Klarinet Archive - Posting 000324.txt from 1998/06

From: Neil Leupold <nleupold@-----.edu>
Subj: Re: [kl] Serious music and entertainment
Date: Tue, 9 Jun 1998 01:58:44 -0400

On Mon, 8 Jun 1998, Lee Hickling wrote:

> and I think he's right. I'm bothered too. Beethoven is classical. Handel
> and Mozart are not. They're baroque. Tschaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov are
> not. They're romantic. Bach, of course, is uncategorizable. Stravinsky is
> not classical. He's an early modernist. And so on. But "periods" and dates
> are unreliable, because Borodin is clearly a romantic, born out of his time..

Beethoven was a transitional figure, both Classical and Romantic,
this illustrated particularly well in his opus of early, middle,
and late string quartets, as well as such symphonies as Eroica.
If the general chronological dividers are afforded any meaning,
Mozart was in the early Classical period, which spans approximately
1750 -1850. Handel should be mentioned not alongside Mozart, but
rather with Bach. Both were born in the same year, the former
living 9 years longer than the latter, and both are considered
the epitome of the Baroque period, approx. 1650-1750. There is
some question regarding the placement of Tchaikovsky in the Roman-
tic period, despite the years in which he lived, due to his in-
ability to incorporate the organicism of the Romantic period in-
to his music like, say, Schumann or Brahms. He retained a great
deal of balance and proportion, characteristic more of the Classical
century. The rub of the issue is to characterize based upon the
nature of the music rather than when it was written. As far as
the label of "Classical" to all art music is concerned, I've come
to understand it as a useful generic term for discussions where
other genres of music bear equal weight (i.e.; jazz, rock, etc.).
When discourse centers on the periods as taught in schools of music
around the world, then the distinction becomes plainly germain and
one can not bandy the term "Classical" about indiscriminately.

Neil

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