# Musical Epochs



## JeffD (May 8, 2017)

I have found the most exciting things to investigate are transitions. In fishing its where the eddy and the main flow, or the thousands of little turbulences in pocket water, where the water diverted from this rock hits the water diverted from that rock, and falls into the tiny quiet pond area, that you can catch some beauties.

And in music, the transitions between say Baroque and Classical, or Classical and Romantic, etc...

I don't have formal training in music, or in history, but its fascinating to me. (I don't have any formal training in anything but math, science, and engineering. Everything else is due to voracious reading and lack of a busy social life.) So the shovel I use to dig at this stuff is to ask myself these two questions, what is lost, and what is gained.

I mean, when we go from Classical to Romantic, what is lost? Can I identify it. Can I understand it, can I see and understand why change was inevitable, or necessary. Can I miss the old in the way that someone too aged for the time misses the past.

And then what is gained? Can I listen to Romantic music and say, oh yea look this couldn't be done before, this is an innovation. Can I get excited about the change like a young person growing out of his parents world.

And so on through all the musical epochs.

I think this is especially challenging for me with atonal music. I really have to dig in and see what happened to tonality. Was it played out. Was everything that could be said already said? And then, atonality, what does it free us up to see, to feel to appreciate. What is exciting and new about it, to one brought up in a tonal world.

For me to really appreciate it I need to get down to the emotional level. I need to feel regret and loss about what was left behind, and I need to feel excitement and expansiveness and freedom from previous strictures when encountering the new.

Its true in philosophy, where every philosopher is pushing against something, and to really really "get it" you have to understand what is being pushed against, and why it was important enough to push against.

Many (most) of you folks are well versed in musicology and music history. If you could put your explanations in terms of answering the two questions, the rest of it I can go get on my own. It seems to me that without a real feeling for the loss and the gain, the details about the particular music are not part of a narrative, not connected to any story, like a pile of symptoms without a coherent disease.


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## Triplets (Sep 4, 2014)

Have you ever read some basic Music Theory books that are aimed at the general public? Copland's book, Charles Rosen's books on the Classical Style and Romanticism, Jacques Barzun are good places to start. The Great Lectures series had a good set on the History of Music, and Bernsteins Harvard Lectures (You Tube and elsewhere) are good resources.


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## JeffD (May 8, 2017)

I have been listening to "The Great Courses" and enjoying it, actually.


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## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

I'm not sure evolution is ever strictly about loss and gain.


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## helenora (Sep 13, 2015)

I agree with previous poster . One should read books about theory/history of music to understand those transitions. They are rather subtle changes at the beginning and later we can see results only looking back at those epoch. 

well, it makes more sense to read something first. Otherwise all explanations given here will result in many pages of typing.


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## Myriadi (Mar 6, 2016)

I've found that the more music I listen to, the more composers I discover, the less I'm inclined to think in terms of epochs. To me, the differences between the styles of e.g. François Couperin, Vivaldi, and JS Bach are far more important than the similarities. It's not helpful at all to try to label them all "Baroque" and then shoehorn all three into some concept of what "Baroque" was really about. 

Also, labels like "Baroque", "Romantic", etc. have damaged the reputations of many fine composers who had the misfortune to be "in between" epochs - like Froberger and CPE Bach. They're frequently referred to as "transitional composers", whereas the truly great composers are those who "embodied the highest ideals" of those made-up labels. I don't think this is fair.


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## Agamemnon (May 1, 2017)

I have the same obsession as JeffD but not limited to musical epochs: my great obsession is what modernity is all about so what is the difference between classical and modern thinking (and why it took the Middle Ages - about a millenium - to make the transition)? But if we look for an answer I think we come close to an answer to JeffD's question as well...

So what distinguishes classical from modern culture? The answer is actually christianity or the transcendence of God. The ancient Greeks only believed in the discrete, the measurable so everything is number (number as in 1,2,3, etc). So it came as a shock to them that the square root of 2 is irrational so not a ratio of numbers. For the Greeks, beauty is the perfect ratio. Modern classical music (Mozart etc) is based on that classical concept of beauty: the ratio is leading, everything must have the right proportion.

But christian mystics longed for God who is not a number but something transcending it or an infinitity (like the square root of 2). Romanticism is christian art: it is not about the right proportion and the ideal unity of body and mind anymore but about freeing the mind and striving to the sublime which transcends any rationality. So music got subjective (expressing your soul) and thus emotional instead of rational and thus transgressing all boundaries becoming extreme (e.g. very sweet or very violent). Inevitable this romanticism led to atonality and modernism finally.

What does this mean when comparing e.g. Mozart (classical) and Beethoven (romantic)? I guess Mozart's music is more straight-jacketed while Beethoven is freeing himself out of it, giving way to more directly expressing feelings (which makes romantic music often more easily accessible and satisfying) and to experimenting, freedom and inventing new musical pathways (which makes modern music often less easily accessible and satisfying).


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## Eschbeg (Jul 25, 2012)

JeffD said:


> I think this is especially challenging for me with atonal music. I really have to dig in and see what happened to tonality. Was it played out. Was everything that could be said already said?


As others have already suggested, reality is never as neat and tidy as our historical narratives make it seem. On the other hand, we don't have much choice but to use narratives if we want to make some kind of sense out of history. Periodization inevitably distorts history, but history always serves the needs of the present, and those distortions are a necessary way of seeing (that is, inventing) how we relate to the past.

That's just a complicated way of agreeing with others that the concept of "gain" and "loss" is not quite the right way to view history, even though that's the way historians have tended to do it.

The example of atonality is an especially good illustration of this. Most academic books will tell you that tonality was pushed to its limits some time around 1900 thanks to people like Debussy and Strauss, and then finally came to an end around 1910 thanks to Schoenberg and others. So supposedly whatever atonality enables was "gained" at the expense of tonality's "loss." Certainly composers themselves seemed to think so. (I forget the exact wording, but Webern once said something like "For the past 25 years, major and minor have ceased to exist, but most people don't know this.") We all know, however, that tonality never went away. Atonality never replaced anything. What we really mean when we say tonality "died" is that when atonality came around, tonal works became less historically important. In the narrative we all still pretty much adhere to, the atonal strand of history became the central one, and everything else was at best a secondary episode. It would be just as easy (and arguably more accurate when we look at which 20th century works actually get performed at concerts) to say that atonality was the secondary episode running parallel with the far more dominant tonal strand. Neither narrative is more correct than the other; it's simply a matter of whether we want to privilege the academic narrative (the "canon") or the performing narrative (the "repertory"). There are compelling reasons for both.

The gain/loss approach is especially unfortunate for atonality because it causes us to focus on the differences rather than the similarities between modern and romantic music. Certainly Schoenberg thought he was continuing rather than rejecting romanticism when he went atonal. "This music seeks to express all that dwells within us subconsciously." That's Schoenberg talking about his Five Pieces for Orchestra, but it could also have been any romantic composer talking about any of their works. The appeal of atonality was that it allowed for unfettered expression free of clichés, conventions, rules, and constraints, and was therefore that much more individualistic. (Schoenberg: "One must express _oneself_! Express oneself _directly_! ...Not _acquired_ characteristics, but that which is _inborn, instinctive_.") And disregarding constraints in the name of individuality-that's exactly what Beethoven, Berlioz, Schumann and the rest of them are celebrated for doing.

Again, the academic narrative is not without merit. Even if Webern was wrong about major and minor ceasing to exist, he and his successors nonetheless wrote music believing so, and that belief had some fascinating musical consequences. And since academics have until recently chosen to believe Webern (or at least play along with him), the academic narrative is still the best one for gaining an appreciation of what Webern accomplished.

With all that said, the following questions are still completely valid and fascinating to think about:



JeffD said:


> And then, atonality, what does it free us up to see, to feel to appreciate. What is exciting and new about it, to one brought up in a tonal world.


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