Romanticism in western music

This paper is a study of the consequences of romanticism in Western music. Much of the work of 19th century composers was influenced by a sweeping desire to express emotion through music, explore varied forms and lengths of composition, and link music to the other arts, especially literature. The romantic movement encouraged composers to find their individual voices, both in the work they wrote and in the way they supported their art. It released music from the formality of classicism and laid the groundwork for many elements that are now established in modern music, from the variable size of the orchestra to the appreciation of the conductor's importance to performance and interpretation. As the century ended, however, composers began to believe that the romantics had fully explored the limits of major-minor tonality. In moving beyond what they saw then as confining restrictions, the musical heirs to romanticism staked their claim to new uses of the available tones. The freedom to experiment that had characterized the romantic era was perhaps the greatest of all the gifts bequeathed to the composers who found new paths to follow.

Romanticism was the last great musical movement to fully engage a wide range of composers over a substantial period. In the 60 to 70 years encompassed by the romantic era, an astonishing range of artists produced a rich variety of work that shared a common aesthetic while retaining the individual voices of each composer. Gerald Abraham desc

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by him" (1968, p. 15). Within each of the new schools, the experiments of composers took them far beyond their romantic roots to reconsider the nature and definition of music itself. Schoenberg led the way in pioneering 12-tone music; Cohn describes this new movement in musical composition: Twelve-tone technique is determined by the structural formation of the twelve pitches used in Occidental music. However, unlike the arrangement that guides major or minor tonalities, there is no relationship whatsoever to a focal or ground tone . . . The music [is] fully chromatic . . . a newer kind of musical rhetoric . . . [which] is now an orthodox discipline (1965, pp. 256-257). At the time, however, before 12-tone music was widely understood or accepted, Shoenberg's explorations took him into quite radical territory in the views of contemporary critics and audiences. Bailey terms 12-tone technique "one of the most contentious movements of this century" (1991, p. 1); though accepted, it is still not completely understood and welcomed, even by the most sophisticated listeners. Alban Berg (1885-1935) was a pupil of Shoenberg's. He created operas such as Wozzeck and the unfinished Lulu, which had a startling effect on audiences both fo

Category: Arts - R