Romanticism--Old and New
Lecture Recital
Michael Mauldin, January 2001
The romanticism (with a little "r") of the Romantic period of music history (1830-1900) is the flowering of an ongoing thread that binds the musical periods--and all of us--together. The piano music of the Romantic movement--that of Schumann, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Liszt and Brahms--is an overflowing of a force that budded in the Renaissance, further developed during the Baroque (1600-1750) and Classical (1750-1830) periods, and which flourishes even now, in the post anti-Romantic era.
Before looking at the evolution of this force, let me begin with the ending. It is a contemporary view, as expressed by Deepak Chopra in THE PATH TO LOVE (Harmony Books NY):
You were created to be completely loved and completely lovable for your whole life. Time cannot blemish your essence, your portion of spirit. If you lose sight of this essence, you mistake yourself for your experiences. All of us must discover for ourselves that love is a force as real as gravity--it is intended as our natural state. We have separate bodies, separate minds, separate memories and backgrounds. But part of us hates living in separation. If love is the ultimate reality, as the great teachers tell us, then the slightest gesture of connection is a gesture of love. To reach across the wall of separation, whether to friend, lover, family, or stranger, is to act in the name of love, whether we consciously realize it or not.
Some of my young piano students, who have not yet experienced the euphoric rush of self-love and acceptance brought on by their first real love affair, seem puzzled by the use of term "romantic" for a period of music simply because the music is "so emotional". They see the sudden changes of mood as being a bit unstable, or in modern lingo, "uncool". But that almost-out-of-control, hot passion is what makes it more captivating, more emotional, more exciting, and yet more soothing than the music before or after.
The Romantic movement in Germany originated in a literary school of the late eighteenth century by writers who went back to the literature and culture of the Middle Ages, with its valiant knights, gracious ladies and pious monks. After 1800, musicians (always a bit behind the other arts) came under the Romantic influence. Little was known of the music of the Middle Ages, and it wouldn't have been much of an inspiration for them anyway. But to musicians, the Romantic movement meant a general attitude of "longing for something nonexistent, a propensity for dream and fancy, for unrestrained subjectivism and emotionalism" (Willi Apel, MATERS OF THE KEYBOARD, Harvard University Press).
One of the most important trademarks of Romanticism is the blurring of borderlines. The Romanticist includes reality in his dream world, instead of facing it as an objective phenomenon. This integration of the outer world with the inner self, a "subjective universalism", gives rise to the multiple moods and strong, contrasting personalities in Romantic character pieces, and the breakdown of class and race boundaries.
For my young piano students or the new initiates in my boy choir, who are having trouble seeing the fun in preparing to have fun (such as when practicing a new piece, studying its theory, or working on its technique), I often draw two circles side by side and write the word "reality" in one and "pretend" in the other. I mention that I know a lot of adults who spend their whole time in the "reality" circle, ignoring or discounting any contact with the "pretend" circle. They get a lot done, but they are usually not very happy and not very interesting.
Then I tell my young friends that I also know a lot of children who spend most of their time in the "pretend" circle, avoiding the "reality" circle whenever it bumps up against them. For a while they are fun to be around, until their lack of awareness of their environment and their inability or unwillingness to help anyone, makes them seem selfish and not very smart.
Then I redraw the two circles, allowing them to overlap slightly. I shade in the overlapping area and explain that I purposely spend as much time as I possibly can right there in that area of mix and of balance.
To deliberately blur the borders of one's experience so as to live in reality and fantasy at the same time is a romantic notion that is being seriously reconsidered in the quantum-physics era. Though we acknowledge the importance of technology, we no longer worship at its altar, as our savior. We have seen its potential for evil, and we have seen our lovely, fragile planet from space. We are again willing to listen to poets and seers. The American composer Leonard Bernstein said, "It is the artists of the world, the
feelers and the thinkers who will ultimately save us; who can articulate, educate, defy, insist, sing and shout the big dreams."
The scientific method brought us out from under the "blind" faith in the selfish, controlling religious leaders of the Middle Ages (and from their theft of the energy of their own people). During the Renaissance, budding interest in mixing the "real" with the "spiritual" expressed not just the exalted thought of the Church, but also the devotion and color of its people. In the Baroque era, men felt just as free to enjoy their earthly lives as they felt themselves bound to the laws of God and the Church. Classicism, with its earthiness dressed in elegance, has aptly been described as a synthesis of "nature and humanity." The Romantic era asked more questions--deeper ones--releasing a wide range of emotions, which were deemed too subjective during the first half of the 20th century, at the beginning of anti-Romanticism and the "cult" of technology.
Fortunately, some scientists pursued knowledge beyond what was necessary to provide for our physical and psychological needs. The findings in quantum physics and relativity have made us aware that perhaps some things may never be clearly explainable with scientific observation alone. This passage from James Redfield's novel, "The Celestine Prophecy" (1997, Warner Books), sums it up:
"The whole of Einstein's life's work was to show that what we perceive as hard matter is mostly empty space with a pattern of energy running through it. This includes ourselves. And what quantum physics has shown is that when we look at these patterns of energy at smaller and smaller levels, startling results can be seen. Experiments have revealed that when you break apart small aspects of this energy, what we call elementary particles, and try to observe how they operate, the act of observation itself alters the results--as if these elementary particles are influenced by what the experimenter expects. This is true even if the particles must appear in places they couldn't possibly go, given the laws of the universe as we know them: two places at the same moment, forward or backward in time, that sort of thing."
According to Redfield, we are collectively evolving toward an awareness that the energy we have always stolen from each other--through physical, sexual or psychological manipulation--may seem more powerful than, but is actually less sustaining and more self-destructive than, the very real energy we get from enjoying beauty around us--in a sunset, a tree, a melody, or a lovely face. There is plenty of energy to go around. We do not have to steal it from each other. It is more fun to share it.
There is today a renewed interest in integrating our daily, "secular" experience with the "sacred". I believe, as does the American Indian, that there need not be a borderline between the two. The farmer watering a corn plant, or the mentor loving a child, can be a sacred act. We love not because we are expected to, but because it makes us happy to do so. The notion is not new that such traditionally mutually exclusive pursuits as pleasure and spirituality are really parts of a whole. The struggle to reconcile these apparent opposites is at the heart of romanticism through the ages, and its very fire comes from the belief that such wholeness and resolution is possible.
After a long, hard period of the exclusion of the resolution of tension from contemporary music, there seems now to be greater acceptance that at least some resolution is needed in order to keep alive the belief in resolution. To clarify that, let me quote two paragraphs from Leonard Meyer's book, EMOTION AND MEANING IN MUSIC:
According to Hebb, the difference between pleasant and unpleasant emotions lies in the fact that pleasant emotions...are always resolved. They depend on 'first arousing apprehension, then dispelling it.' But were this actually the case, we could only know whether an emotion were pleasant or unpleasant after it was over. Yet, surely, we know more than this while we are experiencing affect. The pleasantness of an emotion seems to lie not so much in the fact of resolution itself as in the belief in resolution--the knowledge, whether true or false, that there will be a resolution. --EMOTION AND MEANING IN MUSIC, L. Meyer, p. 19 ...in everyday experience the tensions created by the inhibition of tendencies often go unresolved. They are merely dissipated in the press of irrelevant events. In this sense daily experience is meaningless and accidental. In art inhibition of tendency becomes meaningful because the relationship between the tendency and its necessary resolution is made explicit and apparent. Tendencies do not simply cease to exist: they are resolved, they conclude. --EMOTION AND MEANING IN MUSIC, L. Meyer, p. 23
The composer works in a temporal medium. Most of the stylistic traits that we will trace this evening, have to do with the composer's use of time. Whether he delays the resolution of tension with a long note--or with a silence, whether he extends or contracts the length of the musical phrase from its usual norms, how quickly he changes the underlying harmonies, whether he resolves the tension at all or merely dissipates it or ignores it--all have to do with our expectation of how he will use time.
Before I play the pieces, let me excerpt a few measures to demonstrate some of the devices that all composers use to play with that expectation. All of these devices were used in the other style periods, but they were "enlarged" during the Romantic period, as was everything--from the size of performing groups, to the length and dynamism of pieces.
Delay of resolution with a non-chord tone. The most common such device is the appoggiatura, from the Italian "appoggiare", meaning "to lean on". It is a non-harmonic (or non-chord) tone, meaning it is not one of the notes in the underlying harmony. It is usually a second (or step) above the expected chord-tone in the melody. It is melodically connected with the main note that follows it (that is, it is sung in the same breath or played with the same stroke of the bow, or on keyboard instruments, connected smoothly to that following note).
[example: measure 16-17, Allemande from French Suite No. 4, Bach]
[example: measure 5-8, Intermezzo, Op. 188, No. 2, Brahms]
Use of silence. During the Baroque, musical phrases were often connected with scale passages, making for few silences. The Classicists allowed brief silences between sections--the kind of pregnant pause described by the American Indian as "svaha", the time between the lightning and the thunder. This was enlarged by the Romantics to the "grand pause" between phrases of markedly different character, or to indicate the lack of an answer to a musical (personal, philosophical, religious) question.
[example: measure 17-26, Menuet & Trio from Sonata No. 10, Haydn]
[example: measure 73-77, first movement of Sonata No. 20, Haydn]
[example: measure 23-29, and 45-55, Fantasia in d minor, Mozart]
Loosing sight of (delaying) the resolution with a faster harmonic rhythm. Harmonic rhythm is the speed of change of the underlying chords or harmonies. Once a frequency of change is established (usually one or two chords per measure), a composer may suddenly begin to change the harmonies on every beat, having the effect (as with Einstein's laws) of making things seem to take longer by using a faster rate of change, since we naturally want to fully experience each of those chords, which are now coming at us more quickly.
[example: measure 17-24, Sarabande from French Suite No. 1, Bach]
[example: measure 11-13, Nocturne in E-flat, Op. 9, No. 2, Chopin]
Use of stasis. "Going into a trance" is a device composers use to suggest a daydream state. My own theory is that daydreaming is nature's way of momentarily putting our controlling egos into neutral, letting the surrounding energy--the still, small voice, if you will, flow into us--a kind of automatic meditation. In music it is usually accomplished by holding a harmony much longer than normal. Or it can come from changing to a slower harmonic rhythm for a while.
[example: measure 73-76, Intermezzo, Op. 118, No. 2, Brahms]
[example: measure 1-4, Intermezzo, Op. 118, No. 2, Brahms]
Delaying the resolution by extending the phrase-length. Although it was made firm during the Classical period, the use of the four-measure phrase was common even in earlier eras. That means that we have for centuries expected a musical phrase to be four measures long, no matter whether the song uses two, three, four or more beats per measure. The best example is a single line in the verse of a hymn or song.
[example: measure 11-18, The Lord of Salisbury His Pavin, Gibbons]
Avoiding the "tendency" of the phrase with sudden shifts. One of the hallmarks of romanticism is its sometimes-unpredictable changes in loudness, style, mood, tempo.
[example: measure 9-15, first movement, Sonata No. 20, Haydn]
[example: measure 22-26, first movement, Sonata No. 20, Haydn]
[example: measure 25-38, Intermezzo, Op. 118, No. 2, Brahms]
Use of harmonic ambiguity. Though especially popular in Debussy's Impressionism, many earlier composers used chords in ways much different from their usual functions. Sometimes they merged chords with opposing tendencies, such as the dominant or "itch" chord combined with the tonic (or final) chord that the dominant is supposed to drive us toward. At other times the chord progression is normal except for a few substitutions of chords which partly fulfill the expectation but partly don't.
[example: measure 1-20, Mazurka in a minor, Op. 17, No. 4, Chopin]
Before playing each piece, I'll make some brief introductory remarks about each.
* * *
ROMANTICISM--OLD AND NEW
MICHAEL MAULDIN, PIANO
JANUARY, 2001
PROGRAM
The Lord of Salisbury His Pavin . . Orlando Gibbons (1583-1625)
(refinement, "spirituality", phrase extensions, energy)
Allemande from French Suite No. 4 . . . JS Bach (1685-1750
(appoggiaturas, "contour", key melody notes hidden, lyricism)
Sarabande from French Suite No. 1 . . . . . . JS Bach
(lyricism, increase in harmonic rhythm encourages expressive ritardando)
Menuet and Trio from Sonata No. 10 in C (1766) Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
(elegance and sadness/adversity clearly separated, with exact repeat of elegance)
First movement, Sonata No. 20 in C minor (1771) . . Joseph Haydn
("Sturm & Drang", elegance and sadness/adversity mixed, dramatic silence, quick dynamic shifts)
Fantasia in D minor, K 397 (1782) . . WA Mozart (1756-1791)
(melodramatic characterization, grand pause, cadenza, quick changes of mood)
Nocturne in E-flat, Op. 9, No. 2 . . Frederic Chopin (1810-1849)
(mellow, tuneful, use of stasis, increases in harmonic rhythm, is in the "present tense")
Mazurka in A minor, Op. 17, No. 4 . . . . Frederic Chopin
(harmonic ambiguity, sweet memory framed by regret, in "past tense", cyclic non-ending)
Polonaise in C minor, Op. 40, No. 2 . . . . Frederic Chopin
(dramatic, quick harmony/mood swings)
Intermission
Intermezzo, Op. 118, No. 2 (1892) . . Johaness Brahms (1833-1897)
(many appoggiaturas, stasis/extending harmonic rhythm, counterpoint, many moods)
Nocturne in D-flat . . . . . Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
(pre-Impressionistic emotional outbursts, scene painting, odd meter)
First movement, Piano Sonata No. 3 (1950) Dmitri Kabalevsky (1904-1987)
("sinking"/non-functional chords, dissonance mixed with lyricism, neo-classicism)
Three Senior Pieces . . . . . . Michael Mauldin (1947)
(written for my piano students when they graduated from high school)
Souvenir of a Russian Journey (for Nick Curro, 1989)
Fantasia (for Jennifer Freeman, 1989)
Music Mountain (for Bryan Cook, 1994)
Going Forth at Dawn With Power (2000) . . . Michael Mauldin
(written for Lawrence Blind, pianist, on the occasion of the birth of his son, Wesley)