# Is Classical period really Classical?



## ethanjamesescano (Aug 29, 2012)

We know that the composers was not categorized in their time, they are just composing based on their creativity. For example:
Beethoven didn't say: "I'm tired of classicism, I will now make a new musical movement called Romanticism".

Now the question is, did they really think of the Classical Greek as their main influence on their music (or in architecture, art etc...)?


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## Ramako (Apr 28, 2012)

No.

The idea of Classical Greek music retained an influence throughout the period from the Renaissance to the early 19th century. Having no Greek music, however, the influence was minimal, and restrained to talking _about_ music rather than music itself. The exception is opera, which was intentionally, at start, intended to imitate the tragedies from Antiquity. Thus I suppose the musical Baroque period is more 'classical' than the 'Classical' one is.

Classical as a term was I believe introduced at some point late in the first half of the 19th century, I think, to refer to the period from Bach to Beethoven not as referencing Classical Greece, but in the sense of a 'golden age' of music (rather than referring to a specific stylistic practice).


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## Guest (Aug 16, 2013)

Ramako said:


> Classical as a term was I believe introduced at some point late in the first half of the 19th century....


1810, in Germany.

1825, in England.


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## quack (Oct 13, 2011)

There was a neoclassical revival during the 18th and 19th centuries throughout the arts which was especially influential in the visual arts and architecture but also in literature and philosophy. The discovery, or simply recognition of surviving classical architecture was probably the most significant factor but a greater knowledge of Greek and Roman texts helped as well. These texts tended to show a very formal society with precise rules in poetry, aesthetics, the structure of the state etc. and they became a model for the neoclassical era.

These ancient rules were easily adopted in some fields, such as architecture, but they were lacking in music, as the information was scant. In imitation of classical thought people also formalised new rules and so a kind of classical aesthetic was developed for music. So while what would later be called the classical era of music wasn't directly connected to music of the Greeks and Romans, and had more to do with the technical basis developed in the baroque, it was certainly influenced by the interest in classicism throughout 18th century.


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## Ethereality (Apr 6, 2019)

Every decade there's always a new invention or discovery in music, it's unhelpful to view the musical eras as so settled one way, but based on major breakthroughs you can start to categorize composers differently in your mind if that helps. Every composer is a contributor to what a new era entails, as every year changes history. Based on the contrasts of sensibility in music one can view Beethoven as either Classical, Romantic, or of his own era. It can be useful to map things in different ways to get a broader sense of a composer and their connections to music evolution, for instance sometimes I could organize it like this:

Classical era - starting with major composers like C.P.E Bach, Gluck, going through to Mozart, they inspired a wholly exhibitive and engaging purpose and style to music and theme-building
Romantic era - starting with its founder and interpreter Beethoven, who brought a much more developed, more personal, larger meaning and possibility to music, with symphonies and concertos of epic aesthetic that aren't like Classical. Ending with Brahms
Programmatic? era - starting with major composers like Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Dvorak, whose musical vision was to reform and organize much more comprehensive thematic material, forms and instrumentation, like the big 5 philosophy
Free era - starting with founders like Stravinsky, who inspired a sense of total creative liberty and experimentation, that what music 'is' shan't be regulated by norms

Anyway, this is just an example that eras are vague, so don't be so tied to one way. There might not be "eras", or Romanticism might just be a rawer personal era of Beethoven, that was adopted by Schubert, Chopin, and Brahms.

_Eras aren't one way._ That's all I'm saying.

One point of contention. One might call the Romantic era above more of the Individualist era, and call the Programmatic era the real Romantic era, as the root and meaning of Roman refers to story telling. Beethoven and other early Romantics were still subconsciously telling their 'story' through personal feelings and emotionality, not _directly_ envisioning story necessarily. Though Wagner in this naming would classify as true Romantic.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Since the continuum of music's development is uninterrupted, the decision of how to define and categorize styles and eras is certainly open to differing views, depending on the importance we attach to various elements of music and the wider culture in which it exists. I do think that the standard periods we call Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and Modern make sense, to varying degrees, as representing easily observed stylistic and historical developments, but I doubt that anyone finds them wholly satisfactory. There will inevitably be debates about borderline cases, possible transitional periods (e.g., Rococo), and subdivision of periods which span extraordinary changes (Renaissance, Baroque, Romantic, Modern).

Of the standard periods, the Classical seems to me the most well-defined. It was rather short, and perhaps because it's dominated for us by the creation of sonata form and the clearest possible deployment of common practice tonality, it sometimes feels like an island of calm, with the turbulent waters of the Rococo lapping at one shore and the tsunami of Romanticism threatening the other. But that sense of calm is only part of the story. It's been observed that the Rococo, with its concern for the expression of feelings - the _Empfindsamer_ or "sensitive" style - was "proto-Romantic," and in fact we find Romanticism, called by that very name, arising as a literary phenomenon in the late 18th century, right through the period we call "Classical." I think of the Rococo and its emphasis on personal expression (see C.P.E. Bach in particular) as marking a more significant moment of change than Romanticism itself; it marked the early stirrings of revolutionary change in the political thought, economic structure, and sensibility of Western society of which the Romantic movement was the ultimate expression. Seen in this perspective, Classicism, in its Apollonian aspiration to perfect beauty and balance, appears paradoxically both as a kind of Romantic ideal and as a restraint on Romanticism, an attempt to civilize the passions of the free man now insisting on calling himself not a subject but a citizen.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

Woodduck said:


> Of the standard periods, the Classical seems to me the most well-defined. It was rather short, and perhaps because it's dominated for us by the creation of sonata form and the clearest possible deployment of common practice tonality, it sometimes feels like an island of calm, with the turbulent waters of the Rococo lapping at one shore and the tsunami of Romanticism threatening the other. But that sense of calm is only part of the story. It's been observed that the Rococo, with its concern for the expression of feelings - the _Empfindsamer_ or "sensitive" style - was "proto-Romantic," and in fact we find Romanticism, called by that very name, arising as a literary phenomenon in the late 18th century, right through the period we call "Classical." I think of the Rococo and its emphasis on personal expression (see C.P.E. Bach in particular) as marking a more significant moment of change than Romanticism itself; it marked the early stirrings of revolutionary change in the political thought, economic structure, and sensibility of Western society of which the Romantic movement was the ultimate expression. Seen in this perspective, Classicism, in its Apollonian aspiration to perfect beauty and balance, appears paradoxically both as a kind of Romantic ideal and as a restraint on Romanticism, an attempt to civilize the passions of the free man now insisting on calling himself not a subject but a citizen.


It's funny that some people think this way now, but the general view many composers (circa 1700~ 1850) had in those times was that the kind of music the "conservatives" such as Sebastian Bach was writing had craftsmanship but lacked "feelings of mortals", whereas Vivaldi, Handel, Gluck and the 18th century masters of "opera and drama" moved away from that sort of aesthetics to focus more on expressing "feelings of mortals". And it is more likely Emmanuel Bach's instrumental works in Empfindsamer Stil were seen as a reaction to his own father's style. (Don't get me wrong. I do like a lot of Bach, like Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, WTC and double Violin Concerto and the Lutheran masses etc, I'm just talking about what the general view on the style like Bach in those times)

_The sensitive style (German: empfindsamer Stil), empfindsam style, or tender style is a style of musical composition and poetry developed in 18th-century Germany, intended to express "true and natural" feelings, and featuring sudden contrasts of mood. It was developed as a contrast to the Baroque Affektenlehre (lit. "The Doctrine of Affections"), in which a composition (or movement) would have the same affect (e.g., emotion or musical mood) throughout._

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/the-glorious-history-of-handels-messiah-148168540/
"where Bach's oratorios exalted God, Handel was more concerned with the feelings of mortals. "Even when the subject of his work is religious, Handel is writing about the human response to the divine," says conductor Bicket."






Beethoven and Mozart particularly admired Handel for the use of effect:
_"Handel knows better than any of us what will make an effect. When he chooses, he strikes like a thunderbolt."_

There's numerous accounts Berlioz admired Gluck, Spontini, and even Salieri's Les Danaïdes (for the reasons described above):






http://www.hberlioz.com/Photos/BerliozPhotos8.html
"Gluck is another of Berlioz's "demi-gods", for whose music he had unwavering admiration throughout his adult life. The first time that Berlioz saw an opera by Gluck was when he attended a performance of Iphigénie en Tauride at the Paris Opéra in 1821.

Berlioz discovered Beethoven's music in the late 1820s; he subsequently became one of Berlioz's musical "demi-gods".

Berlioz "adored" Mozart's music, especially the later works, some of which he included in his concerts in London and elsewhere in Europe. According to David Cairns Mozart's opera Idomeneo may be seen as an influence on Berlioz, not only because of its Gluckian affinities, but in its almost 19th-century use of colour."
https://www.cambridge.org/core/book...z-and-mozart/D120367758977FD742477965EAD04FB5

https://books.google.ca/books?id=GTorDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA24
Ave verum corpus K. 618: "The intimate and fervent religiosity of this short masterpiece seems to conform precisely to Berlioz's ideal of religious music.
_'This is not just religious music, it is really divine and worthy of the dwellers of Heaven. It is the ideal manifestation of pious serenity, of mystical love, of ecstasy. God dictated it; an angel wrote it.'_"

https://www.bartleby.com/library/prose/692.html
"On Bach
By Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)

From Berlioz's Autobiography

_YOU will not, my dear Demarest, expect an analysis from me of Bach's great work: such a task would quite exceed my prescribed limits. Indeed, the movement performed at the Conservatoire three years ago may be considered the type of the author's style throughout the work. The Germans profess an unlimited admiration for Bach's recitatives; but their peculiar characteristic necessarily escaped me, as I did not understand the language and was unable to appreciate their expression. Whoever is familiar with our musical customs in Paris must witness, in order to believe, the attention, respect, and even reverence with which a German public listens to such a composition. Every one follows the words on the book with his eyes; not a movement among the audience, not a murmur of praise or blame, not a sound of applause; they are listening to a solemn discourse, they are hearing the gospel sung, they are attending divine service rather than a concert. And really such music ought to be thus listened to. They adore Bach, and believe in him, without supposing for a moment that his divinity could ever be called into question. A heretic would horrify them, he is forbidden even to speak of him. God is God and Bach is Bach._"

Diary entry for 20 September/2 October 1886, in which Tchaikovsky reflects mainly on his contrasting feelings for Mozart and Beethoven:
_"As for the predecessors of these two, what I would say is that I like playing Bach because it is entertaining to play a good fugue, but I do not acknowledge in him (as others do) a great genius...
For although (as he told me himself) he would every now and then play piano fugues by Bach when he was alone, he always felt that the latter's cantatas and major vocal works were "real classical bores"."_


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

^^^Why do you bother to quote my post when yours apparently has nothing to do with what I was saying? You inform us that "it's funny that some people think this way now," but say absolutely nothing to show that what I said is "funny." Your post is so long and rambling that it ends up making no discernible point at all. If you're going to respond to me, how about being considerate enough to state specifically what's "funny" about my statement, and then to express your alternative view in a concise way that rational minds can deal with?


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

I tend to think of "Classical" and "Romantic" eras in terms of art/philosophy in general rather than as that of Music, Painting, Literature, Philosophy. The attitudes of the times shaped what we today term "classicism" and "romanticism", and there are differences. If one looks at the poetry of Alexander Pope (a "classical" era poet) one sees a strict regularity of iambic-pentameter form and rhyming heroic couplets:

"A little learning is a dangerous thing.
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring;
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
and drinking largely sobers us again."

If one wants to talk Greek/Roman stuff in relationship to the Classical era, one can point to that reference to the Pierian Spring, which is drawn from Greek mythology. But these lines are "classical" in their structural sense. Pope, for example, would have never thought of writing the following:

''My heart leaps up when I behold 
A rainbow in the sky:''

and

"What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;"

These are examples of "Romantic" poetry. Indeed, they are lines from a poet named William Wordsworth who was born in 1770, the same year as Beethoven. Alexander Pope's heart would never be moved by the sight of a rainbow; in fact, I imagine the poet pulling the brow of his hat lower over his face as he limps down a London street, cursing the very fact that he has to be outside in the open air, to shade out any view of the colorful arc in the sky. But Beethoven would have exalted at this beauty of nature. In fact he does, in the 6th Symphony. One can not imagine Haydn or Mozart penning that _Pastoral _Symphony, either. Pope's emphasis was on man and his actions (very Greeky, actually) just was were the painters of his era, who specialized in portraits. People in action could be a way to put the focus of classical art. Landscape painting, such as that championed by the British artists Constable and Turner, was a thing of Romanticism. If folks are shown at all on their canvases, they tend to be small afterthoughts in the larger scheme of the natural world. Turner was born in 1775, Constable in 1776. You can surmise that all of these "Romantic era" figures grew up in a European world where philosophical attitudes were undergoing a change. It was, afterall, the great "age of revolution", and the romantics created an art of revolution.

A Beethoven symphony sounds different from one by Haydn or Mozart (though early Beethoven and late Haydn and Mozart, which somewhat overlap, timewise, are more similar) just as a poem by Wordsworth reads differently from that of Alexander Pope, and a painting by Turner or Constable differs in appearance from one by, say, Jacques-Louis David or Francois Boucher, two rather "classical" painters. Boucher, in fact, died the year Beethoven and Wordsworth were born.

Classical art is more devoted to adhering to a form than to evoking an emotional reaction. Classical art is more focused to man's role in society while Romantic art looks at man's relationship to nature, where nature is the greater thing in most cases. Both eras celebrated things Greek and Roman, but the classical era emphasized the formal aspects (lessons to be learned) and the Romantic age examined the fantastical side, the myths as glories of imagination rather than as instruction books for rules and mores on how to live life.

There are not strict boundary lines. Romantic elements appear in Classical art, Classical elements appear in Romantic art. A detailed study of such things is the stuff of a college degree. Suffice it to say that philosophy changed somewhere in the late 18th century and that change led to artistic attitudes rethinking the purpose of art and the artist. It is not a clear, simple thing. Rather it is complex and amorphous. But when one hears Tchaikowsky's great Sixth Symphony, no matter the sonata form evident in the piece, one knows he/she is no longer in the sound world of Haydn and Mozart. And maybe that's enough to realize.


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

Many of the ideas posited here describing the philosophies of the eras are dubious. They are mostly projection I think. Within any given era there are a multitude of composers each with distinct compositional personalities. They don't all have identical philosophies and generally aren't following some kind of playbook. I don't think you can boil down any composer's ideas about music to concepts like "I don't care about freedom. I'm a good obedient subject with control over my passions. I am devoted to form over emotional content." Or "I'm not concerned with the feelings of mortals." etc.



SONNET CLV said:


> Classical art is more devoted to adhering to a form than to evoking an emotional reaction. Classical art is more focused to man's role in society while Romantic art looks at man's relationship to nature, where nature is the greater thing in most cases.


This statement misses the mark I think. For one thing in the classical era the sonata 'form' was not codified, rather it was a living malleable thing. There was no set 'form' they were adhering to. The classicists were creating compositions based on the unique attributes of thematic material. It was in fact the Romantics who attempted to codify sonata form, and according to Rosen attempting to adhere this process to a strict 'form' is what destroyed it. So one could argue that the Romantics were the ones more concerned with 'form', to a fault in fact. I can't think of any classical composer who stated he was avoiding evoking an emotional reaction. Further much of the music of the classical era is of pastoral character therefore deals directly with man's relationship to nature. I'm also not sure how classical era music is more (or less) concerned with man's role in society than romanticism. I don't think any of these statements have much basis in fact.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

tdc said:


> Many of the ideas posited here describing the philosophies of the eras are dubious. They are mostly projection I think. Within any given era there are a multitude of composers each with distinct compositional personalities. They don't all have identical philosophies and generally aren't following some kind of playbook or have rules like "I don't care about freedom. I'm a good obedient subject with control over my passions. I am devoted to form over emotional content." Or "I'm not concerned with the feelings of mortals." etc.


All general statements about art have exceptions, and tendencies and trends are merely that. That doesn't mean there are no genuine differences between eras. How would you distinguish Classical art and music from Baroque, on the one hand, and Romantic, on the other?


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

tdc said:


> For one thing in the classical era the sonata 'form' was not codified, rather it was a living malleable thing. There was no set 'form' they were adhering to. The classicists were creating compositions based on the unique attributes of thematic material. It was in fact the Romantics who attempted to codify sonata form, and according to Rosen attempting to adhere this process to a strict 'form' is what destroyed it. So one could argue that in fact the Romantics were the ones more concerned with 'form', to a fault in fact.


I'm afraid the logic here is faulty. The fact that sonata form was "codified" in the 19th century doesn't alter the other, more important fact that the "sonata-allegro" concept, with its chracteristic structural pattern and tonal scheme, was a creation of the 18th century. I would actually call it the most fertile and permanently significant achievement of the Classical period. The sonatas, symphonies, concertos and chamber works of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven - and of many composers thereafter - are unthinkable without it. Certainly there's plenty of room for variation in the way the sonata idea is carried out; the number of themes, their key relationships, the length and proportion of the sections...But the composer either chooses to work within the scheme or he doesn't; he doesn't just happen upon it "based on the unique attributes of thematic material." He will in fact choose his themes based on their suitability for sonata-form treatment. If Rosen is right that attempting to codify the sonata idea led to its demise (and I'm not at all sure that that happened), it's only a testament to the importance and vitality of the form in its heyday.

I can see no basis for the idea that the Romantics "were the ones more concerned with 'form'." _Worried about it_, maybe - the Romantic impulse necessitated new solutions to new problems. Set a painting by Jacques-Louis David alongside one of Delacroix, and the difference should be clear.


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

Woodduck said:


> All general statements about art have exceptions, and tendencies and trends are merely that. That doesn't mean there are no genuine differences between eras. How would you distinguish Classical art and music from Baroque, on the one hand, and Romantic, on the other?


There are differences between eras of course and some of what you say is correct. I'm fine with the idea that classical art generally strives towards a certain formal clarity and symmetry, and even on a certain restraint of the passions relative to the romantic aesthetic. However these concepts have nothing to do with the idea of 'personal freedom' or being a subject of the monarchy and church. The ideas of formal clarity and the notion of not being ruled by one's passions originated in classical Greece. (Also where democracy originated).

*Edit* - In truth I suspect these 'classical ideals' predate the Greeks.


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

If we were to draw comparisons between these musical temperaments and personal freedom, on one hand it might seem that freedom is being able to do whatever one wants anytime they want because they 'feel' like it. (This is exactly what being ruled by one's passions means). However in reality one can observe that being ruled by one's passions leads to either A) the loss of personal freedoms of other individuals who become victimized and enslaved by the individual who wants to do whatever they feel like. Or B) an individual commits an act out of passion and suffers karma as a result, ie - jail or death.

Now I'm not saying that Romantic composers are all about being ruled by their passions. That is a simplification and it is not fair to project that concept onto all of these differing compositional voices. I'm just pointing out the _morality_ behind the classical ideal. It is valid, it predates Christianity, and at its core I think it is not about restricting freedom but widening it.

True freedom on a societal level occurs when people are willing to _strike a balance_ between their passions and morality. It is not about form over emotion, it is about self mastery and balance.

Again this is not to say that classical music is moral and romantic immoral, as pointed out aspects of these different approaches overlap into both eras, and different composers have differing musical temperaments.


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## fluteman (Dec 7, 2015)

While I think quack did a good job in explaining why the classical era in music is called classical, the question remains why impose labels for the music of various eras at all. I think terms like baroque, classical, romantic and modern can be useful as servants but are bad masters. That is, these terms can be useful shorthand to refer to certain characteristics generally present in much or most of the important music of a specific time period. 

But note that I do not say these characteristics are always present in all music of the relevant period, or never present in music of other periods. Better to acknowledge that these are only general descriptive terms and not absolute rules, otherwise one ends up in a lot of debates that aren't very useful. I don't think it's useful to argue, for example, exactly when the classical period ended and the romantic period began. Better to simply assign exact dates, so that when one refers to, say, the classical period, everyone knows exactly what is meant.

I see the classical period, which I'd define as 1750 - 1825, as a time in western music when certain well-defined forms were used and (deceptively) simple rules observed, but with great elegance, subtlety and imagination, and often in a highly complex and elaborate way, by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, and with less success by lesser composers who worked in a similar way. These include the concept of theme, development and recapitulation, for example. Charles Rosen, in his fine book The Classical Style, goes into great detail about how Mozart took this basic concept and used it to reach great heights of creativity, for example with his use of the deceptively simple technique of modulation.

But as the bard pointedly asked, "What's in a name?" I think there's no need to worry too much about the etymology of the word "classical". One could read entire books, or perhaps be satisfied with quack's post above.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

tdc said:


> There are differences between eras of course and some of what you say is correct. I'm fine with the idea that classical art generally strives towards a certain formal clarity and symmetry, and even on a certain restraint of the passions relative to the romantic aesthetic. *However these concepts have nothing to do with the idea of 'personal freedom' or being a subject of the monarchy and church.* The ideas of formal clarity and the notion of not being ruled by one's passions originated in classical Greece. (Also where democracy originated).


If we believe that artistic developments are to a significant degree the expression of cultural values and sensibilities, I think we need to look at those things in understanding such concepts as "Classicism" and "Romanticism," even in a relatively abstract medium such as music. There's always the danger of oversimplifying and making spurious connections between concurrent phenomena, but it helps to remember that it takes time for cultural change to manifest itself in art. Romanticism was a sensibility before it was an artistic movement; it manifested in literature before it did so to any great extent in music, probably because literature consists of words which can express new ideas directly.

What were the cultural changes that gave birth to Romanticism? Most conspicuously, the rise of democratic government, the bourgeois class, and the industrial revolution were all expressions of the individualism that lies at the heart of Romantic art. Interestingly, this major cultural shift took place right through the period we call "Classical," but that only looks like a contradiction. In a profound sense, Classicism and Romanticism were successive phases of a single artistic movement, evidenced by the fact that in their own day Haydn and Mozart were called "Romantic" composers. That should prompt us to look for elements of their music which expressed the new individualism, and foremost among these I would place sonata form. A scheme based on thematic contrast which permitted the creation of a narrative of conflict and resolution - a scheme in which a musical theme becomes a protagonist in a miniature drama, a story with a beginning, middle and end - turned out to be the ideal vehicle for expressing a new sense of individualism by musical means alone. And that idea was the vehicle by which Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven could, after the Baroque, take a new style of music searching for significance and make it express the powerful sense of life that was transforming Western society in their time.

How do the features of music we today call Classical, features that distinguish it from what we call Romantic, fit into this schema? Wikipedia says this about Classicism in art: "Classicism, in the arts, refers generally to a high regard for a classical period, classical antiquity in the Western tradition, as setting standards for taste which the classicists seek to emulate. In its purest form, classicism is an aesthetic attitude dependent on _principles based in the culture, art and literature of ancient Greece and Rome,_ with the emphasis on form, simplicity, proportion, clarity of structure, perfection, restrained emotion, as well as explicit appeal to the intellect." We need to remember that Western culture looked back to antiquity for inspiration at many junctures; the creation of opera was an attempt to revive the spirit of Greek drama, an attempt echoed later by Gluck and again by Wagner. Enlightenment political thought looked to Greece for a prototype of democracy (government in which every individual has agency and power), and Greek philosophy, Aristotle in particular, pointed toward an ethic based on individualistic virtues as opposed to an ethic of submission to God and God's agent, the absolute state. Thinkers and artists in the "Age of Revolution" (the mid- 18th century to the early 19th) searched for historical precedent in their opposition to the authoritarian society they were trying to overthrow, and they found Greece and Rome. Their view of antiquity was, from our perspective, romanticized, which makes almost amusing the fact that the Greek temples that inspired 18th-century buildings and adorned 18th-century gardens inspired in their contemporaries comments such as "How romantic!" It's our historical schemas, not the culture of that time, that drew a clear line between Classicism and Romanticism. Such a line may be justifiable based on a longer view of history, but that longer view ought also to make us realize that those "periods" were successive expressions of a young post-authoritarian society which affirmed the value of the autonomous, self-governing individual.


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

Of course, precise demarcation lines for artistic eras are ludicrous at best, but the fact remains that Mozart's music is unlike that of Liszt, and Liszt's music unlike that of Debussy, and Debussy's music unlike that of Xenakis. And it remains that Mozart, Liszt, Debussy, and Xenakis are highly recognizable, at least to most of us here at this Forum. Each of these composers hails from what we identify (if only for sake of convenience) as a different period of music and certainly from a different time period, one which was shaped by philosophical thought generated by way of world events, industrial and technological and social advances, and resultant works and influences of artists and thinkers. Mozart, I will contend, proves one of the most imaginative minds in the history of human accomplishment, yet, I will also contend, he was incapable of imagining any work composed by Liszt, Debussy, or Xenakis. (Okay, maybe we can take Liszt off the list, as the composer has written some music, mostly in the religious vein, that Mozart could possibly have identified with. But that is moreso because Liszt knew Mozart's music. Debussy and Xenakis, I suspect, had skills enough to mimic Mozart's style, but I certainly wonder if Mozart could ever have comprehended anything by Xenakis as being even identifiable as "music".)

Artists of any genre do not create in a vacuum. The best of them have vast awareness of the past. This knowledge, coupled with their unique imaginative bents combines to create what we identify as "the new". And "the new" is always anchored in the old, or the past. Even those most radical of artists, the ones who seem to eschew all of what had come before, prove consciously reactionary by attempting to avoid past influences. I suspect that no artist can truly throw off past connections and create a "new thing" that has no tentacles to what has come before. 

Which is one of the reasons I get annoyed at Modern Art museums or contemporary music concerts when I hear someone say something akin to "I could do that!" Splash paint randomly on a canvas. Plunk down piano keys with seemingly no set pattern or concern for melody or harmony. Of course, my challenge to such nay-sayers is "Go ahead, then, and create something completely new in the art form." Avoid all past influences in your creation, which means you cannot just splash paint at random (It's been done!) or plunk down piano keys without a pattern in mind (It's been done.). 

It always remains, of course, to some degree or another, that the definition of "art" derives from the audience (society at large) and not just from designations of an "artist". This is the power of art. It helps define us and our world. If art didn't change, the world wouldn't change. If the world didn't change, art would not change. But the world will continue to change, and so will art, as long as we humans retain that fundamental quality of ours -- our very humanness itself.

Music (and, in general, art) fans need not get too hung up in labels such as "Classicism" or "Romanticism" or "Impressionism" or "Modernism". These are simply convenient designations that assure us we are still human. I, for one, am thankful for that.


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## fluteman (Dec 7, 2015)

Good points by Woodduck and Sonnet CLV. As for "form, simplicity, proportion, clarity of structure, perfection, restrained emotion, as well as explicit appeal to the intellect" mentioned by Woodduck, it's worth remembering that in the classical style at its best, simplicity, in particular, is a bit of a ruse. The Parthenon in Athens looks at first glance like a simple rectangular box supported by cylindrical columns. However there are almost no perfectly straight lines or right angles, but rather various subtle "irregularities" designed to give the optical effect of proportion, clarity of structure and perfection. Mozart's music is very much in that tradition.

A similar point could be made about the abstract impressionist paintings alluded to by Sonnet CLV. In a recent thread I discussed a large "drip painting" by Jackson Pollock, and how difficult and time-consuming it was for him to create its (to me) striking, even unsettling, effect. A typical five-year old would be hard-pressed to reproduce it. Similarly, much of the music of Pierre Boulez, whatever one thinks of it, is the product of an immensely complex and intricate system of organization, not the random plunking of piano keys with no pattern. The concept of randomness or indeterminacy does appear in some modern music, but is far from a dominant concept.

Different systems of organization or structure is one of the main things that distinguishes one artistic movement from another.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

fluteman said:


> Different systems of organization or structure is one of the main things that distinguishes one artistic movement from another.


Always looking for reasons, causes and correlations, I like to try to figure out why different ways of structuring music appear and predominate in different cultures and eras. Staying with the Classical period, it's interesting to note that elaborately contrapuntal music, music in "learned" style, was largely confined to works written specifically for the church and religious functions, which continued to be virtually the only place one could hear the polyphonic choral and organ works of Baroque and Renaissance composers. In secular music the desired style was basically homophonic (melody and accompaniment) even in large-scale works like symphonies and concertos. Granting the inherent conservatism of religious institutions and the expected attachment to traditional music, I see a basic correlation between polyphony (the subordination of the individual voice to the collective) and the older, authoritarian societal regime on the one hand, and between the emancipation of the individual melody and the new, more anti-authoritarian or individualist outlook on the other.


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## Luchesi (Mar 15, 2013)

fluteman said:


> While I think quack did a good job in explaining why the classical era in music is called classical, the question remains why impose labels for the music of various eras at all. I think terms like baroque, classical, romantic and modern can be useful as servants but are bad masters. That is, these terms can be useful shorthand to refer to certain characteristics generally present in much or most of the important music of a specific time period.
> 
> But note that I do not say these characteristics are always present in all music of the relevant period, or never present in music of other periods. Better to acknowledge that these are only general descriptive terms and not absolute rules, otherwise one ends up in a lot of debates that aren't very useful. I don't think it's useful to argue, for example, exactly when the classical period ended and the romantic period began. Better to simply assign exact dates, so that when one refers to, say, the classical period, everyone knows exactly what is meant.
> 
> ...


Well said. Categories and categorization are important for teaching in the arts (and in the sciences), but the goal of the student should be to rise a little bit above all the wordage. Learn the concepts and then learn the exceptions and contradictions.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

Woodduck said:


> Staying with the Classical period, it's interesting to note that elaborately contrapuntal music, music in "learned" style, was largely confined to works written specifically for the church and religious functions, which continued to be virtually the only place one could hear the polyphonic choral and organ works of Baroque and Renaissance composers.


In the genre of string quartets though, the story was a little different. This article discusses how the early classical string quartet was divided in parts by the old and the new styles. But later in the era, the old and new fused to form a new language, _thematische Arbeit_.

https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lecture/transcript/print/mozart-quartet-in-c-major-k465-dissonance/
"... Let's move now to the work that concerns us this week, Mozart's so-called 'Dissonance' quartet, written in the mid-1780s, when he was at the height of his short-lived career in Vienna and only five or so years before his untimely death. This date might seem to take us back nearly to the origins of the genre, but in fact a great deal of ground had been covered in the short time since string quartets had emerged at about the middle of the century. Mozart himself had written more than a dozen youthful quartets before the set of six to which the 'Dissonance' belongs, ones typical of the earliest examples in the genre. From our perspective today, they seem peculiarly divided in style. On the one hand, most movements are dominated by a very simple texture, with a clear melody line in the first violin and a clear bass in the cello, and with the inner two parts involved in functional accompaniment figures. This was the modern style of the time: a radical simplicity of effect when compared to the music of Bach and his contemporaries a generation earlier. On the other hand, though, certain movements are in the form of elaborate, Bach-like fugues, with absolute equality between all four instruments. As I said, this mixture sounds strange to us, a clashing of the old and the new, but it was not necessarily so at the time, when (after all) fugal writing persisted in certain musical genres (notably religious ones) all the way through the eighteenth and even the nineteenth centuries.

However, the set of six quartets that Mozart wrote in the first half of the 1780s, to which the 'Dissonance' belongs, is very different, and the differences come precisely in the absence of that clear division between 'old-style' counterpoint and 'new-style' melody and accompaniment. The string quartet, at least in the hands of Mozart, found a new balance, one sometimes associated the very ideals of the Enlightenment. It is as if the elements of old-style fugal writing, with its strict independence of the voices, has somehow been combined with the new-style, melody-and-bass simplicity, in a 'modern' texture which has obvious elements of melody and accompaniment, but which constantly injects into this a sense of independence among the parts. No single instrument accompanies for very long: each of them plays an essential part in both the melodic development and its accompaniment. People near the time gave this new, more complex texture a severe-sounding German name; they called it _thematische Arbeit_, thematic working - all elements of the ensemble are independent (and individual), but each works with the others to produce the total effect.

How did this revolution come about? Mozart gives as a broad hint in his dedication to the published version of the six quartets, which came out in 1785. He said that the quartets had been 'the fruit of a long and laborious endeavour' (and this much can be borne out by a glance at his autograph score, which sits less than a mile away from here in the British Library, and is full of evidence of second thoughts and improvements). And he dedicated them to 'a very celebrated Man' who is 'at the same time his best Friend'. The man was none other than Joseph Haydn, and there's plenty of evidence that Haydn's recent collections of quartets, in particular his Op. 33, were part of the inspiration for this new burst of _thematische Arbeit_ that Mozart indulged in these quartets. I say 'part of' because these musical developments weren't merely being passed between two great men: a gathering complexity of musical language, a rebelling against the simple melody-and-bass regime, was being felt in many genres, and in the work of many composers. ..."


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

hammeredklavier said:


> In the genre of string quartets though, the story was a little different. This article discusses how the early classical string quartet was divided in parts by the old and the new styles. But later in the era, the old and new fused to form a new language, _thematische Arbeit_.


The issue I was addressing was not whether counterpoint is present, but whether it's primary or necessary to the distinctive sensibilty and musical forms and genres of the time. The string quartet - four voices with timbral homogeneity - naturally invites contrapuntal writing, so it isn't surprising to find more of it in that genre than in symphonies, concertos, and other typical Classical works.

Classical and Romantic composers never lost interest in counterpoint; it presented a technical challenge, at least, and they found fresh expressive uses it for, from the demonic fugues of Beethoven to the polyphonic weaving of chromatic lines in Wagner. But extensive "strict" counterpoint was already becoming archaic in Mozart's time and remained so for the Romantics; in the 19th century it's either part of a "sacred" work or it's a rather obvious - sometimes too obvious - device for working up energy in development sections (or, in _Meistersinger,_ a cheerful middle finger flipped at the Beckmessers who thought RW was destroying music in _Tristan_).


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