Klarinet Archive - Posting 000331.txt from 1998/06

From: Lee Hickling <hickling@-----.Net>
Subj: Re: [kl] Serious music and entertainment
Date: Tue, 9 Jun 1998 09:57:17 -0400

Rich and Tani Miller object to my calling Mozart baroque:

>Mozart is the quintessential example of classical period music, not
>baroque. Handel is baroque. Bach is baroque too(I agree, Bach belongs in a
>category unto himself). Beethoven kind of led the way into the romantic
>period. His early music, though is very classical.
>
>I think that the term "art music" works well to distinguish what we generally
>refer to as classical music from popular music. Obviously all lines are not
>distinctly drawn, especially in the 20th century. Using this term then
allows
>for the term "classical music" to refer to music during a specific period in
>time (I'm sure that someone else remembers the dates from Music History).
>
>The classification of music into historical periods serves several
purposes. It
>allows us to identify trends in various societies that influenced the way
that
>music was composed. It also allows us to more easily see the changes.
Finally,
>for me anyway, learning about music history can make us better educated
>listeners and performers.

Well ... In my book, if Handel is baroque, Mozart is too. But while I don't
disagree with what Rich and Tani say, or what a couple of off-list messages
said, I don't fully agree either.

The trouble with hard and fast definitions of artistic periods, genres or
categories is that their principal use, almost their only use, is in
teaching. Academics seldom agree, though, and even more to the point, what
they do is define their criteria first, and then make reality agree with
them. (I am about to do the same thing)

Bach, for instance, wrote in the baroque period, but from the standpoint of
his harmonic originality, and to a lesser extent his formal innovations, he
towers so high above baroque that he cannot be pigeonholed on the basis of
when he lived. Western European music did not catch up with some of the
things Bach did for well over a hundred years.

Another problem is that there is a seamless continuum in the musical art
that makes drawing lines a very risky venture. Mozart and Handel can fairly
be lumped with Beethoven, Brahms and their lesser contemporaries as
classicists, if musical forms are a major criterion - but in terms of their
harmonic practice and melodic traits they are still baroque. Their themes
are normally balanced, in multiples of two measures, and their chord
progressions are simple, predictable and almost invariably resolved to the
tonic. Call them high baroque, perhaps, the culmination of baroque.

Drawing lines is not really possible. It's an exercise in rationalization.
What label you affix to a composer depends on the structure of your schema.
Mozart idolized Papa Handel, and copied a lot of his best moves. He
surpassed his idol in some ways, but they are more alike than they are
different. Beethoven can equally well be called the first great romantic,
although I would award that title to Borodin, and there are other
contenders. The young Beethoven began as an assiduous Mozart and Handel
imitator. His late quartets and piano concerti, and his last symphony -
melodically and harmonically, and in some respects formally - foreshadow
many of the traits of the high romantics. And take Dvorak. Is he a
romantic, or an early modernist? Most of his work is clearly
folky-romantic, but in his last years he wrote a mong other things a cello
concerto that rivals anything by the young Prokoviev or Stravinsky in its
modernity, complexity and harmonic daring - to say nothing of its
difficulty for the soloist.

The classification I used is unabashedly subjective, but so are all the
others, unless one adheres to a strict dating of periods. That's useful in
making lesson plans for Music Appreciation 101, but apart from that I think
it's ridiculous. My categories are weighted toward an analysis of harmonic
structure and thematic material, and put less importance on musical forms.
They're as useful as anybody else's, more useful in some ways, and they are
defensible,

Lee Hickling <hickling@-----.net>
Cobb Island, MD 20625
301-259-4483

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