10/20 German Romanticism & Song PDF

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Professor Ted Gordon...

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Read: Listen, Ch. 16 (p. 213-227) Listen: Franz Schubert, “Erlkonig” (1815) Watch: “Erlkonig” animation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JS91p-vmSf0

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Music After Beethoven: Romanticism Baroque: term for a style period in music, coined by musicologists in the field of art history in the 20th century Romantic: term used by Romantics themselves; first used in literature, then when the earliest Romantic composers began their careers in the 1820’s, their literary contemporaries talked about “Romantic” music Because of Beethoven, people became aware of, and respected music as a major art

16.1 Romanticism ● For us, the word “romantic” refers to love, but the glorification of love was only one of many themes of Romantic literature, themes that were also central to the music The Cult of Individual Feeling ● Heart of the Romantic movement: Striving for a better, higher, ideal state of being ● Highest artistic goal: Emotional expression ● These attitudes may be based off of Enlightenment philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who, in the 18th century, spoke about “natural” human feelings, as opposed to the artificial limitations imposed by society ○ “Rousseau provided the Romantics with the ideal of individual, as well as political, freedom and fulfillment” ● The Industrial Revolution also was behind the new attitudes. People felt helpless as their inhumane working conditions developed capitalism. Romantics used their art as an escape. Romanticism and Revolt ● After the Industrial Revolution came the American Revolution, and then the French Revolution of 1789 shook all of Europe ● The Romantics played a role in rebelling against the established order ● “Many musicians (like many poets and painters) associated themselves with liberation politics, starting with Beethoven and his Bonaparte symphony” ● Both political revolution and social revolution occured Artistic Barriers ● 18th century drama - As a reaction to the Romantics’ search for higher experience and more intense expression, artists went against all limitations of artistic form and genre. ● As part of going against the rules, they began citing the works of Shakespeare, where locations changed scene by scene, noble characters share the stage with clowns, etc. ○ This made Shakespeare very popular in the 19th century ● Music - Composers worked to go past the limitations of harmony and form

Music and the Supernatural ● The supernatural was a big part of Romanticism ● Schubert wrote “The Erlking” about a demon who claims a terrified child, in 1815 ● Devilish and spooky music were used Music and the Other Arts ● Efforts were made to blend musical works together (make poetry more “musical”, give paintings and musical works “poetic titles”, etc.) ● Philosophers at the time were led to incorporate music as the central point of their views because people felt that music could express inner experiences more deeply than other forms of art ● “All art aspires to the condition of music” - Walter Pater, famous Victorian critic 16.2 Concert Life in the Nineteenth Century ● Public concerts (first introduced in the Baroque era) became more important in the days of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven ● “As the 19th century progressed, the concert hall together with the opera house came to dominate the presentation of music” The Artist and the Public ● Concert life brought a generally audience of middle-class ticket buyers who wanted value in their purchase - they wanted to see something that was already established as a masterpiece ● The innovative composers depended on the public, but felt resentment towards them; while the conservative public admired the composers, but often distrusted them 16.3 Style Features of Romantic Music ● Every genuine artist was expected to have a personal style, since the main artistic theme of the Romantic era was personal feeling ● A common interest of 19th century composers was to sound different from everybody else Romantic Melody ● The most recognizable feature of Romantic music is its melodic style, which was more emotional, unrestrained, and demonstrative than before ○ Melodic lines were wider in range than the restrained tunes of the Classical era, and built up to more upholding climaxes ○ “Melodies became more irregular in rhythm and phrase structure, so as to make them sound more spontaneous” ● Romantic melody had a grand, exaggerated emotional aspect to it ○ Some are more intimate, however Romantic Harmony ● Romantic melody is inseparable from harmony

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Chromaticism: “music that liberally employs all twelve notes of the chromatic scale” Chromaticism was utilized more by Romantic composers than it was by Baroque and Classical ones “in order to expand the expressive range of both their melodies and their harmony”

Rhythmic Freedom: Rubato ● Rubato: “the general tendency to blur all sharp edges found its musical counterpart in the rhythmic practice of tempo rubato, or just rubato”. ● “Rubato means that in performance the rhythm is handled flexibly; the meter itself may waver, or else the beat is maintained strictly in the accompaniment while the melody is played or sung slightly out of phase with it. (The term means “robbed time” - that is, some time has been stolen from one beat and given to the next)” ● No one has ever found an accurate way to indicate rubato in musical notation - it is rarely indicated in a score ● Adding notes or ornaments to a score (improvising) was abolished by the end of the 19th century ● When overly applied, rubato was considered a sign of bad taste in Baroque or Classical music. However, rubato is essential in the expression of the playing, singing, and conducting or Romantic music The Expansion of Tone Color ● For the Romantics, tone color, or simply the quality of sound, was considered to have as high artistic value as rhythm, melody, and musical form. ● During the 19th century, instruments went through major technological advancements ● The orchestra was expanded ● Composers learned how to mix instrumental colors and combine instruments ● “Romantic composers and audiences alike were fascinated by the symphony orchestra, and for the first time conductors came to the fore - conductors wielding batons” ● The orchestra became even more important in opera 16.4 Program Music ● Program music: “instrumental music written in association with a poem, a story, or some other literary source - or even just a highly suggestive word or two” ● Program music was not new in the Romantic era, but it became more important in it ● Sometimes program music tells or traces a story; and sometimes program music “attempts to capture a general flavor of a mood associated with some extra musical state, concept, or personality” 16.5 Form in Romantic Music ● Romantic composers of the 19th century “wanted each work of art to express its individuality in its form as well as its style (melody, harmony, timbre, etc)” ● They did not trust/ use standardized forms ● Romantic composers had to find a way to create the impression of spontaneous form

while at the same time giving the listener a sense of coherence so they could follow it They used/ created the following effects to try and solve this problem… Miniature Compositions ● Miniatures: pieces lasting only a few minutes, or even less ● Mostly songs and short piano pieces ● They were made by composers to point to a specific, quick emotion - allowed composers to communicate with the listener (kind of like a “single short, meaningful glance”) ● “Romantic miniatures, though they were often published in sets, nevertheless were composed so as to stand out as individuals in their own right” Grandiose Compositions ● These were “larger and larger symphonies, cantatas, and so on, with more and more movements, increased performing forces and a longer (sometimes much longer) total time span” ● In addition to music, this effect included poetry, philosophical or religious ideals, story lines, and (in operas) dramatic action ● Though we see that the bigger the work, the bigger the problem, composers helped solve it by using extramusical factors such as the words of a vocal work or the program of an instrumental one. The Principle of Thematic Unity ● Thematic unity: Important general principle developed by Romantic composers ● “There was an increasing tendency to maintain some of the same thematic material throughout whole works, even (or especially) those with many movements” ● “In 19th century symphonies and other such works, several different levels of thematic unity can be distinguished”:

In Class Notes ● A response to the enlightenment - realizing you cannot rationalize everything ○ Fantasy ● Johann Gottfried Herder - said that language has the power to shape thought ○ Depending on where your from and what language you speak changes how yo think and act ○ Invented the concept of folk songs or folk stories ○ In his travels he would transcribe the people he encountered and their music ○ Every place in the world has a folk and every place is different ● Johann Wolfgang Goethe - 82 years old and he lives out everyone else ○ Wrote a famous poem in 1782 ● The Brothers Grimm - wrote the original scary stories like red riding hood, cinderella,

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hansel and gretel ○ they wrote these folk stories that all have morals ■ Dont trust men ■ Don't wander into the woods ■ Don’t talk to strangers The Uncanny - “shockheaded peter” - very intense and scary stories ○ If a kid does something bad, they will get punished in a very morbid way Erlkonig - a writer goes into the woods and is enticed by a group of women elves and they try to entice him and he says no and then she puts a curse on him and he dies ○ Herder finds this story and wants to publish it into German ■ He translates it as the elf king’s daughter ● The person who puts the curse is the daughter of the elf find ■ He thinks it would be good to use this story and theme for a light opera he is writing with his friend corona schroder ○ This song about the elves is scary and creepy undertone but the music is controlled and calm and rational which shows us how he we have this creepy story and can understand how its not real. It can be scary and creepy but the music lets us know that it is not real Schubert rewrote this song ○ This song is in a minor key and its repetitive which makes the music seem really tense and urgent ○ There is some sort of juxtaposition of the fast tempo and scariness, to a light vocal tone in a major key and it sounds kind of like a childrens song. This happens when the elf is trying to entice the child. There is not such a fast rhythm there is still a fast tempo but a slower rhythm ○ The elf king then says “I love you you're beautiful form excites me, if you're not willing I will use force” - starts off in major mode and then by the end its in the minor mode - within the same stanza ■ Every stanza has different music in schubert's setting of this poem ■ It's not strophic or aria or AAB, it changes throughout the poem by giving the elf king a major harmony ● Never before would a major harmony have ever given off a creepy connotation, but that's not true ● We see here how the major harmony is disturbing ■ We are taking what we thought would be something comforting and nice, and then it ends up being something scary This is a translation of something in nature into something sinister - everytime the kid says in the elf story that the elf is gonna get him , and the dad goes no its not its just the nature in the woods ○ The child perceived nature as scary and the dad says not to be scary because we control it and have dominion over....