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

Just who are you trying to confuse: yourself, other researchers or the general public? Allow me to sift through some of the nonesense you have written.

>The Romantic Period (1800-1900AD)
>Everything seemed to be getting bigger; even chamber works were of a scale only dreamed of before.

Quite the reverse: the Schlegelian "epigram" and "arabeske " swept Austro-Hungary, along with "witz" and a heightened level of harmonic symmetry which although employing an ostensible "logic by force" nonetheless operated with a degree of Classical economy and proportion. See Beethoven's tonal rhyming used to affect harmonic order in the B flat Quartet Op. 130; Schumann's substitute dominant and insertion of literary structural devices combined with a predeliction for mediant modulation in the "Fantasie" in C major.

>The 20th Century
>Firstly, popular and 'classical' music began to separate.

Again, no: as in other ears a general trend can be observed throughout the arts in general. In short, the boundaries between "low" and "high" art blurred as much as they individually adopted various expressive modes. Jazz became a genuine Art form influencing Ravel, Stravinsky, Gershwin ("Porgy and Bess" actually being a "Jazz Opera") Copland and many others as much as the acoustical discoveries of Stockhausen in his Koln studios influenced the Beetles in "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band".

>Secondly, many composers abandoned the idea of a tonal centre, consonance, or harmonic progression altogether, >resulting in atonality, dissonance, and free use of borrowed chords becoming common.

This - like many of your generalisations - actually is wrong. Schoenberg's use of "free atonality", Webern's rows hinging on axes of symmetry, the integrated serialism of the Darmstadt school and its inheritors and the post serial works of Birtwistle, Berio and Boulez (to name but a VERY small number of composers working in idioms which could not be described as Post-modern, Minimalist or Neo-anything) are all discrete and very different from one another. They all make use of tonal centres, they all use consonance as an aggregate to what you call dissonance. "Harmonic progression" as you call it, is also present. I don't know what you mean by a borrowed chord, but I expect it's yet another generalisation in a long line of banal curities being passed off as knowledge and information.

>No prominent school of thought has yet arisen to claim that it is the true 20th Century descendant of Romanticism. As >such, many scholars think that the 20th Century Period will continue until the middle of the 21st Century.

Oh grow up, please…

Golly. This seems to be the subject that whatever you write about it is guaranteed to annoy all readers and please none.

Just goes to show . . . something, I'm not sure what.

I think not - he was just venting his frustration at the inadeptness of someone who thinks he knows about classical music. The article in question is rife with stupid, arrogant comments and ignorant sentences.

Edd

It's so hard to write anything remotely ept about music (e.g. A1012230 'Sol-fa: the key to the riddle of staff notation') one is reminded of the wonderful dictum of Sir Thomas Beecham: "There are no good books about music"

or Captain Tobias Hume: "To praise music were to say, that the sun shines"

one of the few points I think on which Thomas Beecham was wrong. I point you in the direction of:
Charles Rosen - The Romantic Generation
Charles Rosen - The Classical Sonata
Carl Dahlhaus - Nineteenth Century Music
Richard Hoppin - Medieval Music
Palisca - Baroque Music
The New Grove Dictionary of Music
As far as 20th century is concerned, you might perhaps look to Arnold Whittal's "Musical composition in the twentieth century" to which there has recently been published a follow up which is apparantly very good.

As for the article (this one not the notation one) - it is difficult I agree to write a knowledgable all-encompassing article on classical music. However one thing you can do with relative ease is write one which does not rely on your own musical taste - i.e. one that is objective and does not rail against any type of music. In this article the author clearly shows his disaste for modern music and pop music, and does not show any knowledge of pre-baroque music. Just because contemporary classical music is not to his taste, does not mean that it is not classical music. His ignorance is such that he doesn't even know of what contemporary music is made.

Do you know for instance, that if you were to ask most real scholars who have studied musicologically the entire span of musical history as we know it, that they would label the modern era as starting in the 16th century and not having ended yet?

Edd

This is a big statement: ". . . one thing you can do with relative ease is write [an article on music] which does not rely on your own musical taste - i.e. one that is objective" That I find hard.

What Beecham so elegantly expressed, as I read him, is that there may be great books, and they may be about music, but no book can approach music itself for musical greatness. Biased, but what do you expect? Oh sorry, yes, you expect objectivity.

"if you were to ask most real scholars who have studied musicologically the entire span of musical history as we know it, that they would label the modern era as starting in the 16th century and not having ended yet" -- yes I take your point, but . . . actually there's very little musical history before the 16th century, since history relies so heavily on documents, and though music was written down since the 9th century or so it only expanded with the invention of printing into the kind of volume of production historians like to deal with. By which I mean, pre-renaissance music history, and the history of all oral traditions, is bedevilled with surmise.

> one that is objective" That I find hard.

it's as easy as writing a rubbish one which is subjective. My point was there are things in that article which are just fatuous. You may think that to have written any article is a blessing, but do you really want people to go away with the opinion that modern music isn't "real" music?

As to 16th century music - what is your point? There are various surviving documents which suggest that polyphonic writing started in the 16th century - that's all we need to know. There is documentary evidence going back way before then. I refer you to the recently reconstructed "Salem" Hymnal, which describes one of te original types of service in the chuch and is full of notated chant. Records go way back before then when notation consisted of symbols above the words, denoting mere inflections of the chant. We don't know alot about performance practise and there is presumably a large body of work which was never written down or was lost, but we have a fair picture of what seems to be the more popular of the traubadours/composers of the time.

Edd

Cards on table: I hated this article too, I'm not defending it. I suppose I'm expressing my despair at trying to talk meaningfully about music at all.

I am currently researching William Lawes, a seventeenth century composer, and I find him refreshingly modern; I'd love a chance to jam with him.

The fact that we treat all music as comparable with modern (notation-dominated) music shows just how much history is bedevilled with surmise.

I'm going to start (soon) on an entry on "The Three Ages of Music". My point (to answer your question) is that the dominant mode of dispersal in any age floods that age's perception of music (and everything else), with highly distorting effects. Briefly, in the first centuries of notation, notation was a rough aide-memoire; by the nineteenth century it had become gospel, to the extent that paper copies of compositions were (and still are) called "the music".

ah - good

>The fact that we treat all music as comparable with modern (notation-dominated) music shows just how much history is bedevilled with surmise.

not really - and I'd argue that those that do, treat modern music the wrong way. If one is to be objective, one should treat each piece of music individually within your knowledgeable context regardless of when it was composed - in brief, one should listen to mozart like it was written yesterday.
Whether it is notation dominated or not - music relies on a set of limitations - this is your notation. It doesn't need to be written down. I agree that recently people have caught onto this and are attempting to write "symbolist" music - music for which the notation is more important than the performance - it's nothing particularily new - Satie was doing it at the turn of the century, however you could also argue that "music" is a strictly sound-based medium, and what the symbolists have acheived is a form of expressionist art.

There's a really great article you should read - I'll look it out for you in a bit

Edd

"one should listen to mozart like it was written yesterday" -- maybe, but . . . I can't. Context is absolutely necessary for understanding anything.

Ethnomusicologists (Bruno Nettl, John Blacking?) have encountered difficulty with definitions of 'music'; in some African communities things that 'sounded musical' (childrens' snging games) were not regarded *by the community* as music, 'unmusical' recitations were.

The analysis of music becomes awkward when you are dealing with oral traditions: performances can vary, pieces can be almost indistinguishable -- it's much easier to dissect a corpse than a moving animal.

In those cases you have to decide whether you're analysing music or culture. One of Classical music's prominant features is that it can be devorced from culture. Sure you can analyse the culture, but you must acknowledge that it and the music are different facets entirely. Likewise you could just analyse the music of african communities without examining the culture, but the thought is that this would be doing the music an injustice - this is not the case for classical music. It is written largely with analysis in mind, and if it isn't, then the genius of it lies in it's analytical proprties. For instance, your William Lawes. Very famous for his Viol consort sets - this was becuase they were among the first pieces to use dance forms, and brought the traits of italien music into Britain. Non of what I have said so far referes to his culture. I can carry on talking abou his harmony, his use of techniques, even his use of, for him, traditional techniques without even once referring to the culture. It's like this issue of performance practise, and whether we should be "authentic" or not - and again, there is an article you really really should read, and I shall look it out when I have the time. This is why notation is important - the only reason we know about the written down music is because it is written down, and we are entirely dependant of that script as the limit of our ideal perception of that music. As you said - it becomes awkward when dealing with oral traditions. Of course it does - in fact, one might argue that it is impossible - that is not to say that relying on notation as we are, we are any different to those who relied on the notation of the mind, as it were. There are hundreds of little things, ranging from how we make the instrments to how we interpret pieces which is in itself an oral tradition in our community that we forget, because we can;t see the woods for the trees. We are not so relliant on written notation as you may think, but certainly due to the varying nature of oral traditions and interpretations, we have come to view written notation as the piece in it's pure, or universal state.

Edd

"William Lawes. Very famous for his Viol consort sets - this was becuase they were among the first pieces to use dance forms, and brought the traits of italien music into Britain."

Where d'you get that? It's as bad as Mr. Tuba's opus A290981!

(Yes, I've seen it somewhere but . . . don't use that source!)

I learned it in a lecture, yesterday. It was very general, and not specifically about Lawes. Hence lack of detail. It's not important though. It was merely an example.

Edd

The article you should read is from "Authenticity and early music : a symposium" Edited by Nicholas Kenyon (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1988) pages 137-207, "The Pastness of the Present" by Richard Taruskin.

Trust me you won't regret it

Edd