4.16 Music After Beethoven: Romanticism

• ==Terms== for historical periods of arts are used ==after the fact==, generally
  • Baroque was adopted from art historians in the 20th century
  • Romantic, was uniquely used by the Romantics themselves
• Earliest Romantic composers were in the ==1820s==
• Music after Beethoven
  • Music was seen as a major art now
  • ==Music was taken seriously==
• Some think that lit. and music developments line up

Romanticism

• Great age of ==English literature== around ==1800-1829==
  • Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Byron
• There was also ==German Romantic lit.== around the same time
  • Less commonly known
  • Tieck, Novalis, Kleist, Hölderlin, and E. T. A. Hoffmann
• “Romantic” meaning love started with this ==literary movement==
  • ==Glorification of love== was a theme in literature and music

The Cult of Individual Feeling

• “Striving for a better, higher, ideal state of being was at the heart of the Romantic movement”
• ==Emotional expression== was the highest goal
• Bohemians
• ==Jean-Jacques Rosseau== was an Enlightenment philosopher who was “hailed as the philosophical father of the French Revolution”
• The Industrial Revolution and smokestacks could be stifling, Romantic art was also ==escapism==

Romanticism and Revolt

• The Industrial Revolution brought ==political revolutions==, such as the American Revolution and French Revolution
• Romantics were considered ==rebels==
• ==Social revolution== as well, such as in the levels of nobility

Artistic Barriers

• Artists ==resisted rules== and regulations
• Music had a lot of ==experimentation==, with chords, chord progressions, harmony, and form

Music and the Supernatural

• ==Supernatural content== was bizarre/macabre, and it was more popular in the romantic age
• Weird painting- “Nightmare”- by Henry Fuseli
• Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
• Operas such as Robert the Devil, The Vampire, The Magic Bullet

Music and the Other Arts

• Efforts were made to ==blend arts==
  • Poetry was more “musical”
  • Paintings and musical works had “poetic” titles
  • See ==Gesamtkunstwerk==, “total artwork,” by Wagner
• Music was seen as being capable of ==expressing inner experienc==e more deeply than anything else

Concert Life in the Nineteenth Century

• Concert halls and opera houses “dominate[d] the presentation of music”
• Carnegie hall was built
• ==Concerts== of lieder (German songs) and string quartets were common
• Musicians would go on ==tour== to remote areas too

The Artist and the Public

Composers depended on ==public interest==, and the public wanted things they already knew they liked

Style Features of Romantic Music

Every artist had a ==personal style==, but there were some common interests (even though a big one was trying “to sound different from everybody else”)

Romantic Melody

• Emotional, effusive, demonstrative
• ==Ranged more widely==
• Irregular in rhythm and phrase structure
• All were meant to express some feeling

Romantic Harmony

• Great technical advances
• Harmony was either used to h==ighlight emotionality== in the melody, or to be “savored for its own sake”
• ==Chromaticism==: music that has all 12 notes of the chromatic scale

Rhythmic Freedom: Rubato

• ==Rubato==, or tempo rubato, was a term that showed rhythm would be “handled flexibly” in performance; means “robbed time”
• Hardly ever indicated in a score
• Improvisation was no more, but performers still added their own touches in rhythm with rubato

The Expansion of Tone Color

• All instruments had major ==technical advances==

• Orchestra was vastly expanded

• New combinations of instruments

• ==Orchestration==- the use and combination of the instruments of the orchestra

• Orchestra was more important in opera

  

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Program Music

• ==Program music== is “instrumental music written in association with a poem, a story, or some other literary source”
  • Sometimes only music that has a distinct story (the program) itself is program music
  • Others just try to capture a mood instead of a story
  • Nocturnes, by Frédéric Chopin
• Not new, just more important now
• Lead to debate if music really illustrated or represented the program

Form in Romantic Music

• Particularly ==free== and spontaneous
• Use of distinct forms was very loose
• Couldn’t truly be formless

Miniature Compositions

• ==Miniatures== are pieces that are a few minutes long, or shorter
• Convey “a particularly pointed emotion”
• Often published in ==sets==

Grandiose Compositions

• Very long
• Listeners were ==impressed== by them
• Form was considered a problem

The Principle of Thematic Unity

• Some ==thematic material== was ==maintained== for whole works
• Themes from one movement come back in others
• New versions of a single theme
• ==Thematic transformation-== short themes freely varied at relatively wide/unpredictable intervals of time
• Vague similarity was more popular than clear likeness

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