Some years ago I found myself caught up in a discussion
about re-aligning the perameters of the periods of musical history. We were all taught that music fell into four
neat historical eras – Baroque, Classical, Romantic and Modern/20th
Century (in my youth we rather regarded anything before Baroque as Primitive,
but now we are more generous and call it Renaissance) – and that those eras
were defined by certain key musical events.
The Baroque began with the first operas around 1600 and died with Bach in
1650 and the Romantic began with Weber’s Freischütz
in 1821. The bit in the middle was
called Classical (it contained just two composers, apparently, Haydn and
Mozart) and everything after has been called Modern or 20th Century. Even as a boy in the 1950s it seemed odd to
describe Debussy as “Modern” (as my teachers told me he was) and I find it
appalling that students are still being told that he is a “Modern” (or – worse still
– a Contemporary) composer. Yet nobody
has come up with a handy label to stick on music written since 1900, the random
date given for the end of the Romantic era largely by those who were born at a
time when the 20th century still seemed to an age of disturbingly challenging
ideas. So, even to this day, anything
after Romantic is Modern.
My former University tutor, Arnold Whittall (who was, for
me, the most inspirational man in my educational history, although I did not appreciate
it at the time – thanks, Arnold, if you’re reading this) preferred to define
musical periods in terms of social upheavals, particular war, and while his
seminal book on 20th century music puts it in a nutshell, Music Since the First World War, I was
also greatly taken by his definition of the Romantic era as being that period
between the French and the Russian Revolutions.
Indeed if, as we must believe, music reflects the society in which it is
created, surely wars have to be a defining moment in every musical era. With the First World War catastrophically
changing everything about society, it is little wonder that it had a similarly catastrophic
effect on music. I myself have written
that the First World War “dropped a bombshell in the trenches of classical
music which scattered fragments so far and wide, they have still not been collected
back together into a semblance of cohesion”.
The problem we have in defining music after the Romantic era,
irrespective of whether that finished in 1900, 1911, 1914 or 1920, is that
there has been no stylistic unity. The
similarities for an audience between Stockhausen and Arvo Pärt are so extreme
as to render any attempt to link them stylistically as irrelevant, while even the
works of Stravinsky encompass such a vast stylistic range that they define
single-label categorisation.
But then wasn’t it ever thus? What possible link is there stylistically
between the keyboard works of Domenico Scarlatti and those of his exact contemporary
Johann Sebastian Bach? Yet we glibly
categorise them both as “Baroque” composers and search, in vain, for stylistic connections. T
For those who have missed out on this peculiarly English
approach to music education, the need to label and compartmentalise everything is
seen as a basic tool in the instruction of history; hence the rote learning of
the dates of the Kings and Queens of England (note the word “England” rather
than “Britain”) in the history lessons of my youth. Fortunately British schools adopt a much more
enlightened approach to history teaching nowadays; sadly, music teachers do
not, and it is still asked of most students; “What period does this composer
belong to?” and, “What are the features of Baroque music?”. Our old friend Wikipedia even provides us with a graphical representation of this
on one of its myriad pointless pages (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dates_of_classical_music_eras). (You will note the wonderful idea that the 20th
century runs well beyond the year 2000, as if heading towards infinity.)
So our discussion was primarily concerned with deciding when
the Romantic era really ended and what to call what came next. The death of Mahler (1911) was a preferred
choice, and as Schoenberg devised his 12-note system around the 1920s, there
was a strong vote in favour of 1920 as being the end of the Romantic era. That Rachmaninov and Richard Strauss carried
on writing Romantic music well into the 1940s cut no ice with those who
regarded these, in any case, as insignificant composers in the course of
musical history.
Feeling that the whole thing was an utterly pointless
exercise, I came up with the suggestion that we call everything after 1920 “Dysfunctional”;
which got the derision it so fully deserved and, not long afterwards, my interest in
the discussion waned and I headed off to more fruitful pursuits in the bar.
True, there were social connections - both men worked under
royal patronage – and the Europe of their lifetime had certain artistic standards
to which both men adhered by default rather than design. But try and interpret Scarlatti as you would Bach,
and you miss the essential character of their music. I have heard teachers explain ornamentation
in “Baroque” music as if every composer - Bach, Scarlatti, Purcell, Byrd,
Lully, Rameau – needs to be approached the same way, and I have more than once came
across students asking whether it is right or wrong to use notes inégales in “Baroque” music, as if there is a one-answer-fits-all
solution.
I can see why teachers like to use these terms to help their
students get to grips with the vast panoply of musical history, but I’ve long
ago given them up, preferring the more arbitrary (but, ironically, more relevant)
use of centuries to divide up musical history.
I find it easier to trace the development of music through the 18th
century, say, than through the “Classical” era; that certainly helps put Bach in
his true place, not as the final voice of the Baroque but as the siren call of
the Classical. Understanding society and the changes in it
are much more helpful to understanding music and its development than a random
sequence of labelled periods which create a wholly false impression of music written
within them as being stylistically related.
And it’s not mere semantics.
A huge, huge problem music examiners face when hearing recital diplomas
is the completely erroneous belief that to achieve a “balanced” programme one
has to draw on different stylistic periods.
So we might have a programme of Bach, Mozart, Brahms and Debussy which, from
a listener’s point of view, is utterly unbalanced, but which looks good in that
it covers different stylistic periods;
on the other hand, a programme of Debussy, Grieg and Rachmaninov, while
perfectly balanced in the ears of the listener, is dismissed merely because all
three composer lived in the same era.
Only the other day I sat through a performance of Debussy, Brahms and
Percy Grainger. When I commented to a
teacher on how satisfying it had sounded, she shook her head in dismay – “But
it was so unbalanced”, she told me, “All three works were written within 20
years of each other”.
The trouble with labels is that they block our ears. How much easier it is to see balance when it
has nice clear letters and numbers than when it has that elusive and
indefinable element we call music.
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