# Pieces You'd like to Understand (or know more about)



## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

I would like to say that I have really enjoyed the threads in which a piece of music is analyzed from a variety of perspectives. There was one thread in particular that I thought was an excellent example of this, but I need help in finding it again.

One of the forum's music composition students had heard a piece of music by Rachmaninoff for which a score did not exist. He posted what notes he thought he was hearing. Several senior theory/composition/analysis members joined in to get it all straight. Then another member joined in and talked about what he thought the composer was trying to convey emotionally to the listeners by choosing those notes, keys, transitions, etc..

I really enjoyed that thread and would love to read more of them.

Does anyone else remember that thread? I'm certain EdwardBast was a contributor because he talked about Reimian analysis... Is anyone interested in starting and posting in such a thread?


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

^^Maybe members could post a piece or a few pieces of music that they would really like to understand better or one composer's music in general. One composer I discovered via one of Bulldog's games is Toru Takemtisu. People in the game really loved his music and I especially loved the topic of one of his pieces of music.

It was commissioned by Green Peace (?) and one of the component pieces was entitled _Moby Dick. _Unfortunately I just didn't like the piece of music and I really wanted to like it. I haven't given up hope on the thing I just might need someone to point out what Takemitsu was doing in the music to convey his love of whales.

This is just one example.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

For modern music in general, I refer you to this blog 'o mine:

This idea came from one of my theory books. If anyone insists on an exact source, I'll go dig out the book.

https://www.talkclassical.com/blogs/millionrainbows/1521-new-conceptions-musical-time.html

In the Takemitsu, it sounds like he was influenced by Debussy. An overall "impressionistic" atmosphere, and use of the whole-tone scale and octatonic scale, which help "suspend" the tonality, making it "float around." Debussy was influenced by oriental things, so Takemitsu is relating to this.


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

millionrainbows said:


> For modern music in general, I refer you to this blog 'o mine:
> 
> This idea came from one of my theory books. If anyone insists on an exact source, I'll go dig out the book.
> 
> ...


I responded to your blog entry. Extremely interesting and helpful.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

millionrainbows said:


> For modern music in general, I refer you to this blog 'o mine:
> 
> This idea came from one of my theory books. If anyone insists on an exact source, I'll go dig out the book.
> 
> https://www.talkclassical.com/blogs/millionrainbows/1521-new-conceptions-musical-time.html


Those terms are used by Jonathan Kramer in _The Time of Music_, although I'm not sure which if any originated there.



JosefinaHW said:


> Does anyone else remember that thread? I'm certain EdwardBast was a contributor because he talked about Reimian analysis... Is anyone interested in starting and posting in such a thread?


I remember the thread. I think the focus was a piece by Prokofiev, and it definitely got into neo-Riemannian theory


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

EdwardBast said:


> Those terms are used by Jonathan Kramer in _The Time of Music_, although I'm not sure which if any originated there.
> 
> Even if you haven't read the book have you used any of these types of time besides linear to analyze music?


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

I think some good examples of this sense of "moment time" are in Messiaen's music. It helps to see the music as a "series of events" or "declamations" rather than a developing narrative in the classical sense.






Can you dig it? Messiaen was dealing with "cosmic" subjects, as he was a mystic Catholic. This peice deals with the dead rising up from their graves.

You know, God is infinite, and time stands still, becomes meaningless in the grand scheme. I'm not a catholic, but the "scary-sounding" aspect of some of his music is not really meant to scare, but to invoke a sense of awe. It's a very unique way of expressing things through music.

There is lighter fare, like his "Catalogue of Birds" where he tries to represent birds on the piano.

Boulez and other modernists were influenced by his "exotic" scales and use of percussion and gongs. He had a lot of non-Western influences, like Balinese gamelon music, which also appealed to Boulez.

John Cage is another example of "time standing still" and "things going nowhere."


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## Larkenfield (Jun 5, 2017)

I thought the Messiaen was brilliant... like a great spiritual force or God moving across the land... something for people but not about people... The spirit behind it seemed bigger than that and rather awesome in its majesty, mystery and wonder... I did not find its dissonances scary or frightening, and he put them to such good use... such purposeful use. How refreshing! Its basic nature is constructive and positive as he seems to be representing a sacred force that is within the universe. Music has a language and I felt that he knew exactly what he wanted to say and said it the best that he knew how. In a work of this powerful and on a grand scale, music is always conveying something more than sound, at least for me, and has an actual language that can communicate wonders. And he wasn’t afraid of relative or occasional silence... and of course, there’s the awesome silence at the end... Here’s a work worth celebrating because it’s dealing with some of the invisible forces of life in a meaningful way and giving voice to them. Nor IMO does it have the usual sense of human stress, anxiety and neurosis that so many 20th century works have to their detriment. Bravo.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

JosefinaHW said:


> Even if you haven't read the book have you used any of these types of time besides linear to analyze music?


I read a pre-publication version of _The Time of Music_ when I took Kramer's "Time Seminar," as it was called, at the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, and I believe I might have been cited in the acknowledgements of the published version (under my street name), along with other attendees who critiqued Kramer's ideas and made suggestions. Jonathan invited vigorous debate in the seminar, especially criticism of his own thinking.

I haven't used his time concepts in analysis, but I did develop one of my own that wasn't on Jonathan's radar for my final paper. I claimed that one of the defining features of Romantic music was a new conception of subjective time. The argument was that whereas Classical Era music, to the extent it embodies human experience, does so more or less in objective clock time, Romantic Era music was built on the idea that the internal time of the musical persona (the experiencing subject whose experience the music is assumed to be) was subjective and unrelated to objective time.


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## philoctetes (Jun 15, 2017)

Another thesis - space and time are wired together in our heads, simply in the Newtonian sense (no relativity required kids!). Hence the elastic nature of time in modern music will create a more complete sense of space in our heads, arousing imagery associated with spatial dimensions.


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## eugeneonagain (May 14, 2017)

EdwardBast said:


> The argument was that whereas Classical Era music, to the extent it embodies human experience, does so more or less in objective clock time, Romantic Era music was built on the idea that the internal time of the musical persona (the experiencing subject whose experience the music is assumed to be) was subjective and unrelated to objective time.


Is this an explanation for the ever-expanding musical creations of late romanticism? Once the idea of chronological time is abandoned you get five-hour music dramas and Mahler symphonies where the concept of 'running time' is irrelevant. The problem being they still have to be experienced in chronological time, unless one is idle enough not to be harried by time constraints.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

eugeneonagain said:


> Is this an explanation for the ever-expanding musical creations of late romanticism? Once the idea of chronological time is abandoned you get five-hour music dramas and Mahler symphonies where the concept of 'running time' is irrelevant. The problem being they still have to be experienced in chronological time, unless one is idle enough not to be harried by time constraints.


I hadn't thought about that issue. I was focused on program music and on the relation of expression and structure in instrumental music. Pre-Romantic program music tends to employ lots of onomatopoeia, portraying battles, storms, bird calls, cannons, and the like. Classical chamber music often contains simulations of human dialogue and conversation. All of this simulation of human speech and natural sound seems to take place in objective clock time, which is understandable given that the reigning paradigm under which it was composed was imitative aesthetics. Art was valued according to how well it imitated important aspects of human experience and form. Drama, sculpture and painting were fine arts at the top of the pantheon because they readily embodied human action and form, and music was at the bottom because it was capable only of trivial onomatopoeic effects (bird calls, gunshots, storms, etc.).

When the shift to Romantic expressive aesthetics happened (middle Beethoven and later?) music suddenly vaulted to the top of the pantheon because it was thought to be capable of portraying the central affect and drama of internal life in a more direct way than any of the other arts. For this to work, however, it was essential that the content of music be freed from the tyranny of clock time. Why? Because the essential currents and dramas of emotional life aren't manifest in little five minute spurts during which wildly contrasting emotions come and go. If music like the first movements of Beethoven's Appassionata and Tchaikovsky's Fourth were understood as real time dramas of mental life, of ten to twenty minute slices of human affective/psychological experience, the personas of these works (the experiencing subjects whose experience the music is) could only be psychotics. What works like this do, I contend, is play off the default conditions of their persona's experience in something like the manner of allegorical dramas, but in these cases, allegorical dramas of mental life. For example, Tchaikvosky's interpretation of his Fourth Symphony/i, which one finds in every program note ever written about the work, is (paraphrasing) that life is a continual alternation of fleeting dreams of happiness (2nd theme group) and grim reality and lamentation (1st theme) caused by the intercession of Fate (the opening motto). The expressive structure of the first movement is the opening of a wider and wider gulf between the real and the ideal. It isn't eighteen minutes of emotional life, it is, as described by Tchaikovsky, a sort of allegorical drama capturing a conflict among the default conditions of his inner life over an indefinitely longer period. This, I suspect, is why we get all that talk, like ETA Hoffman's, about Beethoven capturing the infinite and ineffable. His sonata structures embodied indefinitely long spans of expressive experience in a few minutes.

Anyway, it's a complicated argument not easily summarized in a couple of paragraphs.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

EdwardBast said:


> I hadn't thought about that issue. I was focused on program music and on the relation of expression and structure in instrumental music. Pre-Romantic program music tends to employ lots of onomatopoeia, portraying battles, storms, bird calls, cannons, and the like. Classical chamber music often contains simulations of human dialogue and conversation. All of this simulation of human speech and natural sound seems to take place in objective clock time, which is understandable given that the reigning paradigm under which it was composed was imitative aesthetics. Art was valued according to how well it imitated important aspects of human experience and form. Drama, sculpture and painting were fine arts at the top of the pantheon because they readily embodied human action and form, and music was at the bottom because it was capable only of trivial onomatopoeic effects (bird calls, gunshots, storms, etc.).
> 
> When the shift to Romantic expressive aesthetics happened (middle Beethoven and later?) music suddenly vaulted to the top of the pantheon because it was thought to be capable of portraying the central affect and drama of internal life in a more direct way than any of the other arts. For this to work, however, it was essential that the content of music be freed from the tyranny of clock time. Why? Because the essential currents and dramas of emotional life aren't manifest in little five minute spurts during which wildly contrasting emotions come and go. If music like the first movements of Beethoven's Appassionata and Tchaikovsky's Fourth were understood as real time dramas of mental life, of ten to twenty minute slices of human affective/psychological experience, the personas of these works (the experiencing subjects whose experience the music is) could only be psychotics. What works like this do, I contend, is play off the default conditions of their persona's experience in something like the manner of allegorical dramas, but in these cases, allegorical dramas of mental life. For example, Tchaikvosky's interpretation of his Fourth Symphony/i, which one finds in every program note ever written about the work, is (paraphrasing) that life is a continual alternation of fleeting dreams of happiness (2nd theme group) and grim reality and lamentation (1st theme) caused by the intercession of Fate (the opening motto). The expressive structure of the first movement is the opening of a wider and wider gulf between the real and the ideal. It isn't eighteen minutes of emotional life, it is, as described by Tchaikovsky, a sort of allegorical drama capturing a conflict among the default conditions of his inner life over an indefinitely longer period. This, I suspect, is why we get all that talk, like ETA Hoffman's, about Beethoven capturing the infinite and ineffable. His sonata structures embodied indefinitely long spans of expressive experience in a few minutes.
> 
> Anyway, it's a complicated argument not easily summarized in a couple of paragraphs.


I think this is a brilliant post. Totally agree. :tiphat:


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

eugeneonagain said:


> Is this an explanation for the ever-expanding musical creations of late romanticism? Once the idea of chronological time is abandoned you get five-hour music dramas and Mahler symphonies where the concept of 'running time' is irrelevant. The problem being they still have to be experienced in chronological time, unless one is idle enough not to be harried by time constraints.


I'd like to take a somewhat different approach to the matter of how musical time relates to "real life" time, an approach which I think might complement EdwardBast's, and would respond to your opening question directly. I'll draw from my experience of music I know particularly well.

Assuming that the "five-hour music dramas" you mention refer to Wagner, I would say that Wagner's long operas and Mahler's long symphonies are long for similar reasons, and that this can be traced in large part to the influence of Wagner on Mahler with particular respect to the latter's expansion of the symphony's scale and the incorporation of programmatic intent (whether explicit or not). Opera and symphony, however, are very different genres, and the forms they employ are fundamentally different, not least with respect to the time dimensions within which their events unfold. We need to consider this in order to see the problem Mahler faced, and largely solved, in applying "Wagnerian" ideas to a "Beethovenian" form.

In drama, events are taking place onstage in some semblance of real time; people tend to be speaking words and performing actions at a pace more or less resembling real life. When drama is set to music, the music can accompany and affect the dramatic action in various ways, ways which may alter, and especially expand, real-life time for purposes of expression. Wagner was particularly interested in simulating naturalistic action onstage while still allowing maximum opportunity for music to express the emotional life of his characters and situations, and in meeting this challenge he evolved a style of music in which the pace of musical exposition - the rate at which musical ideas are introduced and developed - was typically slower, often much slower, than that of music in the Classical tradition. (I'm speaking here of Wagner's peculiar kind of "through-composed" opera, in which music accompanies the stage action continuously. Earlier opera composers had found other solutions to the problems of wedding music to stage action, solutions that typically involved the alternation of musical numbers, in which time was suspended for the elaboration of a particular emotion, and recitative, in which natural speech and action could be approximated with minimal musical development).

Wagner's mature musical technique involved not merely continuous music, but music in which thematic material was subjected to continuous, complex development in a manner often - loosely and inaccurately - called "symphonic." But in actual symphonic writing as practiced up to that time, the exposition and development of musical ideas, unconstrained by the time scale of the alien art of drama, is relatively rapid: the music can "narrate" its "story" as quickly as its themes and developments can be articulated, and so the musical events that constitute the "drama" of a typical sonata-allegro movement fly by at pace much faster than the simulation of real-life events on the opera stage would permit. This is as true of a symphonic movement of Beethoven or Brahms as it is of an equivalent movement by Haydn, despite the later symphonies' larger dimensions. But late Romantic composers, captivated by the prolongation of melody, the long-sustained harmonically-generated tension, and the varied expressive gestures with which Wagner was able to fill long spans of time and sustain the arc of emotion in pursuit of a simulation of real-life experience, were tempted to turn their instrumental movements into what amounted to virtual "music dramas" without a stage.

Applying a Wagnerian sense of musical time to the symphony, though, isn't a simple matter; it requires a rethinking of symphonic form, and for composers under Wagner's spell the challenge was often not met with total success. End-of-century symphonic music is littered with prolix, bombastic symphonies and "symphonic poems" which consist largely of dramatic and picturesque events that seem to hint at some story the music's "effects without causes" (Wagner's perspicacious term) are trying to tell, which may have no obvious relationship to one another, and which tax our patience by lingering on material which in traditional symphonic writing would either be sharply abbreviated for the sake of "getting on with it" or be discarded as altogether unsuited to the form. Wagner himself was aware of the different requirements of the symphony and the music drama, and gave some thought to conceiving a new sort of symphony based on thematic metamorphosis, but he died before he could experiment with the idea.

Mahler obviously understood the difficulty of hybridizing "symphonic time" with "dramatic time," and solved it with much, though not uniform, success, largely through his ability to fill his expanded forms with music of inspired variety, arresting color, and sheer intensity of expression. He, better than most, managed to reconcile the structural armatures and compressed narrative of the symphonic tradition of Beethoven with the Wagnerian quest for a representation of lived subjective experience, experience which could expand into dimensions of feeling seemingly unconstrained by abstractly conceived formal limits and the time scales those limits had traditionally imposed. Wagner had replicated, as no one ever had, the real-life sense of subjective experience liberated from the tick-tock of chronological time, and he did it by slowing the rate of musical exposition, allowing him the time to represent the shapes of feeling in near-graphic detail and with visceral, time-obliterating impact. Mahler, in his most successful works, was able to find room for a near-Wagnerian expansion of expressive space within structures inherited from the symphonic tradition. As for precisely how he did it, I'll have to leave that demonstration to someone with his musical feet planted more firmly on the ground than mine.


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## eugeneonagain (May 14, 2017)

Excellent, a real tour-de-force. That take on the suspension (or even disregard) of chronological time goes in the direction of enormous structures hoping to capture an enormous slice of mental life; almost _everything. _I'd argue that this also lingers on into impressionist music. Debussy's sound and aesthetic may be somewhat different, but his aim is still to capture a 'timeless' experience (of the natural world).

A modernist (postmodernist) aesthetic seems to me to give us small fragments of experience. ****** of light through small fissures, rather than the sum total of timeless experience. Less importance placed on grand schemes of interrelated ideas, but instead everything pared-down and sometimes even offered without any preconceived narrative at all.


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## Guest (May 9, 2019)

I wonder how many typical listeners of classical music are aware of the features of Romantic music that have been discussed above. I'm not suggesting that any of it may be incorrect, just that it seems to raise matters that are highly academic and speculative, and probably way over the heads of most people. 

It's also the case that there were somewhat differing viewpoints among the composers of the mid-late 19th Century as to what was the best direction for music to take, with the famous 'War of the Romantics' arguing it out bitterly as between programmatic versus absolute music. 

The Brahmsian style of Romanticism (absolute music) doesn't seem to fit well with some of the alleged features suggested above concerning the way time was conceived and portrayed in music. Nor does the music of the other great Romantics of the time, Dvorak and Tchaikovsky, or any of the later Russian composers. The French were off doing their own thing altogether with impressionism and early minimalism. I don't think that the Brits or Americans went down the same route as Wagner and Mahler. Sibelius wrote many tone poems but they're all quite short works which I find it difficult to associate with anything similarly produced by Wagner or Mahler.

I think therefore that what has been discussed above in some posts is only part of the story about the evolution of Romanticism, and its treatment of time. It wasn't long in the early part of the 20th C that Romanticism generally began to lose out in favour of neo-classical and other styles, which brought about a welcome move further away from the excesses of Romanticism, in terms of length as well as substance, as some would see it.


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## philoctetes (Jun 15, 2017)

I often wonder about the relationship between literature and music. As if a symphony or opera is a musical novel. And the artists who create both find inspiration in each other. I know of few real examples but they must be out there.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

philoctetes said:


> I often wonder about the relationship between literature and music. As if a symphony or opera is a musical novel. And the artists who create both find inspiration in each other. I know of few real examples but they must be out there.


I'll go with "emotional states" rather than any form of literature analogy.


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## philoctetes (Jun 15, 2017)

millionrainbows said:


> I'll go with "emotional states" rather than any form of literature analogy.


OK, but wouldn't that be a common theme of the Romantic period? Are not big novels of the time considered "romantic" as well? People were developing the art of emotional self-expression on many fronts, not just music and lit, but visual art as well. Visual art often gets credit for musical inspiration. we have no trouble linking the visual with the musical in the Impressionist period, so why not the Romantic, and why not with literature.

I like to say "why not?" too much perhaps.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

philoctetes said:


> OK, but wouldn't that be a common theme of the Romantic period? Are not big novels of the time considered "romantic" as well? People were developing the art of emotional self-expression on many fronts, not just music and lit, but visual art as well. Visual art often gets credit for musical inspiration. we have no trouble linking the visual with the musical in the Impressionist period, so why not the Romantic, and why not with literature.





philoctetes said:


> I like to say "why not?" too much perhaps.




Yes, I can see how the Romantic idea manifest in literature; I just don't think it holds together if music is used as the literal vehicle for 'literary ideas,' although many works are titled as such, and may try to depict such scenes. Maybe the following will explain further.



Partita said:


> I wonder how many typical listeners of classical music are aware of the features of Romantic music that have been discussed above. I'm not suggesting that any of it may be incorrect, just that it seems to raise matters that are highly academic and speculative, and probably way over the heads of most people.


It might sound academic, but I think that the expression of emotional states, even in compressed form, can easily be related to by anyone, since it consists as "gestures" of meaning.

Instrumental music is not, literally, about any particular "narrative." This doesn't mean it has no other meaning, such as evoking strong "emotional states," as in Schoenberg's Transfigured Night, Five Pieces and Mahler's symphonies.

Instrumental music, "musical sound", when divorced from "literal action" and drama, lost its connection to explicit meaning, and was revealed for what it is: a non-representational medium, the abstract evocation of "inner" states of being, which, coincidentally, is exactly what "abstract art" does: it reveals the artist's, and by empathy, the viewer's inner emotional state of being.

Music gradually divorced itself from drama over several centuries. Look at the rise of instrumental forms: the symphony, the concerto, tone poems, etc.

In instrumental Romanticism, although it was music divorced from drama, still had residual traces of drama, expressed as "dramatic gestures." 

This "splitting" of drama from music opened-up a new can of worms, giving us the whole range of the non-specific "feelings" evoked by music, which are by their very "non-narrative nature" fleeting, transitory, and ephemeral, unclear, evocative, vague, and indefinable (meaning non-narrative).

Still, this is not a requirement for music to be expressive of emotion or states of being. To take matters even further into the fog, when we get into more modern music, I think "emotion" as a descriptive term begins to fail us. For example, in Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra, the "emotional gestures" expressed are so complex that we begin to experience them as "states of being," like anxiety, foreboding, fear, tension, awe, etc., creating in our minds, empathetically, a reflection of our own, and the artist's, "inner state of being."

Concerning modernism, it's true that in many instances the "evoking" of dramatic emotion, and dramatic gesture is absent (but certainly not always). Stockhausen evokes, for me, a sort of "Platonic classicism" in his Klavierstücke; with modernism, we must put aside our need for drama and overt emotion, and listen on the level of "pure abstraction," an enjoyment of color, sound, and timbre itself. In this sense, modern music is not "modern" at all; music has always been "abstract expressionism" when divorced from drama and opera. 

So, in a sense, this is an "internal narrative" we share with the composer, but indefinable in literal narrative terms, because these are transitory, fleeting states by nature; simply "gestures of meanings."

Our general knowledge, and the historical context of a work can provide a source of "general narrative content" which can add greatly to the meaning of a piece, if only in our own minds. This always happens for me with Shostakovich (images of Soviet Russia) and with Webern's Op. 6 (Six Pieces for Orchestra), which always evokes in me grey images of Europe immediately preceding the World Wars. With Mahler, the Sixth Symphony snare-drum always evokes images of some malevolent military presence marching through our once-peaceful existence.

I think in many cases, the composer actually is composing with a specific narrative in mind, from his own emotionally-charged experience of events in his life, and then leaving it up to us to interpret it as we will; but we will never know for sure. That's the beauty of poetry; it is open-ended in meaning. 

That's a useful distinction, I think; instrumental non-narrative music (containing "dramatic gesture") is more like poetry, whereas the explicit meaning and narrative of opera is like a story or novel.

Perhaps that's the reason opera seems to lend itself to an audience more easily; the "poetry" of instrumental music is an "inner" experience, more solitary in nature, like reading a book of poems by yourself. Maybe sitting there in the concert hall listening to instrumental music gave audiences too much idle time to think.


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## philoctetes (Jun 15, 2017)

If you were to analyze literature at the same level, that of the artist or critic and not the reader, and how a writer creates their unique language, verbal effects, scene-setting, dialog... and how it can cross from intentful purpose to subjective lensing... that's what i'm talking about but I'm too lazy and stupid to elaborate.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Partita said:


> I wonder how many typical listeners of classical music are aware of the features of Romantic music that have been discussed above. I'm not suggesting that any of it may be incorrect, just that it seems to raise matters that are highly academic and speculative, and probably way over the heads of most people.


Musical analysis of any kind is over the heads of most music listeners. The fundamental appeal of music is that it addresses our feelings directly. But I like to imagine that thinking about it isn't just the eccentric passion of a handful of pinheads like me.



> It's also the case that there were somewhat differing viewpoints among the composers of the mid-late 19th Century as to what was the best direction for music to take, with the famous 'War of the Romantics' arguing it out bitterly as between programmatic versus absolute music.


Definitely. But I think the aesthetic dispute we also call the "Brahms-Wagner" conflict concerned not merely the presence or absence of programmatic content itself but the effect new expressive goals had on musical form. Wagner didn't initiate that process of change; he merely carried it to an extreme by finding the ultimate "excuse" for it in the alliance of music and drama.



> The Brahmsian style of Romanticism (absolute music) doesn't seem to fit well with some of the alleged features suggested above concerning the way time was conceived and portrayed in music. Nor does the music of the other great Romantics of the time, Dvorak and Tchaikovsky, or any of the later Russian composers.


Brahms was the unofficial leader and figurehead of the "resistance," and Brahmsiam Classicism was a real and major thing, with a host of little Brahmses writing carefully crafted symphonies and chamber works well into the 20th century, islands of academic rectitude amid the Romantic tide sweeping over the musical world. Composers negotiated the situation in varied ways. Dvorak was not as conservative as you seem to be suggesting - listen to his symphonic poems and _Rusalka_ alongside his symphonies and quartets to hear the influence of both Brahms and Wagner. You'll find a similar amalgamation among the Russians.



> The French were off doing their own thing altogether with impressionism and early minimalism.


We need to keep our chronology straight. Impressionism didn't really get under way until the 20th century; _L'Apres-midi d'un faune_ dates from 1894. Moreover, the differences between Gallic and Teutonic sensibilities, and whole-tone scales and hyperchromaticism, shouldn't fool us: Debussy is saturated with Wagner's influence, and there would be no _Pelleas et Melisande _without _Tristan_ and _Parsifal._

Wagner may actually have been more influential in France than anywhere else non-Germanic: try Franck, Massenet, D'Indy, Chausson, Dukas, Lekeu and Schmitt, among others.



> I don't think that the Brits or Americans went down the same route as Wagner and Mahler. Sibelius wrote many tone poems but they're all quite short works which I find it difficult to associate with anything similarly produced by Wagner or Mahler.


Late Romantic American music (Paine, MacDowell, Chadwick, Foote et al.) shows a predictable blend of Brahmsian and Wagnerian ancestry. Sibelius evolved a unique sort of Romantic neo-classicism in his symphonies, but his programmatic tone poems are quite variable structurally, and his first major creative triumph, _Kullervo,_ is a set of dramatic musical narratives that's anything but neo-classical. Again, most of his well-known works were composed near or after the turn of the 20th century.



> I think therefore that what has been discussed above in some posts is only part of the story about the evolution of Romanticism, and its treatment of time. It wasn't long in the early part of the 20th C that Romanticism generally began to lose out in favour of neo-classical and other styles, which brought about a welcome move further away from the excesses of Romanticism, in terms of length as well as substance, as some would see it.


All true. But don't minimize the Romantic revolution, and in particular Wagner's challenge to composers to think about the nature of their work in basic ways that they had probably never had to do before, at least since the early Baroque.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Partita said:


> I wonder how many typical listeners of classical music are aware of the features of Romantic music that have been discussed above. I'm not suggesting that any of it may be incorrect, just that it seems to raise matters that are highly academic and speculative, and probably way over the heads of most people.


In my experience, the only thing that puts discussion of issues in music and musical aesthetics out of reach of "most people" is technical jargon and analysis requiring theoretical training and fluent note-reading literacy. Posts like mine and Woodduck's above make no such demands, requiring only general knowledge most enthusiasts and listeners possess.

Awareness is a different matter. Audiences and critics were immediately aware that there was something very different about what Beethoven was doing in his middle period. Within days of the premiere of Beethoven's Fifth, critics like E. T. A. Hoffmann were already on to the fact that it had something to do with a new conception of musical time. They just had trouble nailing down and explaining exactly what was different. This might explain their resort to quasi-mystical language about it embodying the infinite.



Partita said:


> It's also the case that there were somewhat differing viewpoints among the composers of the mid-late 19th Century as to what was the best direction for music to take, with the famous 'War of the Romantics' arguing it out bitterly as between programmatic versus absolute music.


Yes, but Romantic music on both sides, absolute and program music, was equally affected by the new conception of subjective time. Eduard Hanslick, the intellectual leader of the absolutists, discussed this issue in his manifesto, _On the Musically Beautiful_ (_Vom Musikalisch Schönen_). He observed that expression is much more highly concentrated in absolute music than in music for the stage. That is to say, translating the normal levels of, and shifts in, the affective content of absolute music would require extreme dilution in order to slow it to the demands of operatic writing. Moreover, Romantic composers wrote programmatic works that unfold in clock time and ones in expanded subjective time about equally. In Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, for example, the final four movements unfold more or less in objective clock time, whereas the first movement purports to portray dreams and reveries in a subjective time unrelated to the outside world.



Partita said:


> *The Brahmsian style of Romanticism (absolute music) doesn't seem to fit well with some of the alleged features suggested above concerning the way time was conceived and portrayed in music. Nor does the music of the other great Romantics of the time, Dvorak and Tchaikovsky, or any of the later Russian composers.* The French were off doing their own thing altogether with impressionism and early minimalism. I don't think that the Brits or Americans went down the same route as Wagner and Mahler. Sibelius wrote many tone poems but they're all quite short works which I find it difficult to associate with anything similarly produced by Wagner or Mahler.


This is simply incorrect. Listen to how the finale of Brahms's Third Symphony and Franck's Symphony contain tender, disembodied reminiscences of the principal ideas of their first movements just before the end. It feels nostalgic in both cases, like one is looking back years into the past rather than remembering something that happened thirty minutes ago. Expanded subjective time was standard in absolute music as much as it was in program music.

As for Tchaikovsky, I've already demonstrated in his own words that he believed a single movement could capture the essential emotional conflicts of a lifetime. This is equally true of the major Russian composers who followed.



Partita said:


> I think therefore that what has been discussed above in some posts is only part of the story about the evolution of Romanticism, and its treatment of time. It wasn't long in the early part of the 20th C that Romanticism generally began to lose out in favour of neo-classical and other styles, which brought about a welcome move further away from the excesses of Romanticism, in terms of length as well as substance, as some would see it.


Yes, neoclassicism was a counteraction. But in works like Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra, much of the work of Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and even in Schnittke(!) the monumental expansion of subjective time that ruled Romantic music persisted well into our lifetimes.


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## Guest (May 9, 2019)

millionrainbows said:


> I'll go with "emotional states" rather than any form of literature analogy.


It seems highly unlikely that classical music had to wait until the early 19th Century before "emotional states" were incorporated in any works. 

As I noted earlier, this development occurred much earlier. Some of the late Renaissance/early Baroque composers were fitting words and music together in an increasingly dramatic fashion, as seen for example in the development of the Italian madrigal and later the operatic works of of Monteverdi (1567-1643).

Regards the reference to literature from the time of Schubert and later, I didn't just invent this. It's easily checked.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Partita said:


> *It seems highly unlikely that classical music had to wait until the early 19th Century before "emotional states" were incorporated in any works. *
> 
> As I noted earlier, this development occurred much earlier. Some of the late Renaissance/early Baroque composers were fitting words and music together in an increasingly dramatic fashion, as seen for example in the development of the Italian madrigal and later the operatic works of of Monteverdi (1567-1643).
> 
> Regards the reference to literature from the time of Schubert and later, I didn't just invent this. It's easily checked.


What you write is true. Baroque music was informed by a systematic methodology for evoking emotional states, and it persisted in diluted form in High Classical instrumental music too. However, two things (at least) made Romantic musical expression different: it was conceived as personal emotion, rather than the abstract rhetorical variety understood by Baroque composers and theorists, and the Romantics were concerned that music be coherent in the ways it shifted from one affective state to another between and among movements - they were concerned that a work's expressive content have a kind of narrative continuity or logic.


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## Guest (May 9, 2019)

EdwardBast said:


> In my experience, the only thing that puts discussion of issues in music and musical aesthetics out of reach of "most people" is technical jargon and analysis requiring theoretical training and fluent note-reading literacy. Posts like mine and Woodduck's above make no such demands, requiring only general knowledge most enthusiasts and listeners possess.


What I meant was that "most people" would, in my estimation, find this kind of discussion to be both too speculative and abstruse to be of value in helping them to comprehend the key differences between Classical and Romantic music. If you think otherwise, that's fine, but in my experience most people like to think of this issue in more mundane terms like those I referred to previously, like emotion and poetry etc.



EdwardBast said:


> Awareness is a different matter. Audiences and critics were immediately aware that there was something very different about what Beethoven was doing in his middle period. Within days of the premiere of Beethoven's Fifth, critics like E. T. A. Hoffmann were already on to the fact that it had something to do with a new conception of musical time. They just had trouble nailing down and explaining exactly what was different. This might explain their resort to quasi-mystical language about it embodying the infinite.


If these critics that you mention had trouble nailing down the new thing about Beethoven, are you sure you've correctly identified it? The fact that Beethoven began, in his middle period, to write music which had an other-worldly feel to it, like harking back to events over an indefinite period, this could be consistent with other hypotheses, could it not? In my experience of listening to Beethoven I cannot say that I have ever been particularly struck by this supposed changed perception of time to which you allude. The main change that I observed was that he made his music more and more complex, until it became so complex that nobody wanted it.



EdwardBast said:


> Yes, but Romantic music on both sides, absolute and program music, was equally effected by the new conception of subjective time. Eduard Hanslick, the intellectual leader of the absolutists, discussed this issue in his manifesto, _On the Musically Beautiful_ (_Vom Musikalisch Schönen_). He observed that expression is much more highly concentrated in absolute music than in music for the stage. That is to say, translating the normal levels of, and shifts in, the affective content of absolute music would require extreme dilution in order to slow it to the demands of operatic writing. Moreover, Romantic composers wrote programmatic works that unfold in clock time and ones in expanded subjective time about equally. In Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, for example, the final four movements unfold more or less in objective clock time, whereas the first movement purports to portray dreams and reveries in a subjective time unrelated to the outside world.


I'm afraid that I have trouble understanding the above. Romantics mixing up both perceptions of time in the same work? What's all this about? Even it's true that some did so it doesn't necessarily mean that they all did so.



EdwardBast said:


> This is simply incorrect. Listen to how the finale of Brahms's Third Symphony and Franck's Symphony contain tender, disembodied reminiscences of the principal ideas of their first movements just before the end. It feels nostalgic in both cases, like one is looking back years into the past rather than remembering something that happened thirty minutes ago. Expanded subjective time was standard in absolute music as much as it was in program music.


The above sounds very speculative. This may be your perception of what's going on in these works, but are you sure that Brahms and Franck would agree? I'm not clear why you believe that a part-repetition of of the music in the last movement of these symphonies as in the first movement merits the interpretation you have placed on it. There must be examples of similar things happening in symphonies written long before the Romantics appeared on the scene.



EdwardBast said:


> As for Tchaikovsky, I've already demonstrated in his own words that he believed a single movement could capture the essential emotional conflicts of a lifetime. This is equally true of the major Russian composers who followed.


On this I have no further comment to what I said above, as its the same issue.



EdwardBast said:


> Yes, neoclassicism was a counteraction. But in works like Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra, much of the work of Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and even in Schnittke(!) the monumental expansion of subjective time that ruled Romantic music persisted well into our lifetimes.


Isn't this comment somewhat of a self-contradiction? If neo-classicism involved a return to the classical model, how could it also retain a key feature of Romanticism at the same time? Are you possibly referring to the later development of neo-romanticism, or possibly to some of the nationalist offshoots later in the 20th century?


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## Guest (May 9, 2019)

Woodduck said:


> Musical analysis of any kind is over the heads of most music listeners. The fundamental appeal of music is that it addresses our feelings directly. But I like to imagine that thinking about it isn't just the eccentric passion of a handful of pinheads like me.


I certainly agree and suspect that the typical reader will glance at some of these posts and think ... _WTF is all this about?_



Woodduck said:


> Definitely. But I think the aesthetic dispute we also call the "Brahms-Wagner" conflict concerned not merely the presence or absence of programmatic content itself but the effect new expressive goals had on musical form. Wagner didn't initiate that process of change; he merely carried it to an extreme by finding the ultimate "excuse" for it in the alliance of music and drama.


Yes, agreed. It wasn't just about programmatic versus absolute, but the suitability of musical forms as well. On the latter, it was Clara Schumanan who had especially strong views against some of the new forms, which may have kept the pot boiling for so long.



Woodduck said:


> Brahms was the unofficial leader and figurehead of the "resistance," and Brahmsiam Classicism was a real and major thing, with a host of little Brahmses writing carefully crafted symphonies and chamber works well into the 20th century, islands of academic rectitude amid the Romantic tide sweeping over the musical world. Composers negotiated the situation in varied ways. Dvorak was not as conservative as you seem to be suggesting - listen to his symphonic poems and _Rusalka_ alongside his symphonies and quartets to hear the influence of both Brahms and Wagner. You'll find a similar amalgamation among the Russians.


I'm very familiar with Dvorak's music. I rate him very highly, almost on a par with Brahms, and above Tchaikovsky and Mahler. I detect strong influences from Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, all of whom he greatly admired, and would agree that he was a pioneering Romantic, but that he saw himself mainly as an acolyte of Brahms, not Wagner.



Woodduck said:


> We need to keep our chronology straight. Impressionism didn't really get under way until the 20th century; _L'Apres-midi d'un faune_ dates from 1894. Moreover, the differences between Gallic and Teutonic sensibilities, and whole-tone scales and hyperchromaticism, shouldn't fool us: Debussy is saturated with Wagner's influence, and there would be no _Pelleas et Melisande _without _Tristan_ and _Parsifal._


Noted but I think that impressionism in music is normally regarded as starting around 1890.



Woodduck said:


> Wagner may actually have been more influential in France than anywhere else non-Germanic: try Franck, Massenet, D'Indy, Chausson, Dukas, Lekeu and Schmitt, among others.


In respect of increased dissidence, quite possibly, but this feature might have occurred anyway regardless of Wagner.



Woodduck said:


> Late Romantic American music (Paine, MacDowell, Chadwick, Foote et al.) shows a predictable blend of Brahmsian and Wagnerian ancestry. Sibelius evolved a unique sort of Romantic neo-classicism in his symphonies, but his programmatic tone poems are quite variable structurally, and his first major creative triumph, _Kullervo,_ is a set of dramatic musical narratives that's anything but neo-classical. Again, most of his well-known works were composed near or after the turn of the 20th century.


I'm happy to accept this.



Woodduck said:


> All true. But don't minimize the Romantic revolution, and in particular Wagner's challenge to composers to think about the nature of their work in basic ways that they had probably never had to do before, at least since the early Baroque.


I accept this too. I also have a strong admiration for Wagner, both for what he achieved in terms of works, and for his enormous influence on later composers which changed things for the better, despite my equal admiration for Brahms and his legacy.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

> Partita: It seems highly unlikely that classical music had to wait until the early 19th Century before "emotional states" were incorporated in any works.
> 
> As I noted earlier, this development occurred much earlier. Some of the late Renaissance/early Baroque composers were fitting words and music together in an increasingly dramatic fashion, as seen for example in the development of the Italian madrigal and later the operatic works of of Monteverdi (1567-1643).





EdwardBast said:


> What you write is true. Baroque music was informed by a systematic methodology for evoking emotional states, and it persisted in diluted form in High Classical instrumental music too. However, two things (at least) made Romantic musical expression different: it was conceived as personal emotion, rather than the abstract rhetorical variety understood by Baroque composers and theorists, and the Romantics were concerned that music be coherent in the ways it shifted from one affective state to another between and among movements - they were concerned that a work's expressive content have a kind of narrative continuity or logic.


In other words, I read EdwardBast's reply as pertaining to personal emotion as "identity"; identity as a _"narrative of being"_ that is believable, and can be empathized with; not the more detached "humors" and Baroque devices, which seem more mechanical or part of a methodology.


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

There are some good ideas in this thread, and yes, some of it I think is subjective and essentially an attempt to elevate the music one prefers above all other music. E.T.A. Hoffman's descriptions of the 'infinite' and 'ineffable', for me are descriptions that apply better to certain non-Romantic music, because I don't associate dramatic scenarios and human struggle directly with terms like 'infinite' and 'ineffable'. I see these kinds of dramatic scenarios if anything as more earthy and humanistic. To each their own. 

I think most will agree that what music we love does to us is beyond what can be precisely summed up in words, or what can be described in a verbal treatise. So to refer to such a treatise and then suggest that all composers or listeners of a certain time also viewed music in exactly the same way, I just don't think is accurate. When creating music I think composers are often reacting to intuitive stimuli that they themselves do not fully understand. The greatest composers tend to not write a lot in terms of explaining what their music is about, but let their compositions speak for themselves.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Partita said:


> If these critics that you mention had trouble nailing down the new thing about Beethoven, are you sure you've correctly identified it? The fact that Beethoven began, in his middle period, to write music which had an other-worldly feel to it, like harking back to events over an indefinite period, *this could be consistent with other hypotheses, could it not*? In my experience of listening to Beethoven I cannot say that I have ever been particularly struck by this supposed changed perception of time to which you allude. The main change that I observed was that he made his music more and more complex, until it became so complex that nobody wanted it.


People never stopped wanting Beethoven's music. As for other hypotheses: Sure why not! I'm all ears. I'm just suggesting that the one I presented might be worth testing.



Partita said:


> I'm afraid that I have trouble understanding the above. Romantics mixing up both perceptions of time in the same work? What's all this about? Even it's true that some did so it doesn't necessarily mean that they all did so.


It doesn't matter if they all did so. The first point is that the two conceptions of musical time are represented in both program and absolute music of the Romantic Era. Think about Strauss's tone poems. The comic ones, like Til Eulenspiegel and Don Quixote have scenes painting concrete details of human action and natural sounds in real time. The serious ones, like Death and Transfiguration and Also Sprach Zarathustra, are much more abstract in their relation to human content and stand outside of objective clock time. The main point is that the second type of abstract program music and the conception of time underpinning it didn't exist in the Classical Era and before, which supports the possibility that this conception of time was new in and peculiar to Romantic and later music.



Partita said:


> The above sounds very speculative. This may be your perception of what's going on in these works, but are you sure that Brahms and Franck would agree? I'm not clear why you believe that a part-repetition of of the music in the last movement of these symphonies as in the first movement merits the interpretation you have placed on it. There must be examples of similar things happening in symphonies written long before the Romantics appeared on the scene.


No, I don't think there really were those kind of tender backward glances in earlier symphonies (and certainly not in the Classical Era), unless you want to count Berlioz's protagonist on the scaffold thinking of his love the second before his head is severed from his body.  If there are, I want to know about them.

As for the Brahms and Franck, just listen to the passages in context! Both have cloudy accompaniment of the kind used in operatic dream sequences and flashbacks (string tremolo in the Brahms, sustained chords with harp arpeggios in the Franck), both tenderly look back on the past. Nostalgia strikes me as a fit description, especially of the Brahms - like recalling the struggles of youth from a more secure and distant present. Do you have another description of what these passages express that you prefer?



Partita said:


> On this I have no further comment to what I said above, as its the same issue.


The same issue, yes. But in this case Tchaikovsky's description of exactly what he thought the first movement of his Fourth Symphony meant corroborates my theory. He describes the movement as embodying the long-term emotional struggles of his lifetime, not some isolated 18 minute event. No one before the 19thc had this conception of subjective time in music.



Partita said:


> *Isn't this comment somewhat of a self-contradiction?* If neo-classicism involved a return to the classical model, how could it also retain a key feature of Romanticism at the same time? Are you possibly referring to the later development of neo-romanticism, or possibly to some of the nationalist offshoots later in the 20th century?


No, because the works I was referring to by Bartok, Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Schnittke aren't neoclassical.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

tdc said:


> There are some good ideas in this thread, and yes, some of it I think is subjective and essentially an attempt to elevate the music one prefers above all other music. E.T.A. Hoffman's descriptions of the 'infinite' and 'ineffable', for me are descriptions that apply better to certain non-Romantic music, because I don't associate dramatic scenarios and human struggle directly with terms like 'infinite' and 'ineffable'. I see these kinds of dramatic scenarios if anything as more earthy and humanistic. To each their own.


No one is saying this Romantic conception of musical time is better than that underlying music of the Classical Era. I'm just suggesting that this conception might be an important factor in explaining why music was regarded as the highest of the arts by many of the Romantics whereas it wasn't even considered to be a fine art in the Classical Era. Charles Rosen, among others, implied that much instrumental music of the 19thc was in fact structurally weaker and less vital than that composed by Haydn and Mozart, despite the elevation of musical art to the top of the pantheon. It's not that the music was better. It's that the conception of music's capabilities and mission was much more exalted, regardless of how much or little of the actual music lived up to this supposed potential.



tdc said:


> I think most will agree that what music we love does to us is beyond what can be precisely summed up in words, or what can be described in a verbal treatise. So to refer to such a treatise and then suggest that all composers or listeners of a certain time also viewed music in exactly the same way, I just don't think is accurate. *When creating music I think composers are often reacting to intuitive stimuli that they themselves do not fully understand. The greatest composers tend to not write a lot in terms of explaining what their music is about, but let their compositions speak for themselves.*


Some did write about it a lot (Tchaikovsky for one), and many didn't. And yes, of course most were reacting to intuitive stimuli they likely didn't understand. But this new conception of time and musical content saturated everything they read and heard. Much of the important criticism they were hearing about their predecessors reflected this conception of time and expression. Hoffmann and especially A.B. Marx were especially influential in the reception and understanding of Beethoven, not to mention the general influence of Robert Schumann's journalism. That music was capable of expressing complex emotional content in a way untied to external clock time was a given for everyone in the late 19thc. It was the air they breathed.


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## Guest (May 10, 2019)

Partita said:


> It seems highly unlikely that classical music had to wait until the early 19th Century before "emotional states" were incorporated in any works.
> 
> As I noted earlier, this development occurred much earlier. Some of the late Renaissance/early Baroque composers were fitting words and music together in an increasingly dramatic fashion, as seen for example in the development of the Italian madrigal and later the operatic works of Monteverdi (1567-1643).
> 
> ...


 I'm not exactly sure what you are saying here, but I think I disagree with it.

I don't believe that Schubert, for example, wrote all those songs (circa 600 of them) as expressions of his own "personal emotion" at any stage of his career, if that is what your comments imply. For example, if he happened to be feeling miserable on a particular occasion I doubt that, as a matter of course, he would sit down and write a song with miserable connotations. Likewise, in respect of any other moods he may have found himself in, it's unlikely that he wrote music to suit that particular mood.

The above applies mainly in respect of vocal works of most descriptions: songs, opera, other choral works. It applies less in respect of some of Schubert's instrumental music where a possible personal emotional element can be detected, especially in his late works piano works, What's true for Schubert is also generally true for all the other Romantic composers.

Thinking about it, it's pretty obvious that music of a Romantic nature is not characterised by some kind of peculiar change around the turn of the 18th/19th century whereby composers felt unshackled from past constraints and the need to write music "straight from the heart", as it were, letting their personal emotions determine the character of the music they wrote.

Such a view must surely be incorrect. Yes indeed Romantic composers began to write music involving a greater deal of "personal emotion", but it wasn't necessarily their own emotional sensations that they were expressing. Rather, the general situation that gave rise to this development is quite different. It is, as I wrote yesterday in another thread, their attempt to imbue music with a much greater poetic element.

There were probably different motives for this development dependent on each composer's background aims and ambitions. But once the "penny dropped" that there was a rich, largely untapped source of high quality material - in the form of poetry that had already been produced by the great poets (Goethe, Schiller etc), and other literature - it didn't take some of them long to realise that this was a valuable resource worth exploiting further by converting into music. 

Schubert happened to love the poetry of Goethe from an early age. It probably seemed like too good a free gift not to exploit musically, and in the process might also elevate the general status of music. He was very quick to appreciate the potential value of this material, and set about writing many songs based on poems by Goethe and Schiller's and others.

What's especially interesting and important is that Schubert did so, not in any mild-mannered, apologetic low-key manner as mere accompaniment to poetry, but in more powerful, innovative manner that added further tension and drama (or whatever mood was required) to what was already in the poetry. In fact, he probably elevated the music to a more dramatic level that Goethe might have liked, whose tastes in music were more conservative, which possibly explains why Schubert famously never received any acknowledgement or thanks from Goethe for his efforts. 

In summary, to the extent that Romantic music became more "emotional" this was largely incidental to the personal feelings of the individual, but was due entirely to what emotional features were already in the poetry (or other literary source), as enhanced or embroidered by the abilities and stylist wishes of the particular composer. I accept that there might be some exceptions in the case of some composers' instrumental music, where a purely personal element can sometimes be detected. In general, it had far less to do, if anything at all, with the personal emotions of the individual composers, who allegedly felt somehow personally liberated from the constraints imposed by previous styles in their form of musical expression.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Partita said:


> I'm not exactly sure what you are saying here, but I think I disagree with it.
> 
> I don't believe that Schubert, for example, wrote all those songs (circa 600 of them) as expressions of his own "personal emotion" at any stage of his career, if that is what your comments imply. For example, if he happened to be feeling miserable on a particular occasion I doubt that, as a matter of course, he would sit down and write a song with miserable connotations. Likewise, in respect of any other moods he may have found himself in, it's unlikely that he wrote music to suit that particular mood.
> 
> ...


Most of the disagreement here seems to be over the meaning of _personal_ in this context. Although I explained it in passing, I should have been clearer. My usage is based on that Edward T. Cone developed in his book, _The Composer's Voice_. Cone held that what is expressed in musical works shouldn't be attributed to the composers of these works, but rather to a persona inhabiting the work itself. He got the idea from mid-20thc literary theory (the so-called New Criticism), where what is expressed in a poem is attributed to the speaker of the poem, a fictional character whose thoughts and feelings the words are assumed to be, rather than to the poet. Cone thought it was important to make the same distinction in music. So he defined the musical persona as "the experiencing subject of [an] entire composition … whose inner life the music communicates by symbolic gesture." So personal expression in this view, and as I was using it, doesn't mean that of the composer, but that of the musical persona of whatever work is under discussion. Personal expression, by either definition (attribution to composer or to musical persona) is distinguished from that one finds in Baroque music, which was abstract and rhetorical - formulas developed to evoke affects in the listener the way an orator might.

So I agree with most of what you wrote. Romantic composers weren't (necessarily) writing from the heart, but were creating the expression of fictional personae. This, however, really was a monumental paradigm shift from the Classical and Baroque conceptions of expression.


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## Guest (May 10, 2019)

EdwardBast said:


> So I agree with most of what you wrote. Romantic composers weren't (necessarily) writing from the heart, but were creating the expression of fictional personae. This, however, really was a monumental paradigm shift from the Classical and Baroque conceptions of expression.


Thanks. I'm glad you agree mostly.


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

EdwardBast said:


> I read a pre-publication version of _The Time of Music_ when I took Kramer's "Time Seminar," as it was called, at the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, and I believe I might have been cited in the acknowledgements of the published version (under my street name), along with other attendees who critiqued Kramer's ideas and made suggestions. Jonathan invited vigorous debate in the seminar, especially criticism of his own thinking.
> 
> I haven't used his time concepts in analysis, but I did develop one of my own that wasn't on Jonathan's radar for my final paper. I claimed that one of the defining features of Romantic music was a new conception of subjective time. The argument was that whereas Classical Era music, to the extent it embodies human experience, does so more or less in objective clock time, Romantic Era music was built on the idea that the internal time of the musical persona (the experiencing subject whose experience the music is assumed to be) was subjective and unrelated to objective time.


Greg, Did you write and publish your own paper re/ Kramer's different conceptions of time? I would like to read it if you have. I haven't contributed further in this thread because I am not feeling well, but I am very interested in the topic, particularly as it might be tool to help me understand and appreciate some non-Romantic 20th and 21st century music.

Also, If you don't mind would you please post the address of your professional webpage.

Thank you very much.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

JosefinaHW said:


> Greg, Did you write and publish your own paper re/ Kramer's different conceptions of time? I would like to read it if you have. I haven't contributed further in this thread because I am not feeling well, but I am very interested in the topic, particularly as it might be tool to help me understand and appreciate some non-Romantic 20th and 21st century music.
> 
> Also, If you don't mind would you please post the address of your professional webpage.
> 
> Thank you very much.


I published it in a small journal as a grad student. A revised version is published online at:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303837051_THE_TEMPORAL_LIFE_OF_THE_MUSICAL_PERSONA

The original title is given above. The title I currently prefer is "Time in the Experience of the Musical Persona."


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

EdwardBast said:


> Most of the disagreement here seems to be over the meaning of _personal_ in this context. Although I explained it in passing, I should have been clearer. My usage is based on that Edward T. Cone developed in his book, _The Composer's Voice_. *Cone held that what is expressed in musical works shouldn't be attributed to the composers of these works, but rather to a persona inhabiting the work itself.* He got the idea from mid-20thc literary theory (the so-called New Criticism), where what is expressed in a poem is attributed to the speaker of the poem, a fictional character whose thoughts and feelings the words are assumed to be, rather than to the poet. Cone thought it was important to make the same distinction in music. So he defined the musical persona as *"the experiencing subject of [an] entire composition … whose inner life the music communicates by symbolic gesture." *So personal expression in this view, and as I was using it, doesn't mean that of the composer, but that of the musical persona of whatever work is under discussion. Personal expression, by either definition (attribution to composer or to musical persona) is distinguished from that one finds in Baroque music, which was abstract and rhetorical - formulas developed to evoke affects in the listener the way an orator might.
> 
> So I agree with most of what you wrote. Romantic composers weren't (necessarily) writing from the heart, but were creating the expression of fictional personae. This, however, really was a monumental paradigm shift from the Classical and Baroque conceptions of expression.


Interesting in his approach to the "musical persona" is Berlioz in his _Symphonie fantastique,_ where the persona is a fictionalized version of himself, hopelessly in love with his _idee fixe_ (in real life actress Harriet Smithson) and pursuing her through a phantasmagorical opium dream (Berlioz might have been under the influence during the composition of the work). The symphony is as personal as a Romantic composer could make it, but even as it represents events from his own inner life, it presents them not as direct expressions of his feelings but as imaginative literary transformations of them.


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## JosefinaHW (Nov 21, 2015)

EdwardBast said:


> I published it in a small journal as a grad student. A revised version is published online at:
> 
> https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303837051_THE_TEMPORAL_LIFE_OF_THE_MUSICAL_PERSONA
> 
> The original title is given above. The title I currently prefer is "Time in the Experience of the Musical Persona."


Thank you. I was able to print out the PDF.

Two other things. (1) You should realize that Kramer's book is out of print and it's asking price is rather costly approx $220. You might consider publishing your own book as a commentary/elaboration/critique on his conceptions of time as opposed to this conception of the "musical persona."

(2) After viewing that profile pic or whatever you want to call it..... a wolf whistle. I'm still going to bust on you for your lack of appreciation of Bach and Baroque music but I will do it first, last and in between with a wolf whistle. :devil:


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

EdwardBast said:


> No one is saying this Romantic conception of musical time is better than that underlying music of the Classical Era. I'm just suggesting that this conception might be an important factor in explaining why music was regarded as the highest of the arts by many of the Romantics whereas it wasn't even considered to be a fine art in the Classical Era. Charles Rosen, among others, implied that much instrumental music of the 19thc was in fact structurally weaker and less vital than that composed by Haydn and Mozart, despite the elevation of musical art to the top of the pantheon. It's not that the music was better. It's that the conception of music's capabilities and mission was much more exalted, regardless of how much or little of the actual music lived up to this supposed potential.
> 
> Some did write about it a lot (Tchaikovsky for one), and many didn't. And yes, of course most were reacting to intuitive stimuli they likely didn't understand. But this new conception of time and musical content saturated everything they read and heard. Much of the important criticism they were hearing about their predecessors reflected this conception of time and expression. Hoffmann and especially A.B. Marx were especially influential in the reception and understanding of Beethoven, not to mention the general influence of Robert Schumann's journalism. That music was capable of expressing complex emotional content in a way untied to external clock time was a given for everyone in the late 19thc. It was the air they breathed.


Some interesting ideas here, and I do value these insights as it has helped me to understand and appreciate Beethoven and Romanticism in general. I don't really understand all the 'top of the pantheon' talk, according to whom? Who exactly was it that did not appreciate music as a fine art in the Classical era, yet did come to see it that way in the Romantic era?

The paradoxical aspect of these ideas, is that although it does make sense to view these dramatic scenarios as unfolding outside of clock time, the new forms were now more dependent on literal clock time than ever before, in order to express these ideas coherently. Baroque seems to me a more 'in the now' form of music, it sets a tone and its powerful effects permeate the music instantaneously. Classical and Romantic music are both more dependent on literal clock time than earlier music and Baroque (and in this latter category I would also place much modern music such as Impressionism) in order to achieve its goals. To put it another way, Classical and Romantic era music often set up an atmosphere of striving to get somewhere, the other forms of music I mentioned generally do not set up this problem and are more about exploring a 'now' moment, so in this sense could be viewed as more outside of time than Romanticism, which is more tied to a linear narrative.

I really do appreciate Baroque, Classical and Romantic music in different ways however I do not feel that Baroque music has ever been improved on. Especially in reference to Bach. When certain styles of music are perfected the only thing artists can do is look for other avenues of expression. I think artistic impulse just demands this, to keep things fresh and interesting. Classical music did find a viable path forward by expanding form, they did this in a most impressive way, but had to sacrifice the harmonic complexity found in the counterpoint of Bach. They in effect had to simplify the harmonic and melodic material, in order to create these complex formal and tonal structures, where the theme, chord and form all reflected each other. The Romantic composers essentially stayed with (though expanded) these Classical forms. They did bring back more complex harmonic and melodic material, but had to sacrifice the tonal clarity of Baroque and Classicism, and remained tied to a narrative, the huge forms now requiring more 'clock time' than ever in order to make a coherent artistic statement.


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

J.S. Bach preserved vast quantities of his music, and in his will had it distributed among his children, sadly only CPE Bach took great care in preserving his share of the scores, this is one of the main reasons so much has been lost. CPE Bach lamented the direction music was taking in his time and the lack of counterpoint. J.S. Bach's decision to focus more than ever on his art of counterpoint innovating further in this direction in his last years even when it was becoming out of fashion is an indication he saw his music as an important form of art. 

Brahms was not thrilled with the direction music had taken in the Romantic era and essentially thought the current music scene was a disgrace relative to the past masters, so I don't think the statement that 'music was elevated to the top of the pantheon' of the arts in the Romantic era was a sentiment uniformly agreed on. What we can say certainly is that Brahms who was arguably the greatest composer of the era did not feel that Romanticism lived up to the music of the past anyway.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

tdc said:


> Some interesting ideas here, and I do value these insights as it has helped me to understand and appreciate Beethoven and Romanticism in general. I don't really understand all the 'top of the pantheon' talk, according to whom? Who exactly was it that did not appreciate music as a fine art in the Classical era, yet did come to see it that way in the Romantic era?


Critics, philosophers and other writers of the day. Edward Lippman's A History of Western Musical Aesthetics is a good source on the topic with lots of quotations. Classical Era music tickled the ear in much the same way a good roast tickled the taste buds. Haydn and his players wore livery like the other servants.



tdc said:


> The paradoxical aspect of these ideas, is that although it does make sense to view these dramatic scenarios as unfolding outside of clock time, the new forms were now more dependent on literal clock time than ever before, in order to express these ideas coherently. Baroque seems to me a more 'in the now' form of music, it sets a tone and its powerful effects permeate the music instantaneously. Classical and Romantic music are both more dependent on literal clock time than earlier music and Baroque (and in this latter category I would also place much modern music such as Impressionism) in order to achieve its goals. To put it another way, Classical and Romantic era music often set up an atmosphere of striving to get somewhere, the other forms of music I mentioned generally do not set up this problem and are more about exploring a 'now' moment, so in this sense could be viewed as more outside of time than Romanticism, which is more tied to a linear narrative.
> 
> I really do appreciate Baroque, Classical and Romantic music in different ways however I do not feel that Baroque music has ever been improved on. Especially in reference to Bach. When certain styles of music are perfected the only thing artists can do is look for other avenues of expression. I think artistic impulse just demands this, to keep things fresh and interesting. Classical music did find a viable path forward by expanding form, they did this in a most impressive way, but had to sacrifice the harmonic complexity found in the counterpoint of Bach. They in effect had to simplify the harmonic and melodic material, in order to create these complex formal and tonal structures, where the theme, chord and form all reflected each other. The Romantic composers essentially stayed with (though expanded) these Classical forms. They did bring back more complex harmonic and melodic material, but had to sacrifice the tonal clarity of Baroque and Classicism, and remained tied to a narrative, the huge forms now requiring more 'clock time' than ever in order to make a coherent artistic statement.


Nice ruminations. But none of it addresses the fact that when Classical Era composers explicitly imitate real world phenomena it is in objective clock time. When Romantic composers do so it often is not and we have their testimony on the issue to indicate that this was intentional. The expressive transformation of material shared among movements in Romantic works suggests they were representing broad spans of experience in a condensed time frame.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Woodduck said:


> Interesting in his approach to the "musical persona" is Berlioz in his _Symphonie fantastique,_ where the persona is a fictionalized version of himself, hopelessly in love with his _idee fixe_ (in real life actress Harriet Smithson) and pursuing her through a phantasmagorical opium dream (Berlioz might have been under the influence during the composition of the work). The symphony is as personal as a Romantic composer could make it, but even as it represents events from his own inner life, it presents them not as direct expressions of his feelings but as imaginative literary transformations of them.


In trying to keep things short and simple I left out a qualification both proponents of the New Criticism (e.g., Wimsatt & Beardsely) and Cone included. What I should have written was: _In the absence of clear biographical evidence to the contrary_, the expression of a poem or musical work should not be attributed to the composer, but rather to a fictional persona inhabiting the work. Berlioz's _Symphonie_ is a case where one might argue based on biographical data that the experiencing subject of the work is some version of the composer himself. But it is - one hopes  - a highly fictionalized version.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

tdc said:


> The Romantic composers essentially stayed with (though expanded) these Classical forms. They did bring back more complex harmonic and melodic material, but had to sacrifice the tonal clarity of Baroque and Classicism, and remained tied to a narrative, the huge forms now requiring more 'clock time' than ever in order to make a coherent artistic statement.


An interest in literature as inspiration for music made the art song and the keyboard character piece two of the Romantic period's most typical genres (see Schubert, Schumann and Chopin). In both, a coherent artistic statement is made in a brief and concise way. I take your point that increased harmonic complexity could and sometimes did result in longer works, but most symphonies, symphonic poems and chamber works of the Romantic period, while longer than those of Mozart or Haydn, are not "huge." Works of musical drama (e.g., opera and oratorio) were always as long as their verbal content required them to be, and most operas of Weber, Gounod, Massenet, Donizetti, Verdi, and Puccini are shorter than most of Handel's and Mozart's.

The tendency to hugeness, though partly inspired by a few works of Beethoven (the 9th, the Missa Solemnis, the Hammerklavier) was mainly a late Romantic development and an attempt to infuse instrumental music with the complex narrative and philosophical weight of the Wagnerian music drama. And yes, works such as Bruckner's and Mahler's symphonies do require a lot of clock time (though some people might wish they required less).


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

EdwardBast said:


> Critics, philosophers and other writers of the day. Edward Lippman's A History of Western Musical Aesthetics is a good source on the topic with lots of quotations. *Classical Era music tickled the ear in much the same way a good roast tickled the taste buds. Haydn and his players wore livery like the other servants.*


It seems to me what is going on here to an extent is you are grouping societal elements you find distasteful, with the music itself, but I don't think the quality of music is affected by whether or not the composers were living in a society you approve of or consider 'free'. Further critics, philosophers and writers are often not experts in music. Even some of the lesser musicians of the days views could be questionable, we can see this in some of the ridiculous musical practices of the time recorded in treatises and further evidence when looking at some of E.T.A Hoffmann's musical comments, and the fact he considered Haydn and Mozart as "Romantic" composers.

I think there _was_ a growing appreciation towards music in the Romantic era (this growing appreciation included music of the past as well as Romanticism), but the reasons for this are varied and largely a result of societal and economic factors as opposed to strictly relating to anything intrinsic in the music. *Music became less esoteric*. You are conflating popularity with the concept of 'high art'. (I'm not suggesting here that Romanticism is not high art, but I am suggesting it did not reach any higher than earlier styles).



EdwardBast said:


> Nice ruminations. But none of it addresses the fact that when Classical Era composers explicitly imitate real world phenomena it is in objective clock time. When Romantic composers do so it often is not and we have their testimony on the issue to indicate that this was intentional. The expressive transformation of material shared among movements in Romantic works suggests they were representing broad spans of experience in a condensed time frame.


This may be true, but Romantic composers borrowed their forms from the Classicists, and both styles of music are generally more dependent on linear narrative therefore objective clock time than the other styles of music I was referring to. Whether or not vast amounts of time are condensed or not I don't feel is good or bad in itself, it only reflects a different approach.


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

Woodduck said:


> An interest in literature as inspiration for music made the art song and the keyboard character piece two of the Romantic period's most typical genres (see Schubert, Schumann and Chopin). In both, a coherent artistic statement is made in a brief and concise way. I take your point that increased harmonic complexity could and sometimes did result in longer works, but most symphonies, symphonic poems and chamber works of the Romantic period, while longer than those of Mozart or Haydn, are not "huge." Works of musical drama (e.g., opera and oratorio) were always as long as their verbal content required them to be, and most operas of Weber, Gounod, Massenet, Donizetti, Verdi, and Puccini are shorter than most of Handel's and Mozart's.
> 
> The tendency to hugeness, though partly inspired by a few works of Beethoven (the 9th, the Missa Solemnis, the Hammerklavier) was mainly a late Romantic development and an attempt to infuse instrumental music with the complex narrative and philosophical weight of the Wagnerian music drama. And yes, works such as Bruckner's and Mahler's symphonies do require a lot of clock time (though some people might wish they required less).


You have some good points here, but Edward's ideas that I was discussing in terms of large amounts of condensed time, relate to the larger forms I was discussing. Further this seems to be the crucial area that he feels propelled the music to the 'top of the pantheon'.

That said I agree with what you're saying and feel that many of the Romantic composers did miniature forms quite effectively, and I very much enjoy much of the music.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

tdc said:


> This may be true, but Romantic composers borrowed their forms from the Classicists, and both styles of music *are generally more dependent on linear narrative therefore objective clock time than the other styles of music I was referring to.* Whether or not vast amounts of time are condensed or not I don't feel is good or bad in itself, it only reflects a different approach.


Why do you think linear narrative time means objective clock time? There is no connection there whatever. A single page of a novel can cover the events of a year - thus linear narrative bearing no relation to the clock time required for its performance. The same holds for music narrative of the Romantic Era. Tchaikovsky thought a single movement encapsulated the emotional narratives of a lifetime, which means clearly clock time does not apply. By contrast, when Classical Era composers incorporated linear narrative scenes (presuming bird calls, battle scenes, babbling brooks, arguments and the like qualify) they unfold in objective clock time. Are there exceptions I'm missing?


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

I wouldn't assume events in any piece of music are real-time (except Wagner ). Beethoven's 6th seems the closest that I'm aware, and even then it is episodic with clear breaks between movements. His 5th which Tchaikovsky's 4th is modelled after is also the same theme of Fate knocking at the door and obliterating everything in the path at the end of the first movement. Getting to the shining hope in the last movement is quite a quick struggle in real-time. I read somewhere, it is considered his most densely-packed symphony. I'd agree, except for the last movement where it gets a bit repetitive later on.

Is Haydn's The Creation supposed to be real-time, or the sunrise in his Sunrise symphony? Only recognizable sounds like bird calls or thunderclaps are real-time, or else it is really tone painting of a static image or short GIF


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

EdwardBast said:


> Why do you think linear narrative time means objective clock time? There is no connection there whatever. A single page of a novel can cover the events of a year - thus linear narrative bearing no relation to the clock time required for its performance. The same holds for music narrative of the Romantic Era. Tchaikovsky thought a single movement encapsulated the emotional narratives of a lifetime, which means clearly clock time does not apply. By contrast, when Classical Era composers incorporated linear narrative scenes (presuming bird calls, battle scenes, babbling brooks, arguments and the like qualify) they unfold in objective clock time. Are there exceptions I'm missing?


I think what you say makes sense in terms of the events in a Romantic Sonata unfolding outside of clock time, like Phil I'm not sure I think events in a Classical Sonata are always meant to be scenes playing out in literal clock time, that is something I have to think about. As I said earlier I think some styles of music are not so much about linear narratives, but 'now' moments, I mentioned Baroque and Impressionism, which generally tend to create a powerful mood and sustain it, rather than setting up large dramatic contrasting events over longer stretches of form. This is what I'm referring to when I say that the Classical and Romantic Sonatas are more dependent on time itself, because they are setting up dramatic scenarios that take longer to unfold and make sense of in real time whether or not they are symbolically condensing large amounts of time. All styles of music are dependent on time, but I think the creation of Sonata form maximized the importance of time.


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