"Early Music"

[Roehre]

....

As to why all those underperformed baroque composers are underperformed...I don't know. There are an awful lot of them, and I am sure chance has a lot to do with it - they were performed in their time and place, and they probably didn't expect to survive for posterity.

The same applies to later (classical, romantic etc) composers, btw.
Only in the Viennese archives there are some 100.000 unpublished scores already, most of them from pre-1806 courts and monasteries.

[jean]

Though the it was the Romantic period that gave birth to the idea of the Great Artist, wasn't it?

[Roehre]

Though the it was the Romantic period that gave birth to the idea of the Great Artist, wasn't it?

Well, that's how artists were considered to be, starting with Beethoven and his titanic works (and Alessandra Comini's book about this is illuminating) but there are quite a lot who didn't care less, as long as publishers and public paid (and quite a lot of these have been forgotten) It most certainly was Wagner's, but unlikely Bruckner's intention, e.g.

[jean]

But once the idea of the Great Artist was born, the lioninsing could begin, even though the individual composer might have cared not at all - look what the Nazis did to Bruckner, without his knowledge or consent!

I suppose though that it is only fair to admit that a few composers of earlier periods were similarly lionised -Josquin for example. But that was more likely to involve using his works as a basis for futrther compositions rather than celebrating their originality.

Still, it had the effect of keeping them alive.

[Roehre]

But once the idea of the Great Artist was born, the lioninsing could begin, even though the individual composer might have cared not at all - look what the Nazis did to Bruckner, without his knowledge or consent!

The idea of a great artist(/i.e. craftsman-composer) was known in the renaissance too.
Examples: DesPrez's Déploration sur la Mort de Johannes Ockeghem, Crétin's poetic summary mentioning Agricola, Verbonnet, Prioris, DesPrez, Gaspar, Brumel and Compère, and Lupi's Ergone conticuit(text Erasmus)

[jean]

The mourners of Josquin's Déploration include Josquin himself, Brumel, Pierchon (Pierre de la Rue?) and Compère, who are to - in that lovely phrase - plorer grosses larmes d'oeil.

I am just not sure how much this meant that Ockeghem's music should be preserved - except as the subject of hom(m)ages of various sorts. And I think Josquin himself was exceptional in the reverence he was accorded.

There's also Byrd's Tallis is dead, and Music dies. But what measures would he have taken to keep it alive?

.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

There's also Vasari's work celebrating the Italian Renaissance Artists - and Shakespeare's references to his Sonnets "immortalising" his beloved demonstrates an idea of the Art work being something that would be permanently famous.

But it does take on a new aspect in the Nineteenth Century with, as Jean calls it, the "Lionising" of the Byronic hero (the characteristics of which are grafted on to Beethoven in 19th Century biographies and portraits) - to which many creative artists actively seek to aspire. This whole mindset was what gave Owen, Schönberg and other Artists entering the First World War their naive concept of what they were getting themselves into. Anti-Romanticism/Neo-Classicism was a reaction against excesses - even though Stravinsky (and others) still continued thinking in terms of (a different type of) Great Artist: Nazism/Fascism hoped to maintain the myth, and perverted the focus onto the Fuhrer/Duce figure as "the man of destiny".

[doversoul1]

Ockeghem and DesPrez (maybe even Vivaldi ) were definitely regarded as great artists by others and they must have cared their ‘art’ greatly but I wonder if they see themselves as artists in the modern sense (well, obviously not…)

[Serial_Apologist]

Ockeghem and DesPrez (maybe even Vivaldi ) were definitely regarded as great artists by others and they must have cared their ‘art’ greatly but I wonder if they see themselves as artists in the modern sense (well, obviously not…)

Worth hearing this for a modern composer perspective, from one such today:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06qjf43

The mantel of "great artist" confers onto the slebs of today, I guess.

[jean]

The mantel of "great artist"...

(Sorry couldn't resist)

[doversoul1]

Luigi Rossi’s Orfeo: 6.30pm today

More apologies for repeating myself but this thread has far more readers that the original thread this was posted

Luigi Rossi's 17th-century opera on the myth of Orpheus from the candlelit space of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, performed by the Early Opera Company, conducted by Christian Curnyn and directed by Keith Warner

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06qjfq6

original post

http://www.for3.org/forums/showthread.php?14315-Luigi-Rossi-Orfeo

[Serial_Apologist]

(Sorry couldn't resist)

I'll get me mantel.

[ahinton]

... in the same way as some "conservative" composers living today are still composing in early 20C idioms, and in the 1890s a beethovenian, mendelsohnian or schumanesque idiom was not unusual either

I accept the latter part of what you write here but isn't the former something of an over-simplification? What might those "earlyC20 idioms be"? - Stravinsky, who drew on his Russian heritage, or Schönberg, who in drawing on his Austro-German heritage created something of a synthesis of those once thought to be opposites Brahms and Wagner, of Ives, Varèse, Bartók, Rachmaninov, Mahler, Busoni, Debussy et al, all of whom drew on earlier musics? Mightn't all these and others taken together undermine any real identifiable sense of "early C20 idioms", as well as the very meaning of "conservative" in this context, merely by dint of their sheer diversity? Would you see some composers in the last two decades of C20 as having had recourse to idioms from WWII and the early 1950s? And never mind Mendelssohn (of whose work Barenboim once said that it altered nothing whatsoever in the course of European musical history) or Schumann; what about Beethoven, whose influence has continued to make its powerful presence felt in many ways long after "the 1890s"?...

[Serial_Apologist]

I accept the latter part of what you write here but isn't the former something of an over-simplification? What might those "earlyC20 idioms be"? - Stravinsky, who drew on his Russian heritage, or Schönberg, who in drawing on his Austro-German heritage created something of a synthesis of those once thought to be opposites Brahms and Wagner, of Ives, Varèse, Bartók, Rachmaninov, Mahler, Busoni, Debussy et al, all of whom drew on earlier musics? Mightn't all these and others taken together undermine any real identifiable sense of "early C20 idioms", as well as the very meaning of "conservative" in this context, merely by dint of their sheer diversity? Would you see some composers in the last two decades of C20 as having had recourse to idioms from WWII and the early 1950s? And never mind Mendelssohn (of whose work Barenboim once said that it altered nothing whatsoever in the course of European musical history) or Schumann; what about Beethoven, whose influence has continued to make its powerful presence felt in many ways long after "the 1890s"?...

Common areas of early 20th century compositional advance which broke away from the 19th century include:

Recourse to pre-19th century forms and gestures.

The ending of the concept of resolved discourse and opening of uncertainty, both in idiomatic terms and choices of literary materials/themes.

Breakdown in functional tonality - whether by chromatic elaboration, or modal substitution through recourse to pre-Baroque, folk or extra-Occidental procedures.

Breakdown in associated rhythmic and phase definition associated with the above, followed in some by new rhythmic and metrical procedures.

New sound combinations resulting from novel harmonic voicings and instrumental doublings.

Precursors to all of these are to be found earlier than 1900, and would be continued to be unfolded gradualistically in composers including Mahler, Strauss, Medtner and Sibelius, but their full implications began being fully released in the first decade of the 20th century, chief among the protagonists being the Second Viennese composers, Debussy, Satie, Schmitt, Bartok, Busoni and Ives, with Roussel, Prokofiev and Stravinsky joining as prime movers by the end of that first decade.

[Roehre]

I accept the latter part of what you write here but isn't the former something of an over-simplification? What might those "earlyC20 idioms be"? - Stravinsky, who drew on his Russian heritage, or Schönberg, who in drawing on his Austro-German heritage created something of a synthesis of those once thought to be opposites Brahms and Wagner, of Ives, Varèse, Bartók, Rachmaninov, Mahler, Busoni, Debussy et al, all of whom drew on earlier musics? Mightn't all these and others taken together undermine any real identifiable sense of "early C20 idioms", as well as the very meaning of "conservative" in this context, merely by dint of their sheer diversity? Would you see some composers in the last two decades of C20 as having had recourse to idioms from WWII and the early 1950s? And never mind Mendelssohn (of whose work Barenboim once said that it altered nothing whatsoever in the course of European musical history) or Schumann; what about Beethoven, whose influence has continued to make its powerful presence felt in many ways long after "the 1890s"?...

Of course this is an over-simplification, made for argument's sake.
It might have been better had I written something like "pre-stravinsky Sacre/ pre-Debussy/ pre-2VS early 20C idiom".
But whether or not these idioms are drawn from - and in that sense a continuation of/reaction to- earlier musics is not important in this case.
[IMVHO Beethoven's influence is still to be felt. Is the Grosse Fuge not the eternal avant-garde piece (Stravinsky's words IIRC)? Well, the latter's Symphonies for winds are far off that either IMO, though (the 1st version) being from 1919].

To return to "early music": without Ockeghem no DesPrez, without Dunstable or Dufay no Ockeghem.
Continuation-evolution/reaction, here pushing Ars subtilior to a dead end (an analogy with strict serialism here) and explaining why Dunstable is the most important English composer.

That's analogous to what we see happening in the 20C quite in extenso between 1900 and 1950, isn't it?