russian wote music employing exactly the same forms and techniques as the Germans, their music suddenly became "nationalist". The German nationalist {pun) bias is obvious, as is the irony of the situation.

[Florestan]

Actually, there is yet another way in which Romanticism dominated the 20th century, and it's precisely by way of atonalism, serialism and avant-garde, all of which are the embodiment of typically Romantic notions such as art as an esoteric pursuit reserved to the happy few who can understand it (those who cannot being branded as philistines and haughtily dismissed or even held in utter contempt) and the artist as a high priest leading mankind to new and higher levels of conscience. When Schoenberg wrote the famous words "If it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art" he was pushing to the most extreme but only too logical consequences the Romantic elitism already present in Schumann, Liszt, Berlioz and Wagner. And the culmination of this elitism is to be found in Milton Babbitt's (in)famous article "Who cares if you listen?".

[greg]

Actually, there is yet another way in which Romanticism dominated the 20th century, and it's precisely by way of atonalism, serialism and avant-garde, all of which are the embodiment of typically Romantic notions such as art as an esoteric pursuit reserved to the happy few who can understand it (those who cannot being branded as philistines and haughtily dismissed or even held in utter contempt) and the artist as a high priest leading mankind to new and higher levels of conscience. When Schoenberg wrote the famous words "If it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art" he was pushing to the most extreme but only too logical consequences the Romantic elitism already present in Schumann, Liszt, Berlioz and Wagner. And the culmination of this elitism is to be found in Milton Babbitt's (in)famous article "Who cares if you listen?".

First time I heard this as a natural evolution (rather than a twist in direction), but I agree, it makes sense.

Also I tend to favor this type of musical environment more, even though it might sound a bit antisocial to some people. On the extreme opposite end, we'd have every composer just making watered down music for the masses which can bring in many people, but have few hardcore fans. But for this extreme, we can have a wide variety of composers catering to specific niches (entirely conceived of by themselves), so the expectation is for the listener to move/make an effort, not the composer- but if they don't, so what? They have plenty of other options which sound quite different. When a certain highly specific niche is done well, it will hit the spot hardcore for certain people, and you'd never get that when everyone is just doing mainstream stuff.

[Florestan]

First time I heard this as a natural evolution (rather than a twist in direction), but I agree, it makes sense.

Also I tend to favor this type of musical environment more, even though it might sound a bit antisocial to some people. On the extreme opposite end, we'd have every composer just making watered down music for the masses which can bring in many people, but have few hardcore fans. But for this extreme, we can have a wide variety of composers catering to specific niches (entirely conceived of by themselves), so the expectation is for the listener to move/make an effort, not the composer- but if they don't, so what? They have plenty of other options which sound quite different. When a certain highly specific niche is done well, it will hit the spot hardcore for certain people, and you'd never get that when everyone is just doing mainstream stuff.

The problem as I see it is not that some composers write esoteric, elitist music, but that some of those composers openly express their utter contempt for both anyone who doesn't understand / appreciate their music and composers who write music for a larger audience. The most outspoken practitioner of this haughty dismissal of "philistines" was Robert Schumann, with Berlioz, Liszt* and Wagner contributing their no small share as well. Unfortunately, their misguided crusade has largely succeeded: even today there are large swaths of music lovers who believe that only music born out of suffering and soul torture is any worth and that any esthetic that aims for lightness, tunefulness and accessibility is of a lower order than that which aims for profundity, dissonance and elitism --- and this is yet another way by which Romanticism indeed still dominates our culture.


* Liszt's case is a special one: having been in his youth a hugely popular virtuoso, the very opposite of Robert Schumann's ideal musician, he gradually turned into an elitist.

[vers la flamme]

^Florestan, thanks for your insightful comments. Very early on in my explorations of classical music, I read a book called The Vintage Guide to Classical Music, by Jan Swafford, who described Modernism as "Romanticism with no brakes" (or something to that effect using a different figure of speech). I thought it made a lot of sense at the time and I still do.