A different cut on beginners' classical music

[(poco) Sforzando]

I find this to be a very provocative idea.

As you wish. But bear in mind that "program music" is a concept that dates back to the Renaissance, including such works as William Byrd's The Battell, which has the descriptive sections: "Souldiers sommons, marche of footemen, marche of horsmen, trumpetts, Irishe marche, bagpipe and the drone, flute and the droome, marche to the fighte, the battels be joyned, retreat, galliarde for the victorie." Baroque examples include Vivaldi's Four Seasons and Bach's Capriccio on the Departure of a Beloved Brother; classical examples include Dittersdorf's Symphonies on Ovid's Metamorphoses as well as Beethoven's Pastorale.

But other than the thunderstorm interlude, Beethoven's symphony is written in standard classical sonata forms and he insisted that the programmatic elements were intended more as generalized feelings than any specific attempt to tell a story. The argument over whether Beethoven was a classical or Romantic composer has perhaps not been thoroughly resolved, but I follow Charles Rosen's lead in continuing to consider his forms predominantly classical. As for Impressionism, it refers to a period in late 19th-century music spearheaded by Debussy, and including such composers as Delius, Griffes, Koechlin, etc.

[Haffner]

As you wish. But bear in mind that "program music" is a concept that dates back to the Renaissance, including such works as William Byrd's The Battell, which has the descriptive sections: "Souldiers sommons, marche of footemen, marche of horsmen, trumpetts, Irishe marche, bagpipe and the drone, flute and the droome, marche to the fighte, the battels be joyned, retreat, galliarde for the victorie." Baroque examples include Vivaldi's Four Seasons and Bach's Capriccio on the Departure of a Beloved Brother; classical examples include Dittersdorf's Symphonies on Ovid's Metamorphoses as well as Beethoven's Pastorale.

But other than the thunderstorm interlude, Beethoven's symphony is written in standard classical sonata forms and he insisted that the programmatic elements were intended more as generalized feelings than any specific attempt to tell a story. The argument over whether Beethoven was a classical or Romantic composer has perhaps not been thoroughly resolved, but I follow Charles Rosen's lead in continuing to consider his forms predominantly classical. As for Impressionism, it refers to a period in late 19th-century music spearheaded by Debussy, and including such composers as Delius, Griffes, Koechlin, etc.

Excellent post. I am reminded of the great book by Charles Rosen, "The Classical Style".

I wonder how "sonata" were some of the latest LvB String Quartets.

[Lethevich]

I find this to be a very provocative idea.

Provocative, but not persuading Beethoven is classical through and through. He was also enormously innovative, bending and playing with forms, but firmly rooted in classicism...

[(poco) Sforzando]

Excellent post. I am reminded of the great book by Charles Rosen, "The Classical Style".

I wonder how "sonata" were some of the latest LvB String Quartets.

Since you know Rosen, read again his chapter on Beethoven's late style, where he addresses this issue. All the individual movements from the late quartets are written within the four major classical principles - sonata-allegro, rondo, variations, or ABA dance form. The major formal innovation in the quartets applies to the number and ordering of the movements, with op. 130 most like a suite and 135 most traditional. A piano sonata like op. 111 has only two movements (sonata-allegro and variations). But even 131, which appears to have seven movements, really has only five - as 3 and 6 are interludes or introductions. And so in truth op. 131 has a basic structure consisting of Fugue - Scherzo I  - (Interlude) - Variations - Scherzo II -  (Introduction) - Sonata-Allegro. In fact the most radical procedure in 131 is placing the main sonata-allegro movement at the end, where traditionally it was mostly used as the first movement. This tends to weight the quartet towards the finale as the most formally complex part of the work.

[Rod Corkin]

Concerning 'program music' from the classic period one must also consider Beethoven's 4th concerto, who's unusual nature must surely relate to the Orpheus Myth. Of course Beethoven was never one to let any programmatic element overpower the essential musicality of his work.

[Teresa]

My web host moved me to their new platform yesterday and had to redo my website with new tools.  Here is the redesigned home page: http://analog-lovers.blogspot.com/ also reworded my two controversial articles / recommended list to not so offend lovers of Chamber Music and core Classical repertoire revealing the alternative possibilities.  "Classical Music for music lovers who don't think they like Classical Music" http://sacdlives.blogspot.com/2009/02/classical-music-for-music-lovers-who.html "The Basic Power Orchestral Repertoire or Classical music for folks who don't like traditional Classical music." http://www.positive-feedback.com/Issue35/classical_music.htm

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
"German composer. Often considered a transitional figure from the Classical to the Romantic era.

Ludwig van Beethoven is often described by musicians as a "giant straddling two styles": the Classical and the Romantic. Indeed, it is a testimony to Beethoven's place in history that he is claimed for both periods. Whether Beethoven was a Classical or a Romantic composer, however, is beside the point. Instead, we might best view him as a new composer for a new age -- an age that is reflected in both musical as well as the nonmusical worlds."

http://www.essentialsofmusic.com/composer/beethoven.html

I have all 5 of Beethoven's Piano Concertos and IMHO based on the versions I have Nos. 1,2 and 3 are Classical with No. 1 to my ears sounding very much like Haydn.  However IMHO Concertos Nos. 4 & 5 definitely sound Romantic to me, early Romantic but Romantic nevertheless.

My version: 
BEETHOVEN, LUDWIG VAN (1770-1827)
  Concertos for Piano and Orchestra Nos. 1-5
    Ashkenazy, Solti, Chicago Symphony Orchestra [4 LPs] London ffrr CSA-2404

  0:)

[Robert Dahm]

As for Impressionism, it refers to a period in late 19th-century music spearheaded by Debussy, and including such composers as Delius, Griffes, Koechlin, etc.

'Impressionism' describes a movement in the visual arts, not one in music. The music of Debussy (particularly) was described by some commentators as being 'impressionist', but it was not a lable he ever condoned himself. As such, the description of music as being Impressionist is, while useful, not particularly presciptive (IMHO) as to the composers/eras in which it can be applied.

The tendency of the 6th to avoid traditional tonic-dominant dichotomies through a less tradition I-IV-I type movement is just as harmonically stagnant to classical ears as Debussy was to late romantic ears.

I'm not sure the word 'impressionist' should be applied to either situation, but on a very basic level I understand and agree with what Teresa is trying to say here. But I think this is really an issue of what the piece does, rather than what the piece is.

Re: Beethoven, Classical vs Romantic
All humans are taxonimist at heart, and the need to pigeonhole Beethoven as being Classical, Romantic, or foot-in-both-camps is a result of this, rather than his intrinsically channelling some primal classical/romantic spirit. Actually, Beethoven was Beethoven, pure and simple (same for Haydn, same for Mozart, same for Schubert). His music emerges very clearly from the tradition of Haydn, and he makes some startling innovations. The belief that one morning Beethoven woke up and invented Romanticism is somewhat fallacious.
The 'classical' period, though, defines a rather narrow period of time, more or less beginning with Haydn and ending with Beethoven. Of no other period (except perhaps the 'Roccoco', which there is far from a unanimous definition, or even name, for) does such a temporally and stylistically narrow definition exist. The Romantic period on the other hand (rather like the Baroque) spans an enormous multiplicity of styles and innovations. To my ears, the music of Schubert is much closer to the music of Haydn than it is to the music of Mahler, and it seems slightly absurd to talk about them as if they were somehow musically equivalent.
Similarly, the music of Bach is light-years away from the music of Monteverdi, the music of Machaut is vastly different to Leonin and Perotin.

I'm sure that all this talk of periods is useful, but certainly not in isolation from a meaningful discussion of the content of the music itself.

[Topaz]

Here's a short essay on the The Music of the Romantic Era.  In relation to the discussion above, it emphasises the point I would make, namely that the Romantic composers - especially the early ones - did not reject the basic building blocks of Classical music.  On the contrary, they consciously emulated the composers they considered to be the great classicists, and retained the basic rules of those musical forms while stretching the limits to which it was "proper" to go in seeking novelty.  I would agree with the author that Beethoven (middle and later period) was surely more a member of the Romantic school than an unreconstructed Classicist, as seems to be suggested by one or two comments above.  Short and simple though it is, I usually find articles such as this to be far more informative, and reliable, than the half-baked crap (and very often, worse) that tends to predominate on Music Forums, mostly by people who have grossly inflated opinions about themselves.

[longears]

Another thoughtful post, Robert!

To pigeonhole is to own, to master, to control, to file and forget, to no longer see the forest or the trees but to replace them with a label.  Our system of education rewards and encourages this conflation of taxonomic information with knowledge and understanding.

The profundity of the second Biblical creation account, from Genesis 2:5 to 4:14, seldom fails to give me goosebumps. 

[Fëanor]

My web host moved me to their new platform yesterday and had to redo my website with new tools.  Here is the redesigned home page: http://www.analoglovers.com/index.html also reworded my two controversial articles / recommended list to not so offend lovers of Chamber Music and core Classical repertoire revealing the alternative possibilities.  "Classical Music for Everyone" http://www.analoglovers.com/id10.html "The Basic Power Orchestral Repertoire or Classical music for folks who don't like traditional Classical music." http://www.analoglovers.com/id11.html

...

Teresa, thank you for the new links.  I have added them to my Favorites. 

I note that what was once call, "New to Classical -- Classical Music for Everyone" is now simply called, "Classical Music For Everynone".  I see this as a welcome but partial redaction on your part.  Viz. no longer explicitly makes comments and recommendations for beginners, but merely for "everyone".

Next time you rework the website, you may go the full distance and rename the it, "Classical Music for People Who Hate and Abhor Classical Music and Won't Make an Effort to Overcome Their Limitation".   

[Ephemerid]

All humans are taxonimist at heart, and the need to pigeonhole Beethoven as being Classical, Romantic, or foot-in-both-camps is a result of this, rather than his intrinsically channelling some primal classical/romantic spirit. Actually, Beethoven was Beethoven, pure and simple (same for Haydn, same for Mozart, same for Schubert). His music emerges very clearly from the tradition of Haydn, and he makes some startling innovations. The belief that one morning Beethoven woke up and invented Romanticism is somewhat fallacious.
The 'classical' period, though, defines a rather narrow period of time, more or less beginning with Haydn and ending with Beethoven. Of no other period (except perhaps the 'Roccoco', which there is far from a unanimous definition, or even name, for) does such a temporally and stylistically narrow definition exist. The Romantic period on the other hand (rather like the Baroque) spans an enormous multiplicity of styles and innovations. To my ears, the music of Schubert is much closer to the music of Haydn than it is to the music of Mahler, and it seems slightly absurd to talk about them as if they were somehow musically equivalent.
Similarly, the music of Bach is light-years away from the music of Monteverdi, the music of Machaut is vastly different to Leonin and Perotin.

I'm sure that all this talk of periods is useful, but certainly not in isolation from a meaningful discussion of the content of the music itself.

That was a damn fine post, Robert! 

[greg]

Next time you rework the website, you may go the full distance and rename the it, "Classical Music for People Who Hate and Abhor Classical Music and Won't Make an Effort to Overcome Their Limitation".   

wow, such a fitting title

[Robert Dahm]

That was a damn fine post, Robert! 

Why thank you! (*gushes*)

I had another thought on this issue of period and compositional language. Teresa mentioned a couple of times the 'overly strict rules of composition' at various points in history. She is far from the only person to have this view on (particularly) the Baroque and Classical eras.
I think most composers just did what seemed natural with the syntax they were familiar with. There are examples of composers intentionally attempting to innovate (Florentine Camerata, Wagner, Schoenberg, etc), but for the most part, I don't think that people 'wrote within restrictive rules'. I think they probably just wrote in the language that came naturally - it probably didn't occur to, say, Haydn, to write in any other way.
To draw a parallel with language and grammar, T.S. Eliot writes:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

While we often think of Eliot as a grand innovator, he was simply expressing himself in the way that seemed natural, in the language he had available to him. It simply would not have occurred to him to express himself like THIS.

[Ephemerid]

I think most composers just did what seemed natural with the syntax they were familiar with. There are examples of composers intentionally attempting to innovate (Florentine Camerata, Wagner, Schoenberg, etc), but for the most part, I don't think that people 'wrote within restrictive rules'. I think they probably just wrote in the language that came naturally - it probably didn't occur to, say, Haydn, to write in any other way.

Yeah, this is the sort of thing Copland makes mention of at the beginning of his chapter on musical structure (chapter 9) in What to Listen For in Music.  And the "rules" actually were merely classified by theorists AFTER the fact.

To draw a parallel with language and grammar, T.S. Eliot writes:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

That always reminds me of one other instance of this in Eliot: "Let us go then, you and I..."

"April is the most cruel month" or "Let us go then, you and me" just isn't so gripping!   

[greg]

It simply would not have occurred to him to express himself like THIS.

wow, no comment on that one.....

[eyeresist]

Then Wagner was wrong about this (as about most things).  Sibelius's great symphonies, the acme of absolute music IN MY OPINION, came many years after the big-headed runt was dead and gone.

Gee, for absolute music his symphonies sure are evocative! 
(One thing Wagner was right about IMHO was that the conductor should find the melody in every bar and make it sing.)


Re Classifying Beethoven, Robert's post was definitive, which won't stop anyone from posting! We can agree, I hope, that Beethoven represents a tipping-point between two eras. In terms of strongly individual expression I find him Romantic, certainly more than Schumann, for instance.

[Don]

We can agree, I hope, that Beethoven represents a tipping-point between two eras. In terms of strongly individual expression I find him Romantic, certainly more than Schumann, for instance.

Certainly you jest.

[(poco) Sforzando]

Re Classifying Beethoven, Robert's post was definitive...

Well no, I don't regard Robert's post as being definitive in the slightest, regarding Beethoven or anybody else. What Robert has said appeals strongly to our post-Romantic notions of individuality. And of course there are individual variations in the musical personalities of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and any number of other lesser composers one could mention. But to associate these composers with a style called "classicism" is not necessarily to pigeonhole them, so long as both the common features of the language as well as their individual features of style are recognized.

As far as Beethoven goes, the article recommended above by Topaz, by one Catherine Schmidt-Jones, states the following concerning the composer:

Ludwig van Beethoven, possibly the most famous composer of all, is harder to place. His early works are from the Classical period and are clearly Classical in style. But his later music, including the majority of his most famous music, is just as clearly Romantic.

I love all this "clearly" stuff when nothing about it is clear at all. Mr. Topaz complains that some statements on this web-site are half-baked, but with Schmidt-Jones, the oven hasn't even been preheated. It seems to me that our own Robert is closer to the mark when he writes, "The belief that one morning Beethoven woke up and invented Romanticism is somewhat fallacious." And I would largely agree with Lethe that "Beethoven is classical through and through. He was also enormously innovative, bending and playing with forms, but firmly rooted in classicism..."

This is the position that Charles Rosen takes as well in "The Classical Style," when he argues that Beethoven is one of the three primary exponents of this style and remained so throughout his career. And no one who's read Rosen can accuse him of "talking about periods ... in isolation from a meaningful discussion of the content of the music itself." Part of what Rosen does, and does so well, is to try to define the elements of classical style, and to show how they persist throughout Beethoven's career despite his often startling innovations. For example, Rosen points to how in Beethoven's late music he preserves the convention of the cadential trill, expanding it considerably in the slow movements of sonatas like opp. 109 and 111. Or how he preserves the anchoring use of the subdominant key in his recapitulations, a tendency that is often missing in composers like Schubert or Chopin. Beethoven also made little use of genres that were to become central to Romanticism - such as the song cycle and the instrumental character piece, though he produced occasional examples like An die ferne Geliebte and the piano Bagatelles.

No one can possibly deny that there were composers in the so-called Romantic period who remained essentially classical - Mendelssohn and Brahms perhaps most obviously. And how to characterize Beethoven has been a source of controversy for generations. To the early 19th-century, as expressed by writers like E.T.A. Hoffmann and Victor Hugo, as well as composers like Wagner and Berlioz, Beethoven symbolized Romanticism, however that murky term might be understood. Undoubtedly Beethoven's extremely forceful, Michelangelesque personality - both as composer and otherwise - had much to do with it, and certainly the image of the tragic, isolated, misunderstood deaf composer (very different from the modest craftsman Haydn understood himself to be) did much to shape the century's image of how a composer is to take his place in the world. (Just think of how the image shaped the personalities of composers as various as Berlioz, Wagner, Bruckner, Schoenberg, Pettersson, and more.) Even in 1933 a fellow named Robert Haven Schauffler produced a book called "Beethoven: The Man Who Freed Music," ignoring the fact that the so-called rules of form Beethoven was breaking were not codified until after his death.

On the other hand, starting in the later 19th century and culminating decisively with Rosen's work, the pendulum began shifting back towards a recognition that Beethoven's work remained firmly grounded in classical models. I don't want to say "rigid forms," because there was an extraordinary variety of approaches to models like sonata-allegro, variations, rondo, within Beethoven's work. But to see Beethoven as essentially classical is still a plausible argument, even if not ultimately definitive. A useful article by Maynard Solomon, "Beethoven: Beyond Classicism," which is included in the book "The Beethoven Quartet Companion" edited by Winter and Martin, shows some of the limitations of the classicist position - particularly the fact that Beethoven's work was often seen by his contemporaries as bizarre, grotesque, and extreme. Ripe for the madhouse, said Weber. And so in this respect some of the attributes often associated with classicism - balance, proportion, ironic detachment - may well be superseded in some (though hardly all) of Beethoven.

So what I'm saying is: though I'm not confident seeing Beethoven exclusively as a example of classicism or Romanticism, I'm not confident either that these terms are useless, or that "Beethoven was Beethoven, pure and simple," as if there were no common elements of style by which he can be related to his contemporaries.

[eyeresist]

What Robert has said appeals strongly to our post-Romantic notions of individuality. And of course there are individual variations in the musical personalities of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and any number of other lesser composers one could mention.

Beethoven was the first of the classical composers to consistently say "This is me, world - Raaaarggh!" through his music (i.e. the conscious expression of his individual personality), which for me at least is the definitive Romantic trait.

On the other hand, starting in the later 19th century and culminating decisively with Rosen's work, the pendulum began shifting back towards a recognition that Beethoven's work remained firmly grounded in classical models.

There's no denying that.

[longears]

Gee, for absolute music his symphonies sure are evocative! 

Gee, for a smartass you sure are ____.