Late Baroque, Early Classical or…?

[ardcarp]

Mother of bride (heavy Brummie accent) discusses wedding music with organist:

"Ooh, Oi'd loik sumthink reeeely Classical...er...loik Moonloit and Rowsis."

[doversoul1]

There's quite a comprehensive, if virtual, shelf on Wiki:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Classical-era_composers

I suppose one might need to choose carefully.........

This looks more like a field than a shelf. Maybe someone could pick a couple of dozens every so often and put them in a box and on the shelf. That would be more workable. .

[french frank]

I don't think it would help at all, since by the time we've got to 'Classical' proper with (say) Haydn and Mozart, we've run into confusion withthe more general meaning of 'Classical' for just about everything, and it is no longer useful in its narrower definition.

I think the people most likely to be confused are those who consider Star Wars and Ladies in Lavender as 'classical'. People who are aware of the two distinct meanings of classical/Classical don't get 'confused' - even if clarification is sometimes needed regarding a particular usage.

When anything is of enough interest to be studied in its own right, it needs a name - a label.

M. Vinteuil's 'pre-Classical' seems useful - on the model of 'pre-Romantic' - for general purposes.

[jean]

People who are aware of the two distinct meanings of classical/Classical don't get 'confused'

Those people don't need a label either!

And anyway, 'pre-Classical' has already been usurped to cover the range of what we might otherwise call Early Music.

[french frank]

Those people don't need a label either!

But a label could be invented if one proposed to study them closely!

[Richard Barrett]

'Transitional', why not.

But every era is transitional, isn't it? Once again, the emphasis on labels and canons creates an illusion that music history can be described in terms of more or less stable "periods" with a few revolutionary or anachronistic figures sitting uncomfortably in between.

trammelled in counterpoint by a Baroque master (...) And how the oldies must have tut-tutted!

But almost all composers were "trammelled in counterpoint" right up until the present day. And as for the "oldies", JS Bach proved in the Sonata from his Musical Offering that he could and would do everything the younger generation were doing, to say nothing of Telemann, Graupner, Rameau, Scarlatti...

Of course labels can be useful for study purposes, but something like "pre-classical" creates an implicit hierarchy between the styles of those periods which contained well-known composers and the styles of those periods which didn't, which, among other things, perpetuates a "great men" theory of musical evolution, which in turn neither helps in understanding how that evolution took place nor gives individuals like CPE or JC Bach full credit for what they did. I'm reminded of reading a book about Haydn in which his G minor symphony no.39 was unfavourably compared to Mozart's G minor symphony no.40, written 25 years later, as if somehow Haydn could be "blamed" for not producing a work as "profound" as Mozart's, when in fact both were being looked at basically through a "late romantic" prism. I'm drifting a bit here but I suppose my point is that divisions into "periods" often depend a lot on the unspoken musical attitudes of those making them, which perhaps oughtn't to go unquestioned.

[jean]

Very wise; thank you.

[vinteuil]

... my point is that divisions into "periods" often depend a lot on the unspoken musical attitudes of those making them, which perhaps oughtn't to go unquestioned.

... well-put; thank you.

[ardcarp]

But every era is transitional, isn't it?

I wish our current one was.

[Richard Barrett]

I wish our current one was.

I don't think there's any reason to believe it isn't. (A transition to what is the frightening part, as far as I'm concerned.) I was also going to say that (taking the example under discussion) composers in general don't know what "period" they're in. CPE Bach didn't think of his music as leading from Baroque to Classical in style - how could he have? Likewise Dufay didn't think of himself as an "early Renaissance" composer; Wagner and Liszt had no idea that their harmonic innovations would lead to the loosening altogether of tonal necessities, although in retrospect it seems inevitable. (I've just been looking at a rather interesting book on this subject by Jim Samson, Music in Transition.)

Anyway, returning to the second-generation Bachs, I do think there's a lot to be gained by trying to hear their music on its own terms rather than comparing it to that of other composers. Carl Philipp Emanuel's work in particular, I think, is highly varied and wide-ranging in conception and expression, and sometimes quite startling in its inventiveness. (Try Die neue Litanei for example, I can't think of an 18th century piece with such adventurous harmonies in it.)

[ahinton]

I wish our current one was.

In agreeing with the points various that Richard Barrett has made here, I would submit that our own era is arguably more "transitional" than any previous one, at least insofar as there are far more musics of different styles, manners and persuasions concurrently being pursued than ever before and the sense of a state of flux is thus greater than once it was.

[ardcarp]

I beg to differ. Young bloods from many eras, although they didn't know what name they were attaching to their innovations (Ars Nova, Early Classical, 2nd Viennese School) wanted to do something different, and the good ones wanting to do something different forged [what we now see as] the course of musical history. I think that, with the benefit of hindsight, our present patch...where minimalism has run its course and something needs to supplant it...will be seen as lean, confused and uncreative. There have been such patches in the past too, of course....

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I beg to differ. I think that we are living in one of the richest periods of Music History that there has ever been - producing some of the best Music that has ever been. It is probably the sheer bewildering variety that ahinton suggests (and understandably bewildering, too - we are all accessing the Forum by means of technology that makes whatever is new almost instantly accessible to anyone who seeks it; in earlier periods, the newest Music took months if not years to reach an audience) that seems to baffle certain national broadcasters. Without a "label" to attach to a composer's "style", they appear unable to "market" it - which leaves those audiences reliant on such broadcasters with the rather strange idea that Minimalism is the most recent "thing", and that nothing has "supplanted" it. Music History is being "forged" (actually, I find it astonishingly authentic) as we discuss this topic.


Which rather supports dovers' suggestion that, without a convenient "label", Music doesn't get broadcast nearly as often as it should be on R3. Yes - criteria for such labels should be continually questioned (most valuable concepts need to be refreshed by such scrutiny), but if it gets more broadcasts of Music from composers whose mature individuality emerged in the 1740s, (and those from the 1640s for that matter) then such labelling has some use.

[ahinton]

I beg to differ. I think that we are living in one of the richest periods of Music History that there has ever been - producing some of the best Music that has ever been. It is probably the sheer bewildering variety that ahinton suggests (and understandably bewildering, too - we are all accessing the Forum by means of technology that makes whatever is new almost instantly accessible to anyone who seeks it; in earlier periods, the newest Music took months if not years to reach an audience) that seems to baffle certain national broadcasters. Without a "label" to attach to a composer's "style", they appear unable to "market" it - which leaves those audiences reliant on such broadcasters with the rather strange idea that Minimalism is the most recent "thing", and that nothing has "supplanted" it. Music History is being "forged" (actually, I find it astonishingly authentic) as we discuss this topic.


Which rather supports dovers' suggestion that, without a convenient "label", Music doesn't get broadcast nearly as often as it should be on R3. Yes - criteria for such labels should be continually questioned (most valuable concepts need to be refreshed by such scrutiny), but if it gets more broadcasts of Music from composers whose mature individuality emerged in the 1740s, (and those from the 1640s for that matter) then such labelling has some use.

Quite - and the notion of any kind of musical expression "supplanting" any other simply holds no water; one might as well speak of "atonality" (not that Schönberg would ever do so!) having "supplanted" tonality.

Whether we now live in a period of music history that's "producing some of the best Music that has ever been" might be open to question but the rich diversity of what's on offer today can not only not be denied but also adds to all that has gone before, thereby making it richer still.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Whether we now live in a period of music history that's "producing some of the best Music that has ever been" might be open to question

Well, yes - but it would be fun so to question! Not that such debating could meaningfully take place with people who haven't heard any of the Music under question. (A comment equally true of Music from the Early Classical and all other "periods", of course.)

but the rich diversity of what's on offer today can not only not be denied but also adds to all that has gone before, thereby making it richer still.

(As in TS Eliot's comment that new art not only changes what happens next but what has happened before, perhaps? The idea that The Rite of Spring changes perceptions of the Eroica - "History" being as much how we think about the past [about ourselves] as a list of what happened in it.)