posted
I am attending a "senior seminar" of a kind this quarter, though I am a junior, given by a -very- well know writer in the "Music History/ Musicology" and Conducting field who is respected/ published in the the US and in France. If you took a general music class, you may have read his book.
Anyway, I was sitting in class a few days ago, its a "Post Beethoven's 9th, 18th century Symphony" class, designed to prepare students for their thesis. And we are talking about what makes the 9th so much different from the other Beethoven works, or what makes Beethovean ideals so much different and new after the death of Mozart. Answer is: A WHOLE lot of stuff.
We are talking about the form of the peice, and my teacher says something very interesting, he allows a student (alright me) to point out that the 4th movement is more like its own cantata inside a symphony, than a movement. (I read it in a journal). Anyway, he says yes, Beethoven ressurected the less fasionable cantata as a way of dramatasizing the "Ode to Joy" theme, etc. And he says something like, 'yes its this kind of scale and grandeur that we (I assume musicologists) like to tell people is what "defines romantiscism."'
I found this a bit disturbing. One reason is I have been struggling for the past few years to reconcile the various reasons one composer is called "Romantic," and another is "Classical" or "Minimal" or "Impressionist." While its true that there is alot of overlap in the ethereal qualities of the works of debussy and Ravel, they are two distinct compoers, worth of their own classifications. What bothers me is I can't tell if I am SMARTER than everbody else for looking at the details in the works of each composer and realizing that its insulting to assign each one to a general movement spanning a century, or if I am more stubborn and blockheaded for refusing to think in the academic stream of consciousness about these classifications.
I know people like to make claims about how one composer follows a school of thought, while another follows this other school, and the music sounds "different" for every genre. But the music sounds different for every composer too, and if you look at the perspective of the composers themselves, they can't have been much different from someone like me, frustrated by a need to define themselves UNIQUELY and specifically avoid being classified as part of a genre.
If we have creative artists on one side, pushing back against classification, and classifiers on the other, constantly expanding or segmenting systems of classification, the whole thing gets a little sureal in my head. Its hard for me to describe how I feel about all this. Believe it or not, this is actually a really important part of my education right now, just getting to really know these classifications; and the added burden of not believing in them is testing my patience now.
I have 1.5 more quarters of core classes before I complete the two initial years of my music degree, and then its all specialized study, so I'll make it inspite of myself
Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
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quote:But the music sounds different for every composer too, and if you look at the perspective of the composers themselves, they can't have been much different from someone like me, frustrated by a need to define themselves UNIQUELY and specifically avoid being classified as part of a genre.
Based on this, I would classify you as a "rebel".
Seriously, if you look at something in sufficient detail, everything that isn't an exact copy is unique. Looking for similarities and identifying themes and coming up with names for movements and trends is a large part of what music, literary and art critics do, and if you want to earn your way in such a profession you are better off reconciling yourself to that fact as quickly as possible. If you are looking for true originality in your own artistic expression, perhaps you'll eventually start your own school. Posts: 896 | Registered: Feb 2001
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quote:What bothers me is I can't tell if I am SMARTER than everbody else for looking at the details in the works of each composer and realizing that its insulting to assign each one to a general movement spanning a century, or if I am more stubborn and blockheaded for refusing to think in the academic stream of consciousness about these classifications.
The thing is... you'll never know for sure which is smarter. But until they convince you otherwise, you should probably believe what you judge to be smarter.
Posts: 8120 | Registered: Jul 2000
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posted
Welcome to the world of a majority of the creative arts. Each art has had styles (eras, genres, whichevery applies) that are applied with a wide brush in little more than a swath that happens to overlap various examples. Sometimes these labels are accepted by the community (sounds something like you described with music). Sometimes much of the professionals will rail against the labels which happen to be adopted by the general public (let's say the painting field of art here).
And that's what is at heart here, anyone outside of the creative arts doesn't have the time, and often will, to learn each and every nuance of a creative field; so they simplify, they abbreviate, they group. Is this really wrong? No. Is it something a person who has studied the field should avoid doing? Probably. Do the artists responsible for creating the work deserve better? yes. Is it a pet peeve of mine and I wish they'd stop doing it? Absolutely.
Bottom line, fear not. You really aren't alone, even if you have to look outside musicians to find it.
Posts: 1368 | Registered: Sep 2002
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posted
I think that the different classifications will help to place works in context. I will help, when trying to understand a piece or a composer to understand the different social, political, and artistic movements that make up the artists world. To understand the different influences and how an artist either reflects those influences or plays against them and why he makes those choices. Classifications are a tool; learn how to use that tool.
Posts: 11187 | Registered: Sep 2005
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posted
It's not just art. Humans are obsessed with catalogueing things, whether they be animals, or political views or musical styles. Perhaps it is for ease of understanding, or because they prefer things to be neat and orderly, or because it's useful to compare things with like things.
The general truth is that things can be grouped, or not, depending on how closely you look at them.
I think that statements like "defines Romanticism" are meaningless, because Romanticism is practically undefinable. There are no certain attributes, and there are no solid lines and if you start drawing them, you're going to end up making exceptions and excuses, especially in non-scientific areas.
I think that grouping and catalogueing makes things easier in many instances, and can be very useful. However, I also think that this same human tendency is also restrictive and can be destructive to thought and ideas- not in the way that people feel compelled to stick to them, because artists are usually trying to break them- but because the need to "lump" means that you are either "them" or "us" or "yes" or "no", "in" or "out", and the world doesn't really work like that. Especially nowadays.
As someone probably said, "There is no box."
(as in "I'm outside the box/inside the box/thinking outside the box, etc")
Posts: 8473 | Registered: Apr 2003
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posted
You don't know "Alle Menschen werden Bruder, Wo dein sanfter Flugel weilt"?
(typed from memory but had to spell correct it )
You know you are smart when you say something and at least one person (can be you) believes it.
Seriously, I just read something last night I like a lot. It said how people want to think linearly: A leads to B. But things are usually a net or grid. Thousands of influences cause something. And the same is true with music categories. If you think of objects lying on a net, the heavest object makes the biggest impression. That is usually what people see and focus on. But that ignores all the other objects out there. Some small objects could change the whole landscape if they didn't exist.
Posts: 1209 | Registered: Dec 2003
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quote:Originally posted by human_2.0: Seriously, I just read something last night I like a lot. It said how people want to think linearly: A leads to B. But things are usually a net or grid. Thousands of influences cause something. And the same is true with music categories. If you think of objects lying on a net, the heavest object makes the biggest impression. That is usually what people see and focus on. But that ignores all the other objects out there. Some small objects could change the whole landscape if they didn't exist.
Could we take that analogy one further? What about Einstein? When you plays a gravitatious object in a 4 dimensional plane, space "bends" around it just like if you put a heavy object in a net. The further from the object, the less bending is taking place, but too much mass, and the object bends space into itself so steeply that it rips through the net and nothing can escape.
Maybe our systems of classification are dominated by composers who are so heavy, Mozart, Beethoven, Stravinsky, that our prejudice or praise of them colors or even sucks up our understanding of their lives and their contemporaries.
posted
Or it COULD be that there are too many types of works, and too many composers, to remember anything about them without arranging them somehow, and this system was designed centuries ago, before many of these works were composed, so things get a little mixed up.
As you learn more about the field you many find that there is a lot of overlap between them, and that people OTHER than yourself are aware of it....and have made careers out of writing about it too.
posted
I am not so lacking in perceptiveness as to appreciate your patronizing Kwea, though I know your just kidding. I had assumed we could come from the point of view you describe, that we are all marginally aware of this overlap. But that my Professor had knowingly, winkingly suggested that alot of these classifications were a useful deception on his part, in order to talk down to people like us about music history.
Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
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posted
Actually, Kwea has a very good point. Many, many people in musicology and music theory have worked and reworked over the concept of classification, and it's generally survived the working over. It's a useful, durable concept. You might have been having trouble with the classification of Beethoven particularly because a) he's what's known as a "borderline" composer--one foot in the classical style, one foot in romanticism, and b) he was such an innovated composer. In fact, I'd go so far as to say his influence on music since his time cannot be underestimated. I can point you to a few articles that expound on this idea pretty well. In fact, I can point you to two very-well known works that expound upon this point:
quote:Maybe our systems of classification are dominated by composers who are so heavy, Mozart, Beethoven, Stravinsky, that our prejudice or praise of them colors or even sucks up our understanding of their lives and their contemporaries.
At any rate, there's one thing to be aware of at your current stage, Orincoro: there's a great deal of the field of musicology that you haven't seen yet. I say this as someone who is most of the way to a Ph.D. in the sister discipline of music theory. This is not to say that your ideas are not valuable, just, as Kwea said, that they're likely already out there in the literature. As a musicology/music theory student, you spend the vast majority of your time getting to know the literature of the field, and it is actually from this knowledge that musicologists and theorists formulate their ideas.
Posts: 4077 | Registered: Jun 2003
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posted
Megan, your really smart. You seem assume that I am nowhere near as smart as you. Maybe your right, but you have ignored my point, (really not trying to sound snippy but this is what gets my goat when I have discussions like this, people correct me with information I already have)
Your right in as far as you go, but what I was interested in talking about was the winking professor who mentioned that this was the way we decieve lesser mortals.
This particular proffessor is likely one of the authors you would suggest, and though I am (as silly as it may sound) entirely aware of my own ignorance when it comes to the breadth and depth of musicology as an academic field, I was already aware that my point was nothing new. I was also aware that yes, it serves a very valuable function, in the way that CNN and Fox news provide inestimably valuable functions. Its the way they serve those functions, the intentions that people get up in arms about, not the fact that yes, they are doing SOMETHING.
This post sounds rather snippy and immature. Well (and here is the really adolescent thought that just jumped into my mind) when you treat someone like they're too dumb to know they're dumb, your doing the same thing I posted about in the first place.
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