The five masterpieces that changed the course of musical history

[MrGongGong]

Great though Schubert is I don't think any of his music "changed the course of music history" as much as Schoenberg, Monteverdi, Cage or the unknown Javanese

[cloughie]

Unless I've missed it I am surprised that Berlioz has not had a mention. To me the Fantastque Sym was years ahead of its time.

[Suffolkcoastal]

Unless I've missed it I am surprised that Berlioz has not had a mention. To me the Fantastque Sym was years ahead of its time.

You've beaten me to it, I was coming back to this point later this evening!

[Suffolkcoastal]

Schubert had just the one lesson with Sechter I believe before his death, though he apparently was practising counterpoint in preparation whilst writing the 10th. Yes I think either there would have been a separate finale or the Scherzo-Finale would have been more successfully merged and considerably lengthened. The 2nd movement really is very strange and prophetic.

[amateur51]

Unless I've missed it I am surprised that Berlioz has not had a mention. To me the Fantastque Sym was years ahead of its time.

And what/who did it influence?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSIvV8OqNgU

Bravo Edward Cohen!

[Parry1912]

You've beaten me to it, I was coming back to this point later this evening!

I was also going to mention the Symphonie Fantastique (honest!!). Berlioz changed the way composers orchestrated and, for many, their approach to programme music.

However, given Beethoven's influence on both Berlioz and Schubert, I would still plump for the Eroica ahead of any of their works.

[Petrushka]

Unless I've missed it I am surprised that Berlioz has not had a mention. To me the Fantastque Sym was years ahead of its time.

The Symphonie Fantastique could be said to have had an influence on Mahler, especially the 1st Symphony. In addition, Berlioz' Romeo and Juliet had a very striking influence on Wagner's Tristan und Isolde (listen to the Love Scene in the R & J if in doubt) and we are all agreed that the Wagner did change musical history.

[Pabmusic]

I'm not sure about this assumption
According to many musicologists this isn't true at all, for example see...
How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony : (And Why You Should Care) : Ross W Duffin

Indeed, the work was written expressly for well-temperament, not equal temperament.

I don't quite understand how that changes the significance of TWTC in making music 'sound different' thereafter?

I thought I'd research this a bit more, including by reading Ross Duffin's book a bit better. 'Equal temperament' is indeed the correct term, since no keyboard could be 'well-tempered' enough to play 48 pieces in all 24 available keys, in tune, without being tuned according to equal temperament (that is, unless it were re-tuned several times during the performance, which rather defeats the object). Equal temperament means a system of tuning where each note of the scale in every octave is equally spaced (the Dutchman Simon Stevin calculated in about 1600 that each note would have to be 1.059463094 times the frequency value of the note below to give equal spacing, but this was also discovered by ear). This means that, after the first note of a scale, every other note is very slightly out of tune, compared with what nature would give. The advantage is that you can play in any key (and, indeed, the concept of 'key' has a meaning in the first place), move from one key to another, and combine notes from one key with those from another, because the frequency relationships remain constant. (The remarkable thing is that Bach managed to have a clavicord tuned in this way in 1722.)

This is impossible under any system of 'natural' tuning, because of the 'Pythagorean Comma' that kicks in at note 13 of any scale. This is the phenomenon that causes the octave note of C to be nearer to B#, not C, and means that every higher note will be slightly flatter than we'd now expect. It would also mean that the note E (for instance) would actually be slightly different if it were the tonic of the scale of E, the third of the scale of C, the fifth of A, the sixth of G, and so on, because in each case the relationship between the note and the fundamental tone is mathematically different, and not just by a multiple of a fixed interval.

We could, of course, abandon our artificial system and return to 'natural' forms of tuning - after all, Western culture is the only one that developed equal temperament* - but we'd not be able to play much written in the last 500 years - certainly nothing much from the 17th Century onwards. Ross Duffin makes the point that we in the west have lost a natural 'connection' with music that other cultures have because we are used to artificial tuning. I'd argue that equal temperament has created harmony (as we usually understand it) rather that ruined it, but I sort of see his point. Things would be different (very much so) and we can regret not experiencing that, of course, but we'd lose most of what we hold dear. It's all compromise, with gains and losses.

*Apparently the Chinese understood the Pythagorean Comma paradox 4000 years ago, but didn't seem interested in solving it!

[MrGongGong]

We could, of course, abandon our artificial system and return to 'natural' forms of tuning - after all, Western culture is the only one that developed equal temperament* - but we'd not be able to play much written in the last 500 years - certainly nothing much from the 17th Century onwards.

hummm
well yes and no

http://www.neuroscience-of-music.se/Zengbells.htm

we could easily play most of La Monte Youngs music, Arnold Dreyblat's early pieces and Glen Branca's work
I could probably come up with lots more if I tried

What I got from Duffin's book was a refutation of the idea that somehow tuning was "standardised" at a fixed point in history , the stuff about major and minor semitones is fascinating........
also it's important to remember that virtually no ensembles play at the "standard" pitch of A=440 many instruments are made at 442 and many orchestras habitually play much higher than that (look at the harpist when the oboe gives an A , frenzied activity usually indicates that the pitch given is something radically different from what they had tuned to initially).........

of course without the profession of music with musicians travelling with their own instruments from place to place there would be no need for any of this , the tunings of various Gamelans I have played (and the intervals between the notes) vary widely (as do many organs etc )

[rauschwerk]

J S Bach: das Wohltemperierte Clavier[/B] Written specifically to demonstrate the new equal temperament; without equal temperament we could have had no classical, romantic, expressionist or dodecaphonic music (and a lot more besides)

It seems to me that the '48' would have been just about as influential if all the pieces had been written in C major or C minor. I can do no better than to quote from Richard Jones's essay in the Oxford Bach Companion: "But the decisive moment in its posthumous history arrived when Mozart was introduced to it by Baron von Swieten in 1782. Thereafter it influenced the contrapuntal writing of countless composers (notable 20th century examples being Hindemith and Shostakovich) and it has formed a fundamental part of the training of virtually every musician in keyboard playing, composition, analysis and general musicianship."

[Pabmusic]

hummm
well yes and no

http://www.neuroscience-of-music.se/Zengbells.htm

we could easily play most of La Monte Youngs music, Arnold Dreyblat's early pieces and Glen Branca's work
I could probably come up with lots more if I tried

What I got from Duffin's book was a refutation of the idea that somehow tuning was "standardised" at a fixed point in history , the stuff about major and minor semitones is fascinating........
also it's important to remember that virtually no ensembles play at the "standard" pitch of A=440 many instruments are made at 442 and many orchestras habitually play much higher than that (look at the harpist when the oboe gives an A , frenzied activity usually indicates that the pitch given is something radically different from what they had tuned to initially).........

of course without the profession of music with musicians travelling with their own instruments from place to place there would be no need for any of this , the tunings of various Gamelans I have played (and the intervals between the notes) vary widely (as do many organs etc )

I don't disagree with a word of this. The tuning of A=440 Hz was accepted as an international standard only in (I think) 1955, and it's not law anyway! Lets hope no-one ever tries to make it so. The precise pitch doesn't affect the relationship between the notes, though, which is what equal temperament is about.

[MrGongGong]

I don't disagree with a word of this. The tuning of A=440 Hz was accepted as an international standard only in (I think) 1955, and it's not law anyway! Lets hope no-one ever tries to make it so. The precise pitch doesn't affect the relationship between the notes, though, which is what equal temperament is about.

A good friend of mine who is an organ consultant has more than a few books worth of stories about this whole area (and a rather technical Phd) I find the whole thing fascinating as sonic experience contradicts all our attempts to "standardise".

I do think that the whole "keys having a character" (D minor being the saddest etc ) is the rump of a time when different keys DID have completely different characteristics. In loosing this we have lost much of the harmonic subtlety that is maintained in other musics of the world, and also the way in which we have designed our instruments to be even toned rather than having particular pitches with different timbral characteristics.

[rauschwerk]

also it's important to remember that virtually no ensembles play at the "standard" pitch of A=440 many instruments are made at 442 and many orchestras habitually play much higher than that (look at the harpist when the oboe gives an A , frenzied activity usually indicates that the pitch given is something radically different from what they had tuned to initially).........

The significance of a couple of Hertz is greatly overstated. A temperature change of 1.3 deg. C is enough to cause the pitch of a wind instrument to vary by this much. Even if we suppose that the oboist has tuned to a fork in the green room, the given A might change by at least 2 Hz as soon as he/she walks on to the platform! The harp pitch, on the other hand, is far less sensitive to temperature.

[Pabmusic]

A good friend of mine who is an organ consultant has more than a few books worth of stories about this whole area (and a rather technical Phd) I find the whole thing fascinating as sonic experience contradicts all our attempts to "standardise".

It is fascinating, isn't it? I suppose there's always going to be a tendency towards standardisation, especially in the age of recording, but there's a difference between standardisation of pitch and equal temperament, which is about the standardisation of the relationships between notes. The first is perhaps not of the greatest importance overall; the second allowed the key relationships, harmonies (in our Western sense), modulations, discords and much more besides that underpin most Western classical music.

[Pabmusic]

I do think that the whole "keys having a character" (D minor being the saddest etc ) is the rump of a time when different keys DID have completely different characteristics. In loosing this we have lost much of the harmonic subtlety that is maintained in other musics of the world, and also the way in which we have designed our instruments to be even toned rather than having particular pitches with different timbral characteristics.

Sounds good to me.