# The etymology of the eras...



## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

I think that labelling eras in music have some uses, but like everything they have their limitations.

A quick googling of the meaning (etymology) of certain era labels resulted in explanations of these era labels. I'm inviting you all to read these and talk about things like this:

- Do you think these labels are good descriptors for the eras in question?
- Do they clarify or confuse things for you? Do they make sense or are they just useless jargon?
- What are the ones that work for you, what are the ones that don't?
- Are these labels set in stone? Should they be? Would you suggest any improved labels for some eras?
- Can you think of some other era labels? What about them?

I invite discussion about all things related to this, which I think is quite important to many debates we have on TC, at least in terms of discussions of eras and all meanings we attach to them. I put this on Classical Music Discussion section (since that's the focus of our regular discussions of eras here) but feel free to bring into this thread the other arts if you wish.

*Renaissance* (Renaissance era, 14th to 17th centuries) 
_Renaissance (n.) - "great period of revival of classical-based art and learning in Europe that began in the fourteenth century," 1840, from French renaissance des lettres, from Old French renaissance, literally "rebirth,"...
...An earlier term for it was revival of learning (1785). In general usage, with a lower-case r-, "a revival" of anything that has long been in decay or disuse (especially of learning, literature, art), it is attested from 1872. Renaissance man is first recorded 1906._ (Source: Online Etymology Dictionary)

*Baroque* (Baroque era, c.1600 - c. 1730's).
_According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word baroque is derived from the Portuguese word "barroco", Spanish "barroco", or French "baroque", all of which refer to a "rough or imperfect pearl", though whether it entered those languages via Latin, Arabic, or some other source is uncertain._ (Source: Wikipedia)

*Rococo era *(Rococo era, c. 1730's to late 18th century).
_The word Rococo is seen as a combination of the French rocaille, meaning stone, and coquilles, meaning shell, due to reliance on these objects as motifs of decoration. The term Rococo may also be interpreted as a combination of the Italian word "barocco" (an irregularly shaped pearl, possibly the source of the word "baroque") and the French "rocaille" (a popular form of garden or interior ornamentation using shells and pebbles), and may be used to describe the refined and fanciful style that became fashionable in parts of Europe during the eighteenth century._ (Source: Wikipedia)

*Modern* (Modern era, 20th century - beginning and end dates debatable/unclear?)
_modern (adj.) c.1500, "now existing;" 1580s, "of or pertaining to present or recent times;" from Middle French moderne (15c.) and directly from Late Latin modernus "modern" (Priscian, Cassiodorus), from Latin modo "just now, in a (certain) manner," from modo (adv.) "to the measure," ablative of modus "manner, measure" (see mode (n.1)). Extended form modern-day attested from 1909.

In Shakespeare, often with a sense of "every-day, ordinary, commonplace." Slang abbreviation mod first attested 1960. Modern art is from 1807 (by contrast to ancient); modern dance first attested 1912; first record of modern jazz is from 1954. Modern conveniences first recorded 1926.
modern (n.) 1580s, "person of the present time" (contrasted to ancient, from modern (adj.). From 1897 as "one who is up to date."_ (Source: Online Etymology Dictionary)


----------



## brotagonist (Jul 11, 2013)

The typical breakdown I usually see, ancient, renaissance, baroque, classical, romantic, modern, works for me. I am familiar with the term rococco, but have never been able to associate it with a style distinct from baroque. Modern becomes somewhat problematic, as it includes all post-romantic trends that do not coalesce into as homogeneous a whole as the earlier 'styles' would appear to. Still, it is workable.

For me, these labels make music easier to understand. Name a composer and tell me the period he is from and I have a reasonable idea of roughly the kind of music he was writing.


----------



## Weston (Jul 11, 2008)

Now that you mention it it may be time to reconsiders some of those labels.

I too have trouble with Rococo. It may make more sense in the visual arts than in music. I've always used the term "galante," probably not accurately, to describe the movement away from polyphony that led to the reign of form in the classic period.

I've never liked the origin of "baroque," never thinking of it as flawed in any way, but what can you do? It's pretty much the agreed upon term for one of the longest periods in the history of art and music. It's entrenched. 

"Modern" seems a silly term for a work over a hundred years old. Maybe we should call much of the 20th century the Angst period. And refer to the time we are in now as "new music" until we get some distance on it. It's commonly called that anyway in some circles.

Renaissance is a beautiful word that fits perfectly to me. Classic and romantic are fine terms too.


----------



## Ramako (Apr 28, 2012)

One obvious issue is that in music it is the Baroque which is associated with the revival of Classical art, since opera, central to the Baroque in its earliest days, was deliberately supposed to be a resurrection of the old Greek dramas. In this sense it closer to the renaissance in art...

Romantic makes a lot of sense once you get used to it... Although in many ways I think Romanticism in music died in about 1850 with Chopin, who was very obviously a 'romantic' composer (as opposed to just emotional) in the way that Byron was 'romantic', but perhaps this is due to parallels with the other arts.

Classical has often been called a problematic term, because it necessarily implies a grand status. A classic is something which is necessarily good. This to me however is a semantic pedantry and paranoia of the worst kind, and it is a perfectly useful term, which at least has the advantage of not being an obvious contradiction in the way that 'modern' is.


----------



## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Thanks to all, but I just got time to reply to Weston's thoughts.



Weston said:


> ...
> 
> I too have trouble with Rococo. It may make more sense in the visual arts than in music. I've always used the term "galante," probably not accurately, to describe the movement away from polyphony that led to the reign of form in the classic period.


Well since I created this thread in haste, I agree galante would be better. It means a similar thing to Rococo but more often applied to music. I just looked at the wikipedia article on galante and it mentions Watteau's _fetes galantes._ These where parties for the aristocracy in the open air in pre-revolutionary France. How many of these are on cd covers of Mozart, Haydn, Boccherini and so on? I can imagine their music as soundtracks, indeed being composed for purposes of, accompaniment to these parties. So yeah, galante would have been more apt, but I'll leave it as it is.












> ...
> "Modern" seems a silly term for a work over a hundred years old. Maybe we should call much of the 20th century the Angst period. And refer to the time we are in now as "new music" until we get some distance on it. It's commonly called that anyway in some circles.


Yes Modern for me is the most innacurate, the one of least utility. I love the quote by Peter Warlock, which I've mentioned on TC before, "All old music was modern once, and much more of the music of yesterday already sounds more old-fashioned than works which were written three centuries ago."



> Renaissance is a beautiful word that fits perfectly to me...


I like Renaissance man, an offshoot of the word, which means a guy who can do many things. Many composers where like that, they where experts at music but also many other areas of knowledge, but also just many other areas of life.


----------



## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

brotagonist said:


> ...Modern becomes somewhat problematic, as it includes all *post-romantic trends *that do not coalesce into as homogeneous a whole as the earlier 'styles' would appear to. Still, it is workable.
> 
> ....


RE all that, I'd also add that the addtion of 'Post' to some of these labels to mean something different is also an issue here. But how or what is different can be vague and again the dates fudgy. So you got Post-Romantic and Post-Modern. You've also got High or Late. High Baroque or Late Romantic. I just thought I'd bring these into the discussion too, since I think they're relevant.


----------



## starry (Jun 2, 2009)

Labels are sometimes applied later and so are the view from later periods of an earlier period of music rather than from the perspective of when the music was actually composed. So this could tell us less sometimes about what the composers or audience at the time thought than what people later thought. Sometimes of course it does arise from a contemporary view, 'modern' would fit that. It would fit into the modern new era that people saw the 20th century as embodying. Though that move into a world of technology really started earlier in the 19th century at least.


----------



## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

Richard Taruskin, from volume 1 of the Oxford History of Western Music:



> "Baroque" is a term that musicians do not need. Trying to justify it in any terms that actually relate to the music of the period has never led to anything but quibbling sophistry and tergiversation. All it is now is a commercial logo for a kind of "classical music" that record companies and radio stations market as sonic wallpaper. Let's try to forget it.


tergiversation, indeed!
He goes on to suggest that "the continuo age" might be the best name, as the use of basso continuo was a constant factor throughout the period.


----------



## Garlic (May 3, 2013)

The labels may be useful for musicologists, but I don't have much use for them. Is Beethoven classical or romantic? Is Debussy romantic, impressionist or modern? What does it matter? The labels are always after the fact, the composers didn't think of their music in those terms.


----------



## Klavierspieler (Jul 16, 2011)

Frankly, my dear, I don't give a d---.


----------



## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

I don't know enough about music history so I'm approaching the term 'Renaissance' from the point of view of history and the other arts. It is an entrenched term, generally well-understood & I don't suggest altering it. However, it has always been open to caricature and that is the way I was taught about it as a child: the narrow, know-nothing middle ages was kicked into touch by the glorious light of the rediscovery of the classics. This makes 'renaissance' a bit of a sneer, and in fact the 'new learning' & all that it implies is increasingly being traced right back into the middle ages by modern historians...

PS - Reading the original post, I see the dates for renaissance are 14th to 17th century, which shows the influence of the revisionist view that I mention above. When I studied 'Renaissance & Reformation' for A-level history in the 1960s, the dates were 1450-1610.


----------



## Weston (Jul 11, 2008)

Sid James said:


> Well since I created this thread in haste, I agree galante would be better. It means a similar thing to Rococo but more often applied to music.


No disrespect for your thoughtful thread, my friend. Only for the term, in case there was confusion.


----------



## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

starry said:


> Labels are sometimes applied later and so are the view from later periods of an earlier period of music rather than from the perspective of when the music was actually composed. ....





Garlic said:


> ....The labels are always after the fact, the composers didn't think of their music in those terms.


Yes, hindsight, in retrospect, all that - agreed! It all keeps changing as well.



Ingenue said:


> I don't know enough about music history so I'm approaching the term 'Renaissance' from the point of view of history and the other arts. It is an entrenched term, generally well-understood & I don't suggest altering it. However, it has always been open to caricature and that is the way I was taught about it as a child: the narrow, know-nothing middle ages was kicked into touch by the glorious light of the rediscovery of the classics. This makes 'renaissance' a bit of a sneer, and in fact the 'new learning' & all that it implies is increasingly being traced right back into the middle ages by modern historians...


Yes, the Middle Ages or even as they used to call it, Dark Ages, where not literally dark and without any learning. Of course, the invention of the printing press during the Renaissance era was a big deal, but earlier you had knowledge except it was more guarded by the church and aristocracy, the elites. That was the feudal system. In many small towns, priests where the only literate people, and this continued in many cases way beyond the Middle Ages (even into the 20th century in less developed European countries).



> ...
> PS - Reading the original post, I see the dates for renaissance are 14th to 17th century, which shows the influence of the revisionist view that I mention above. When I studied 'Renaissance & Reformation' for A-level history in the 1960s, the dates were 1450-1610.


My dates where just approximations, and of course its always debatable. But I didn't take long to do my opening post. It was a googling/wiki job, for once I didn't consult any books! Your point is taken, again!



Nereffid said:


> ....
> He goes on to suggest that "the continuo age" might be the best name, as the use of basso continuo was a constant factor throughout the period.


The continuo age sounds good. As for Weston's earlier (kind of half joking?) renaming of Modern era as Angst era, I would suggest something like the Mosaic era. Due to the increased diversity of music in the 20th century, unparalleled compared to eras before it. All the splintering of styles, and also increased fragmentation of many types of music (eg. the breakdown of tonality). Also, it would take in the radical experimentations which occured after 1945 (eg. electronic music and so on), and you could unite what we call Modernism and Post Modernism under the Mosaic era. Just a thought!


----------



## Taggart (Feb 14, 2013)

Ingenue said:


> PS - Reading the original post, I see the dates for renaissance are 14th to 17th century, which shows the influence of the revisionist view that I mention above. When I studied 'Renaissance & Reformation' for A-level history in the 1960s, the dates were 1450-1610.


The OP gives the Baroque dates as 1600 -1730 with Rococo coming in from 1730. Trouble is the "renaissance" style or stile antico persevered well into the 18th Century with composers imitating the modal style of the renaissance as exemplified in Fux's Gradus ad Parnassum - a counterpoint workbook. In fact in Catholic musical circles e.g. Langlais' Messe en style ancien this persists into the 20th century, although it is also informed by the developments in chant pioneered by Solesmes.

This sort of persistence makes any classification extremely difficult. When Bach was at Leipzig he made regular use of Erhard Bodenschatz's Florilegium Portense, an anthology of 16th-century German and Italian motets. In his Mass in B minor he placed stile antico passages in positions of structural significance. Yet we would in other works -WTC or Goldberg variations think of Bach as a Baroque composer.

So how useful *are *these categories except as a starting point?


----------



## Wood (Feb 21, 2013)

Sid James said:


> Yes, the Middle Ages or even as they used to call it, Dark Ages,


I'm pretty certain that I was taught that the Dark Ages went from the withdrawal of the Romans from Britain until the Middle Ages began in 1066 with the relative sophistication of the Normans, ie they were not they same thing at all.

Yet as I read what I have just written, I can see what an Anglocentric view of history that is.


----------



## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

hayd said:


> I'm pretty certain that I was taught that the Dark Ages went from the withdrawal of the Romans from Britain until the Middle Ages began in 1066 with the relative sophistication of the Normans, ie they were not they same thing at all.
> 
> ...


Yes, it could be pre-Medieval era, but I think also early Medieval. I'm in the dark about all this era stuff, well before Baroque especially! Its not my area but I must emphasise what I wrote in the OP, the categories I described and put dates to, was largely meant to stimulate debate and people's thoughts.

& btw I see yet another thread has been made on Modern music, dissonance and all that. I think that this kind of analysis of the meaning behind those kinds of words, and what we attach to them individually and collectively, is good. Not in a pedantic way, more in an exploratory and sharing of ideas way, that is.


----------



## starry (Jun 2, 2009)

hayd said:


> I'm pretty certain that I was taught that the Dark Ages went from the withdrawal of the Romans from Britain until the Middle Ages began in 1066 with the relative sophistication of the Normans, ie they were not they same thing at all.
> 
> Yet as I read what I have just written, I can see what an Anglocentric view of history that is.


I think The Middle Ages are considered to have started earlier than that, that period itself gets divided between early and late/high anyway. The Dark Ages was after the Romans left, although there have been documentaries questioning how dark that period actually was anyway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Ages
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)


----------



## Guest (Jul 22, 2013)

Sid James said:


> As for Weston's earlier (kind of half joking?) renaming of Modern era as Angst era, I would suggest something like the Mosaic era. Due to the increased diversity of music in the 20th century, unparalleled compared to eras before it. All the splintering of styles, and also increased fragmentation of many types of music (eg. the breakdown of tonality). Also, it would take in the radical experimentations which occured after 1945 (eg. electronic music and so on), and you could unite what we call Modernism and Post Modernism under the Mosaic era. Just a thought!


I think the Schoenberg and his followers and imitators should be called the Modernist era - they were making a point of shocking their audiences with new sounds and structures. A cult of novelty if you will. Anything to differentiate themselves from the already saturated field of romantic music.

And as your "mosaic" name suggests, after the modernists (and impressionists) there is a complete breakdown of unity. Some continued to push modernism sometimes to bizarre extremes, some retained loyalty to the romantic or impressionist approach, others took an eclectic approach by trying to mix and match various styles of classical music, national folk music, jazz, electronic, etc. Others pushed deeper into world or ethnic music, while others have tried to reconstruct the music of ancient cultures.

I would call it the eclectic era. Although not every composer chooses to write eclectic music, every composer defines himself one way or another in the face of a bewildering array of stylistic choices. Some may stick to one tried-and-true style, some may try to form hybrid styles, some may try to develop new styles to add to the mix, etc.

But I think the "age of fragmentation" is more apt. Fragmentation even implies some angst. Unfortunately, it sounds funny calling someone a fragmented composer (as opposed to a romantic composer).

Personally, early - baroque - classical - romantic - modernist - fragmented works for me.


----------



## Guest (Jul 22, 2013)

Ramako said:


> ....Although in many ways I think Romanticism in music died in about 1850 with Chopin, who was very obviously a 'romantic' composer (as opposed to just emotional) in the way that Byron was 'romantic', but perhaps this is due to parallels with the other arts.


I find this curious, since I have a lot of music in my collection written after 1850 that I would call romantic. If you cut off Romanticism in 1850, what do you call later music by the likes of Glazunov or Dvorak or Vaughn Williams or Franck or Brahms?

Do you propose another category that comes between romanticism and modernism?


----------



## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

BPS said:


> ...
> And as your "mosaic" name suggests, after the modernists (and impressionists) there is a complete breakdown of unity. Some continued to push modernism sometimes to bizarre extremes, some retained loyalty to the romantic or impressionist approach, others took an eclectic approach by trying to mix and match various styles of classical music, national folk music, jazz, electronic, etc. Others pushed deeper into world or ethnic music, while others have tried to reconstruct the music of ancient cultures.
> 
> I would call it the eclectic era. Although not every composer chooses to write eclectic music, every composer defines himself one way or another in the face of a bewildering array of stylistic choices. Some may stick to one tried-and-true style, some may try to form hybrid styles, some may try to develop new styles to add to the mix, etc.


Well I think mosaic is only held together by them all living in the same century, the 20th century. They are divided but they do make up some sort of whole.

But on the same tack, regarding the eras of 'movements' in the arts, are they over? So in painting, you had the Surrealist movement for example, starting in Europe (esp. in Paris, around Andre Breton, the theorist of the movement), and it spread around the world. Other things like this happened, but now are there any things to neatly box movements like this? Are there any such movements, or are they just eddies and currents, general trends, fly by night bandwagon stuff. Do they last?

These are just thoughts and they feed into eclecticism too. For some, its a dirty word. I've been accused by some members here, in my earlier time here on TC, of liking everything. That's not true but I've been caricatured as that. So okay, its a label. & creative artists are wary of that kind of 'smear' of being too eclectic as well, a Jack of all Trades. In some respects, if you're too eclectic, you end up being everything except yourself. But what about guys like Stravinsky, with all his stylistic changes. Can he be called an eclectic? I think yes.



> ....
> But I think the "age of fragmentation" is more apt. Fragmentation even implies some angst. Unfortunately, it sounds funny calling someone a fragmented composer (as opposed to a romantic composer).
> 
> So, medieval - renaissance - baroque - classical - romantic - modernist - fragmented works for me.


Well there was fragmentation, a lot of it, in the 20th century. & also now of course. But not all composers went for that, or for pushing that to an extreme. Some like Penderecki, Gorecki, Part, and so on went back to tradition quite strongly. Some of the others earlier did as well in later life (eg. Bartok, Prokofiev, even Schoenberg). So fragmentation is more about diversity than move away from tradition.


----------



## Guest (Jul 23, 2013)

We need a new term. I propose sidjamesian!


----------



## Taggart (Feb 14, 2013)

If you want to split things up, you could use a division something like this

Modal Music - Pre 1600

Movement to CPE tonality 1600 - 1700
Standard well tempered tonality 1700 - 1750

Both of these are characterised by (usually) a single tonal centre and limited cadences (very simplistic)

Classical developments in tonality 1750 - 1820
Romantic developments in tonality 1810 onwards

Both of these are characterised by increasing use of modulation and clear use of cadences to set the tonal picture (very simplistic)

The abandonment of tonality 1870 onwards

This is where it gets messy. What I'm trying to say is that by about 1870, composers were now modulating so far from the initial key that they were becoming almost chromatic. Some composers embraced this and made it a system - second Vienna School for example - others went in other directions - folk tunes, American music, back into history - Górecki’s Three Pieces in Old Style or Donaudy’s Arie di stile antico.

The problem is that we haven't established a "modern style" - nobody seems clear about what music is and what you should be doing in the way that we seem to have had a clear pattern of what music was in other eras. 

But equally when we look at the moguchaya kuchka (famous five) we see that even then there was a considerable difference about what music was and should be. We see this in Handel - a German, living in England and writing Italian Operas. We need to analyse the past to see where we could be going.


----------



## Garlic (May 3, 2013)

BPS said:


> I think the Schoenberg and his followers and imitators should be called the Modernist era - they were making a point of shocking their audiences with new sounds and structures. A cult of novelty if you will. Anything to differentiate themselves from the already saturated field of romantic music.
> 
> And as your "mosaic" name suggests, after the modernists (and impressionists) there is a complete breakdown of unity. Some continued to push modernism sometimes to bizarre extremes, some retained loyalty to the romantic or impressionist approach, others took an eclectic approach by trying to mix and match various styles of classical music, national folk music, jazz, electronic, etc. Others pushed deeper into world or ethnic music, while others have tried to reconstruct the music of ancient cultures.
> 
> I would call it the eclectic era. Although not every composer chooses to write eclectic music, every composer defines himself one way or another in the face of a bewildering array of stylistic choices. Some may stick to one tried-and-true style, some may try to form hybrid styles, some may try to develop new styles to add to the mix, etc..


I couldn't disagree more about the second Viennese school. Their music is an extension of romanticism, not a reaction against it. The notion that composers explore new ideas simply to shock their audience is silly.

I agree about being in the age of eclecticism. IMO, music is all the better for it.


----------



## Tristan (Jan 5, 2013)

Garlic said:


> The labels may be useful for musicologists, but I don't have much use for them. Is Beethoven classical or romantic? Is Debussy romantic, impressionist or modern? What does it matter? The labels are always after the fact, the composers didn't think of their music in those terms.


Agreed, especially since a lot of my favorite composers, like Weber and Rimsky-Korsakov, are "cusp" composers and it's hard to classify them into one period...


----------



## ClassicalCumulus (Jul 24, 2013)

I've never had a problem with the era labels, although, I've always found myself disappointed with the lack of them - opposed to painting; literature; sculpture etc. I'm a fan of comparing, so the fact that the classical music eras are SO large without many subcategories interspersed is disconcerting for me. 

Perhaps I am naive! I would love to see a detailed timeline on the matter.


----------



## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

ClassicalCumulus said:


> I've never had a problem with the era labels, although, I've always found myself disappointed with the lack of them - opposed to painting; literature; sculpture etc. I'm a fan of comparing, so the fact that the classical music eras are SO large without many subcategories interspersed is disconcerting for me.
> 
> Perhaps I am naive! I would love to see a detailed timeline on the matter.


Well there are these in the 20th century:

Impressionism
Neo-Classicism
Neo-Romanticism
Minimalism
Serialism

Things like this have various offshoots of course. Eg. Post-Minimalism and Post-Serialism. I see serialism as more a technique than a "style" per se though.

You also got groups of composers like the French Les Six or the Second (or Modern) Viennese School.

You also got these which mean little to me, are like semantics cliches, even composers don't seem to know what they mean:
New Complexity
New Simplicity

However when all these labels mix up (the eclectic thing), group type labels are impossible and probably not useful anyway. A look at the changes Stravinsky did, but so too Bartok and also Schoenberg - for example - may illustrate my point. They moved from one thing to another.


----------



## Xaltotun (Sep 3, 2010)

Nothing wrong about these terms, they are in fact incredibly useful, because they link music to wider cultural history and give it some context. It's not a matter of putting all composers into neat little boxes; it's a matter of recognizing that the boxes exist independently, whether any actual composers fit into them or not (most do, at least partially).


----------



## ClassicalCumulus (Jul 24, 2013)

Thanks, Sid.

It's interesting that more labels emerged out of the 20th c. than any of the previous ones. After conducting a very (very) brief research on literature and painting periods, it seems as if there's a universal outpouring of genres no matter the art form. This makes me want to broach the topic of _globalization_ and how it affects creative output..


----------



## Eschbeg (Jul 25, 2012)

The pre-20th century period terms are relatively unproblematic when they are used to designate a chronological period. It's when they are used to designate a style that we run into problems. Contrary to what was stated above, knowing the name of a composer and period he's associated with is a far from reliable way of inferring even a general idea of what their music sounds like. Notker and DeVitry were both from the medieval period, but any stylistic similarities one might be tempted to infer based on that fact alone would be mighty fantastical indeed. The word "Renaissance" was invented to describe the perceived rebirth of ancient Greek ideals in 14th-century Italian literature; what does that tell us about the music of Dunstaple?

The 20th century seems to me to have the opposite problem: all those -isms Sid James mentioned above are more useful as stylistic designations rather than chronological designations. That's why a lot of composers could be grouped under several of those terms.


----------



## starry (Jun 2, 2009)

The more styles there are perhaps the more the danger there is of only a superficial exploration of them. So I don't think it has to be a bad thing for music to go a while exploring a particular style until the possibilies are more explored.


----------



## pluhagr (Jan 2, 2012)

Well music is currently not in the modern era any more. That ended around 1960-1980 when post-modernism came about. Post-modern theory is a lot about fragmentation and deconstruction. I believe the correct term for music from around the 1970's onward would be contemporary music. In art history there are two distinct periods modern and contemporary.


----------



## science (Oct 14, 2010)

I think pluhagr's right about modern/contemporary. But in 60 years, "contemporary" might have turned into a term describing the period from 1968 or so to 2025 or so.... 

Words change meanings over time. Etymology is often very interesting, and occasionally enlightening, but it can be taken too seriously: "Romantic" came from "Romance" (the literary genre) and "Roman" (for "novel" in the sense of long prose fiction), which came from "Rome" (the city), which probably came from the ancient name of the Tiber River, which came from the Indo-European word for "to flow." 

And it will not surprise me in the least if someone connects "to flow" with the melodies of Tchaikovsky... and then argues that therefore most of Brahms' music, without such "flowing" melodies, is not truly "romantic." 

In a way we suffer from too much self-knowledge. We distinguish between rap and electronica and a fusion jazz and ten thousand other genres, that in a century or two (if there are people who know and care) will probably be crammed together into some other label like "audio" or something. (Made that up. Guessing that maybe in the future recorded music without accompanying visuals will be considered a throwback to the "audio era." Hey, why not? It's as good a guess as any.)


----------



## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

starry said:


> The more styles there are perhaps the more the danger there is of only a superficial exploration of them. So I don't think it has to be a bad thing for music to go a while exploring a particular style until the possibilies are more explored.


Which brings to mind the different types of "Romantic" composer, or of "Modern" era and so on. Speaks to what science says about comparing Brahms and Tchaikovsky, too. I think they are good but have their limitations like anything. Its good to be aware of these limitations, these things are general descriptors, there's subtletly, difference, nuance when one digs a little further and gets to know more things from the same era.

But still, to me "Modern" is of little use. In my opening post, I quoted sources showing how far back that word goes. Hundreds of years. Its time I think "Modern era" should be jettisoned. My suggestion to replace it was "Mosaic era" but that's just a thought, one possibility of many perhaps.


----------



## pluhagr (Jan 2, 2012)

Sid James said:


> But still, to me "Modern" is of little use. In my opening post, I quoted sources showing how far back that word goes. Hundreds of years. Its time I think "Modern era" should be jettisoned. My suggestion to replace it was "Mosaic era" but that's just a thought, one possibility of many perhaps.


The problem with this replacement is that there are other modern periods in other disciplines. For example, in philosophy the modern period occurred in the 17th century. 
While your mosaic theory is nice I still think that there are distinct delineations in the 20th century which allow us to separate it into modern and post-modern. This is supported with the writings of critical theorists and philosophers. I would also suggest another era after post-modernism. There are some artists and thinkers who are eschewing post-modern thought for something more honest. This is post-post-modernism or metamodernism.


----------

