Music in Relation to Other Arts (Notes by Higo Rodrigues)

Here is the text for Higo Rodrigues's Power Point today [thank you for supplying this to the classd!]

MUSIC IN RELATION TO THE OTHER ARTS: THE CRITICAL DEBATE
Jane F. Fulcher (article from Joan Peyser's The Orchestra)

Nature and Appropriate boundaries of content (meaning) in Instrumental Music
 1848-1849 – European Revolutions (Spring of Nations; Year of Revolution)
 “…the issue that fundamentally divided the positions was the social function of music … the role that music was now to serve … in light of the new cultural era that the revolutions in Europe had ineluctably ushered in.”

Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
 “Instrumental music, according to Schumann, as well as to Hegel and E. T. A. Hoffmann, was quintessentially a medium for the expression of the elusive realm of life.”
 “…who was expressing, the composer or the listener, and the way in which the creative and perceptive acts relate.” ???


ETA Hoffmann (1776-1822)
 “Music expressed the composer.”
– Instrumental music transcends other arts and languages to become the discourse of a ‘higher realm’ – “Music, for Hoffmann, was simultaneously transcendental and personal, expressing the composer’s feelings but through reference to an infinite realm.”
 “When we speak of music as an independent art, should we not always restrict our meaning to instrumental music, which, scorning every aid, every admixture of another art, gives pure expression to music’s specific nature…? How can it ever have occurred to you (miserable composers) to treat after the fashion of the plastic arts the art diametrically opposed to the plastic?” (c. 1813) – no extra-musical reference.
 “For Hoffmann, great composers inscribed a content in their works, one that emanated from the most profound recesses of their inner being but one that was nevertheless translated into an indirect language accessible to the listener through his own interpretative act.”

Hegel (1770-1831)
 “The content the composer invests in his music is accessible to the perception of the listener in an indirect way.”
 “For Hegel, music … combines two processes, for perception of music is not an intellectual matter or rational process but an absorbing identification, a natural empathy with its significance.”

Effect of Music and its Stimulus
“The kind of act that listening should be – active and intellectual, or passive – is here integrally linked to the issues of what it is that music communicates and precisely how it does it.”

Schumann – Correctness of Interpretation
 “For Schumann, instrumental music did contain a definite content, the result of the specific environmental influences working on the composer. (…) for Schumann, the task of criticism … was to get at the content of a work.”

Schumann - Content
 “The ‘character’, then, was not explicit, and yet it was perceptually clear, a disposition obtruding itself so that no other interpretation was possible … thus, if music restricts itself to the kind of content to which it is suited, it can be referential and yet satisfy on its own terms.”

Schumann’s oscillations
 “In some cases he was uncertain as to whether guides to the meaning of his works were required; in others he vacillated over how realistic or detailed a program should be and whether or not the listener should employ it.”

Schumann and the necessity of programmatic guides
 On Berlioz’s Symphonie fastastique (1830) – “… a program meant that the content of the work, its essential character, was not self-evident, as it should be. Moreover, an explicit program thwarted or restricted that which Schumann valued so highly, the independent poetic fantasy of the listener.”

1849
 “After 1849 the question of what music should signify or contain and the relation of music to the listener assumed a decidedly new tone.”

Liszt’s target – reason!!
 Liszt – “Only in music does feeling, in manifesting itself, dispense with the help of reason and its means of expression, so inadequate in comparison with intuition … (music advantage is its) supreme capacity to make an inner impulse audible without the assistance of reason.”

F. Liszt (1811-1886)
 “Yet unlike Schumann, Liszt did not hold that the content should be self-evident, and he stressed the importance of guiding the listener’s perception of the work.”
 Liszt’s program – “any foreword in intelligible language added to a piece of music, by which the composer intends to guard the hearer against an arbitrary poetical interpretation, and to direct his attention in advance to the poetical idea of the whole.”

Liszt’s Program
 The program should indicate “the spiritual moments which impelled the composer to create the work.”
 “Since Liszt did not believe that music could describe objects, he held that the program should only ‘put the listener in the same frame of mind as would the objects themselves.”

Liszt’s Works
 Harmonies poétiques et religieuses (1834)
 Ce qu’on entend sur la montagne (1849)
 Les préludes (1848)

Liszt and V. Hugo
 “…clearly Liszt espoused Hugo’s dictum that literature was true ‘modern art’.”
 “In music, the literary model resulted in the primacy of content over form and a stress on techniques that have analogies with specific verbal meanings.”

Liszt and Form
 “Both (Liszt and Berlioz) refused to adhere to any formal or schematic outline that bore little relation to what they wished to express. Finally, both composers allowed a program to dictate important decisions, but it was Liszt who renounced even a nominal adherence to traditional form.”
 “…for Liszt, content is the determining factor of form, every composition will assume its own unique shape.” – The artistic emancipation of content from schematicism.

Liszt
 “Is it not evident from this that it is merely a question of officially recognizing an already existing power with a view to allowing it greater freedom of action and assisting it in the removal of liabilities?”

Eduard Hanslick (1825-1904)
 “After moving to Vienna and receiving his law degree, Hanslick entered the Austrian bureaucracy.”
 “Music, for Hanslick, does have a spiritual force and thus a social end, but through its formal, sublimating properties, not through its elemental force.”
 “Music has no subject beyond the combinations of notes we hear, for music speaks not only by means of sound, it speaks nothing but sounds.”
 REASON – “The source of knowledge, is also the source of the beautiful in art.”

Hanslick’s Reason
 “He thought that ‘to be slave of unreasoning, undirected, and purposeless feeling, ignited by a power which is out of all relation to our will and intellect, is not worthy of the human mind. If people allow themselves to be so completely carried away by what is elemental in art as to lose all self-control, this scarcely redounds to the glory of the art, and much less to that of the individual’.”

External Factors for 19th-cen Composers (Lorne Dechtenberg)

Here are Lorne's notes on Alan Houtchens’ article “Romantic Composers Respond to Challenge and Demand” in Peyser’s The Orchestra, which he presented in class as a report last week. (Thank you Lorne!)

External Factors Acting on Romantic (19th-century) Composers

Prepared by Lorne Dechtenberg

I. Economic Demands
A. Need to make a living
• Result – composers often worked multiple jobs
• Such jobs included conducting (e.g., Mendelssohn), being a critic (e.g., Schumann), and teaching (many did this)
B. Pleasing publishers
• Mass consumption of written music was by amateurs who played at home (often on a keyboard instrument)
• Publishers therefore wanted easier pieces for either solo piano or small chamber groups (duo, trio) that included piano (or songs)
C. Pleasing live audiences
• Concert patrons still enjoyed watching virtuosic performances
• Orchestras therefore wanted difficult, virtuosic pieces
II. Cultural and Artistic Trends
A. The development of the Pianoforte (the modern piano)
• Constructed progressively better and with a louder and better sound
• Composers began to incorporate it into the orchestra (not just concerti)
B. Composer-Conductors were particularly revered by Romantic audiences
• “The composer whose inner ear is the judge of his composition works in quite a different way. This inner ear is an amazingly able judgeof musical shapes – something peculiar to the art of music and a sacred mystery which the layman cannot fathom.” (Weber)
C. The creation of the valved horn
• Allowed the playing of pitches from more than one harmonic series
• Gave the horn more flexibility, but a new sound
• Difference among composers’ reactions
o Brahms hated the color of the valved horn
o Mahler loved it (called for all 7 horn players to stand in the finale of his Symphony No.1)
o Weber also liked it, although he experimented with his own sounds (his Concertino in E Minor calls for the player to sing into the horn while playing!)
D. Opera (perhaps the most experimental genre – as it had been in the Baroque)
• French Grand Opera – combined singing, acting, dance, pantomime, and special effects
• Opera was the first genre to embrace the valved horn (and valved trumpet)
• Also began using other instruments for color (e.g., Bass Clarinet, Harp, English Horn)
• Dvořák called for a contrabass clarinet, but there wasn’t one in Bohemia (modern-day Czech); it had to be sent from Paris, and the player couldn’t play it because he knew only the German fingering system!
E. The conservatory infrastructure
• Turned out highly trained musicians to play in professional orchestras
• This meant that composers could write whatever they want with the expectation that professional performers would be able to play it.
III. Sociopolitical Developments
A. The rise of music criticism
• People other than composers, performers, and audiences now had a say in the popular success or failure of a composer or work
• The disapproval by some critics of the extensive experimentation during this time may had contributed to the rift between composers and mass audiences
B. Nationalism among composers
• As the available body of literature began to expand, composers sought to set their own music apart by incorporating folk stories, characters, and music from their respective homelands
• Der Freischütz (Weber / Germany), Finlandia (Sibelius / Finland) Slavonic Dances (Dvořák / Bohemia), A Life for the Tsar (Glinka / Russia) Peer Gynt (Grieg / Norway), and many others
C. Nationalism among orchestras
• With the rise of international music criticism, many orchestras wanted to garner reputations outside their borders
• Most orchestras already had a unique sound by virtue of the instrument types (e.g., size and shape of brass bores), fingering patterns (e.g., French vs. German), and techniques (e.g., amount and speed of vibrato)
• Some still sought more notoriety – “As conductor of the court orchestra at Meiningen from 1880 to 1885 Hans von Bülow fashioned a distinctive sound quality and performance capability for that body by requiring all of his musicians to stand during performances and by insisting on the use of five-string basses, Hermann Ritter’s larger alta violas, and pedal timpani.” (Houtchens)


This outline is based in part on Alan Houtchens’ article “Romantic Composers Respond to Challenge and Demand” in Peyser’s The Orchestra.