CHAPTER 20 - Musical Taste and Style in the Enlightenment

Theobald von Oer (1807-1885): The Weimar Court of the Muses
In 1860, 55 years after Schiller's death in 1805, this oil painting was produced of a reading of his poems in the park of the Schloss Tiefurt. Among the listeners, to the right, is Goethe

EUROPE in the ENLIGHTENMENT

= 18th century Europe was a cosmopolitan age

          = marriage between powerful families, foreign-born rulers (German kinds in England, Sweden, Poland; Spanish king in Naples; French duke in Tuscany, etc.)

          = intellectuals and artists travelled widely

          = musical life reflected the international culture (German composers active in Paris and London; Italian opera composers and singers worked in Austria, Germany, Spain, England, Russia, France)

          = mixed style was so universally adopted that there was only “one music for all of Europe”

          = nationalism, a major theme in the 19th century, was already emerging by the end of the 18th century, especially in a growing preference for opera in the vernacular rather than the exclusively Italian

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THE ENLIGHTENMENT
= the Enlightenment called on humankind to attempt to understand its place in the natural world based on scientific reason instead of religious belief

= the most vibrant intellectual movement of the 18th century

= central themes were reason, nature, progress

= in general, the Enlightenment was a humanitarian movement, whose adherents were interested in promoting the welfare of humankind; humanitarianism

= the leaders of the Enlightenment were French thinkers (such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rosseau) known as philosophes. they were social reformers more than philosophers

François-Marie Arouet / Voltaire

Voltaire perceived the French bourgeoisie to be too small and ineffective, the aristocracy to be parasitic and corrupt, the commoners as ignorant and superstitious, and the Church as a static and oppressive force useful only on occasion as a counterbalance to the rapacity of kings, although all too often, even more rapacious itself. Voltaire distrusted democracy, which he saw as propagating the idiocy of the masses. He is remembered and honoured in France as a courageous polemicist who indefatigably fought for civil rights

Montesquieu 

his notable and influential achievements are his writings about separation of powers/classifications of government based on their principles

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said 'This is mine', and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody." -- Rosseau 1754

Rousseau was a successful composer of music, who wrote seven operas as well as music in other forms, and made contributions to music as a theorist. As a composer, his music was a blend of the late Baroque style and the emergent Classical fashion, and he belongs to the same generation of transitional composers as Christoph Willibald Gluck and C. P. E. Bach

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SOCIAL ROLES FOR MUSIC

= courts, city gov’ts churches continued sponsoring music-making

= musicians also increasingly depended upon support from the public. there were now public concerts in many cities, offering opportunities for performers and composers to supplement their incomes and reach a wider audience

= expanding economy, growing middle class, more leisure time = number of amateurs increased

= women welcomed to participate at amateur performances, but excluded from almost all professional roles other than as singers (to perform in front of men for money was to put oneself in the courtesan class, which would have been a catastrophic loss of status for any middle/upper-class woman)

= amateur musicians naturally bought music that they could understand and play, and music publishers catered especially to them (keyboard, chamber ensemble, voice)

= the growing enthusiasm for music as a leisure activity fostered the development of well informed listeners who cultivated a taste for the best music. such listener is called connoisseur

= the musical public broadened and more people became interested in reading and discussing about music. by midcentury, magazines devoted to musical news, reviews, criticisms appeared, catering both amateurs and connoisseurs

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THE PUBLIC CONCERT, an innovation

= were usually money-making ventures for which tickets were sold

= anyone who could pay the price of a ticket could attend, but ticket prices were not readily affordable for most people, so the audience for public concerts came mostly from upper-middle classes

= public concerts were advertised by word of mouth, handbills, posters, notices in newspapers, other printer media

= an 18th century concert was a social occasion as well as an opportunity to hear music. audience members could stroll around and converse, paying attention only to the music that interested them without being considered rude (the silent, motionless audience was an invention of the 19th century)

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MUSICAL TASTE and STYLE

= many musical styles coexisted in the 18th century

= each country had distinctive traditions and developed a national form of opera

= despite the variety of styles (ex. contrapuntal complexity and spun-out instrumental melody of Baroque music), audiences preferred and critics praised music that featured a vocally conceived melody in short phrases over spare accompaniment

= writers held the language of music should be universal, should appeal to all tastes at once, from the connoisseur to the untutored/“natural” — free of technical complications

= these values for music related directly to the central ideas of the Enlightenment

= Enlightenment thinkers favored direct observations of nature. in art, they rejected artifice and complexity (which they regarded as unnatural)

= “if music is true to nature it will be easily understood, while learned counterpoint which conveys no meaning is empty show.” (Charles Batteux, Les beaux-arts, 1746)

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TERMS FOR STYLES: GALANT, EMPFINDSAM, CLASSICAL

galant style

          = during 18th century, the most common term for the new style was called galant

          = French term for everything modern, chic, smooth, easy, and sophisticated

          = emphasized melody made up of short-breathed, often repeated gestures organized into larger units, lightly accompanied with simple harmony and punctuated by frequent cadences

          = writers distinguished between the learned or strict (contrapuntal) style/writing (aka Baroque. in which the composer follows all the rules of harmony and modulation) and the freer, more songlike, homophonic (aka galant style)

          = despite its French name, it originated in Italian operas and concertos

empfindsam style / empfindsamer stil (German for “emotional style”)

          = a close relative of galant style/putting expressiveness, different emotions in the instrumentation

          = characterized by surprising turns of harmony, chromaticism, nervous rhythms, rhapsodically free and speech-like melody

          = closely associated with fantasias and slow movements by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach

classical music and classical style

          = the term “classical” is used at times for art music of all periods and at other times for the style of the late 18th century (the meaning is ambiguous and debatable due to historical reasons)

          = classical style (or “classic”)

                    = applied to music by way of analogy to Greek and Roman art

                    = classical msuic possessed the qualities of noble simplicity, balance, formal perfection, diversity with unity, seriousness or wit as appropriate, and freedom from excesses of ornamentation and frills

          = the book (as in this book) regards the era from about 1730 - 1815 as the classic period, and uses “classical music” as the all-embracing term for the music of this period, and to use galant and empfindsam to identify different styles or trends current at the time

          = the boundaries of the Classic period overlap with Baroque and Romantic periods (just as Medieveal and Renaissance and Renaissance and Baroque have blurred boundaries)

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MELODY, HARMONY, TEXTURE, and FORM

melody

          = focus on melody in the new styles led to a new musical syntax

                    = newer styles were marked by periodicity, in which frequent resting points break the melodic flow into segments that relate to each other as parts of a larger whole

                    = musical ideas were articulated through distinct phrases typically 2 or 4 measures in length (instead of being persistently spun out like a ritornello

                    = 2 or more phrases were needed to form a period (a complete musical thought concluded by a cadence)

                    = a composition was made up of two or more periods in succession. this technique creates a structure of frequent cadences integrated through small motivic correspondences

                    = the division of the melody into phrases and periods is suported by harmony

                    = hierarchy of cadences

                              = weakest: marking off internal phrases

                              = stronger ones: closing periods

                              = strongest: for ends of sections and movements

harmony

          = hierarchy of harmony

                    = the small-scale I-V-I of a single phrase is subsumed within a larger-scale modulation from tonic to dominant and back to the course of the movement

          = harmony articulates phrases rather than driving the melody forward, and tends to change less frequently than in older Baroque styles

          = to compensate for the slower harmonic rhythm and limited sustaining power of harpsichords and pianos, composers “pulsed chords”

          = alberti bass

                    = named after Italian composer Domenico Alberti (1710-1746) who used it frequently

                    = one of the most used devices in keyboard music

                    = it breaks each of the underlying chords into simple repeating pattern of short notes, producing a discreet chordal background

form

          = the coherence of late 18th century music was possible because of the differentiation of musical material according to function

          = each segment of music was immediately recognizable as a beginning, middle, or ending gesture

          = such distinctions allowed composers to make clear at every turn where we are in the musical form

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EMOTIONAL CONTRASTS

= deeper knowledge of human physiology (blood circulation, the nervous system, etc) led to a new understanding that feelings were constantly in flux and might take unpredictable turns (contrary to Descartes and others in 17th century that once an emotion was aroused, the person remained in that affection until moved by some stimulus or different emotional state. Baroque composers sought to convey a single mood in each movement, or at most to contrast conflicting moods in self-contained sections such as two parts of a da capo aria or ritornello and episodes of a concerto movement)

= with the new notion that emotions were not steady states, composers began to introduce contrasting moods in the various parts of a movement or within themes

= the possibilities for contrasts were heightened by the new music with its many short phrases and its dependence on differences to articulate form

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THE ENDURING ENGLIGHTENMENT

= we are in many ways children of the Enlightenment often taking granted its central themes: that humans can know the natural world through our senses, understand it through reason, and make progress in science and culture

= the intervening centuries have seen waves of reaction to the Enlightenment that have challenged its ideas, such as 19th century Romantic interest in fantasy and the supernatural

= it has endured today that music is a universal language

= many of our musical institutions and forums stem from the Enlightenment period, such as public concert organizations, amateur choirs, music journalism, books on music history (like this one referenced)

= much of the music composed since 1800 shares essential characteristics with that of the mid-to-late 19th century, from a texture of melody with accompaniment to a periodic structure of phrases and periods