h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

without slagging off your article too much - I'd just like to say that a)you overgeneralise far too much - there is no set definition for the time period which constitutes the "romantic" periods - rather a set of ideals which at one point were paramount - hence "early" (based on a new type of "chromaticism" and mediant chord relationships, along with an association with "romantic" literature [the very word romanticism stems from "roman" or "novel"]) and "late" romanticism (which was based on ever more exotic chords and ultrathematicism). which led to b) the Modernists. There is no question that the modern period stemmed from romanticism. The "Tristan" chord (i.e. the intro to Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde") is the germ from which it grew - a chord that can have repetition after repetition without ever resolving - an idea that it has no real "tonal center" on which to resolve. Then of course Schoenberg came along, and derived his twelve tone system of free atonality (which is better described as merely dodecaphony) which eventually led to the serial technique, which is often regarded as the center of the modernist era. Lets not forget minimalism of course. In fact, your article is so out of date it doesn't even mention the fact that modernity, in that sense, is a thing of the past. People often regard the end of the modernist period as the realisation of "total serialism" - in other words, random music, and at roughly the same time, the culmination of minimalist music with people like John Cage (who seemed to play both fields and none of them atall) and La Monte Young. Now we are in a post modernistic era, the goals of which I shall post in an article soon.
The one thing I wanted to stress. music is in a constant state of change - in a sense is also in a constant state of destruction. We go from Bach, who was the pinacle of what was oringinally the tonal system - based on tonic/dominant tensions, to post modernism, where we forge the very modes we compose with, and how they move in and out of each other, largely on a leading note basis, although boulez for one preferred to base his harmony on pitch "areas" as apposed to pivot notes. Music (I hope) will never return to tonality, in a traditional sense - there may be a wave of neoclassicism, but only in the way stravinsky was neoclassical - in a modernistic sense (or post modernistic, as the case may be). By the middle of next century, we will most likely be in an entirly different state, but whatever it is, once the walls have been broken down, they will never be rebuilt again.

Edd

I hardly think that something claiming to be a "brief" history of western music could be accused of generalising or over-generalising. Giving people an insight into "classical" music (a gross generalisation, you'll note! but one that is readily accepted by most) who might not otherwise have had that insight can only be a good thing.