Fragments and wish lists

There is an important difference between the study of ancient and modern musics. In modern music, we generally know what the music sounds like and how it is made; consequently, research focuses on the music’s structure, effects, or contexts; we can use the sound to understand broader issues. In studying ancient music, on the other hand, much research is an attempt to reconstruct the sound of the music itself.

For example, a modern researcher interested in Native American protest songs from the Standing Rock movement of 2016 might have access to notated or recorded versions of songs and lyrics; will speak or will learn to speak the necessary languages; can interview the singers or people who knew them; and will have access to oral histories and written records that allow them to explore the music’s relationship to its cultural context. A researcher who is interested in deciphering an ancient musical notation, on the other hand, will have to develop a sense of the sound of the music; will probably have to learn an ancient language without a community of people who speak it daily; and will strain to understand the music’s relationship to its cultural context.

In other words, research in ancient music is often reconstructive, educated guesswork that tries to make sense of the existing evidence. Legitimate scholars admit this openly; less credible authors will obscure the amount of speculation in their work, claiming to have definitively rediscovered lost works. Some of this hyperbole, of course, is simply marketing gone awry; it becomes dangerous when the scholars themselves believe it.

At the same time, all such research suffers from an important limitation: the urge to view all past music as something mirroring modern experience. Although we can imagine ourselves in well-documented periods of history, antiquity is something different—”the past is a foreign country,” as the old saying goes. The further that we go into the past, the more our evidence is fragmentary and capable of misinterpretation—and it’s only too easy to fill in the gaps with ideas that make sense to us, but which might not have made sense to ancient musicians. Two examples will suffice.

A clay tablet found in the ruins of the ancient city of Ugarit (near Ras Shamra, Syria) contains markings in an ancient Mesopotamian language known as Hurrian. Scholars eventually realized that these markings contained a religious text, which they labeled “Hurrian Hymn no. 6,” and musical notation for a lyre (a lyre resembles a harp, but it has a bridge like a guitar). This is, to date, the oldest surviving notated composition (c. 1400 BCE).

Hurrian Hymn no. 6 is written in a type of tablature, meaning that it consists of instructions about how one should play an instrument, rather than abstract descriptions of notes to be played. To better understand the issues involved, let’s first consider modern tablature (Example 1). Its six lines are a visual depiction of the six strings of a guitar. A guitar is typically held against your chest when you play the instrument. The topmost line represents the string that is highest in pitch and furthest away from the player’s chest, while the bottom line represents the string that is lowest in pitch and closest to the player’s chest. The numbers indicate fret positions on each string, showing how far up or down the neck of the guitar your hands should move, while the lines and beams suggest rhythmic values. This notation assumes standard guitar tuning (the strings are, from bottom to top, E2, A2, D3, G3, B3, E4). The system is not particularly intuitive to someone who does not understand the guitar or its tuning, but it is widely used around the world.

Now imagine that you had never seen a guitar, didn’t know how it is held, and didn’t have any idea what the pitch E2 is, and you are closer to understanding the problem of “Hurrian Hymn no. 6.” In studying it, scholars have had to discover all the things that we take for granted with guitar tablature. Detailed studies of other contemporary texts revealed the tuning systems used in music for the lyre—scales with seven notes. The tablature features an instrument with nine strings, which was probably a “bull lyre” of the type used throughout ancient Mesopotamia. The tablature itself consists of series of named intervals and numbers, rather than a visual map of the instrument’s strings. The intervals, however, are not named in abstract terms (such as the modern “perfect fifth”) but as combinations of strings: “first string and fourth string.”

Many scholars have attempted to decipher this notation, which undoubtedly made sense to musicians in Ugarit, just as guitar tablature makes sense to modern musicians, despite its peculiar qualities. To date, there is no definitive transcription of Hurrian Hymn no. 6; one point of debate is whether string 1 is higher or lower than string 2. In choosing how to interpret this ancient notation, scholars have not only considered the evidence, but also their understanding of how music sounded in the past. For example, West (1994, 179) argues that the Hurrian hymn must have been “rather plain by comparison with later…music” and probably resembled the surviving music of neighboring cultures. West’s transcription is thus quite simplistic in comparison to transcriptions by other scholars.

The music of the Jewish Tanakh or Bible poses a similar issue. Suzanne Haïk-Vantoura claimed to have uncovered hidden musical notation in the Masoretic text of the Tanakh and argued that the signs reflect a notated transcription of the music of the Temple in Jerusalem (destroyed 70 CE). Her theory focused on the interpretation of te’amim signs that accompany the book of Psalms, signs which rabbinical scholarship has long linked to both the punctuation of a poetic text and cantillation (the practice of singing chant from melodic formulas). Haïk-Vantoura’s theories attracted some attention on their appearance in the 1970s and 1980s, and still have supporters today, as her transcriptions are musically interesting.

The general scholarly consensus is that her work is faulty for two reasons. First, it relies too heavily on her own intuition—while her decision to use a seven-note scale reflects the practice of neighboring cultures in Mesopotamia, the specific choice of notes used in her transcriptions seems to be more influenced by her own taste than by research. Te’amim signs occur throughout the Jewish Tanakh, not just in the Psalms, and while they are used differently in the Psalms, there is much to learn from comparing their use in the Psalms with their use elsewhere. Second, unlike Hurrian Hymn no. 6, there is an existing community of people who are linked to these texts through oral tradition. While there is a diversity of interpretation present among Jewish cantors (trained singers of religious chant), none of their traditions match Haïk-Vantoura’s theory. Her work bypasses the rich tradition of cantillation (click on “complete haftarah” at the top right of the link for Jeremiah 46:13). It is difficult to believe that cantors and rabbinical scholars could forget the true meaning of their own craft—particularly since the Masoretic text of the Tanakh was created to clarify ambiguous passages in surviving manuscript copies of the Jewish scriptures.

Both Hurrian Hymn no. 6 and the Masoretic texts demonstrate the difficulties of reconstructing ancient music from surviving notation. It’s a bold thing to try to rebuild a musical world from fragments, and the temptation to bend the evidence to show the thing we want to find can be strong. Ultimately, these examples show us the limits of evidence and the ways that scholarship can fall into error.

Recommended Readings

Draffkorn Kilmer, Anne. “The Musical Instruments from Ur and Ancient Mesopotamian Music.” Expedition Magazine 40 no. 2 (1998). https://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/the-musical-instruments-from-ur-and-ancient-mesopotamian-music/

 A summary of Mesopotamian music by a leading scholar who helped discover ancient musical notation in Mesopotamia. You can read an interview with her, explaining her process of discovery here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

Mitchell, David C. “How Can We Sing the Lord’s Song? Deciphering the Masoretic Cantillation.” In Jewish and Christian Approaches to the Psalms: Conflict and Convergence, edited by Susan Gillingham. Oxford University Press, 2013: 121–133.

Argues in support of Haïk-Vantoura’s interpretation of the Psalms, based on their musical quality.

Randhofer, Regina. “Singing the Songs of Ancient Israel: ta^came ‘emet and Oral Models as Criteria for Layers of Time in Jewish Psalmody.” Journal of Musicological Research 24 (2005), 241–264.

Compares and contrasts contemporary Jewish chant traditions and their relationship to the surviving notated accents.

Werner, Eric. Review of Suzanne Haïk Vantoura, La musique de la Bible révélée (Paris, Choudens, 1978). Notes 38 no. 4 (1982), 923 – 924.

Criticizes Haïk Vantoura’s interpretation of the Psalms; summarizes evidence contradicting her central claims.

West, M. L. “The Babylonian Musical Notation and the Hurrian Melodic Texts.” Music & Letters 75 no. 2 (1994), 161–179.

Explains problems in interpreting the notation of Hurrian Hymn no. 6.

African musics in colonial North America

Music history books are often silent on the topic of African music in the land that would eventually become the United States. Historians like evidence, after all, and although the scholars regularly acknowledge the significance of African music, there has always been a good deal of guesswork involved in sketching the history of an abused population. Without recorded sound, oral tradition and written notation are the two chief methods of preserving cultural history. Oral tradition has proved fragmentary due to the many abuses of slavery, and written notation of African American music barely exists before emancipation.

Therefore, American music history, like broader American history, suffers from a gaping hole where it ought to have a multitude of stories. Scholars have written massive biographies of George Frideric Handel, a musician whose life was untouched by war or famine and who actively invested in the African slave trade; but it’s not possible to do the same for any of his African contemporaries who survived the Middle Passage and lived out their days in bondage. The lack of evidence means that we can only sketch something that we should be able to understand fully. And yet, among the fragments, there is much to learn from and admire.

We have no direct evidence of the survival of West African classical musics in the colonial United States.  By classical music, of course, I mean music that involves a historic tradition, highly trained professional musicians, elite patronage, and a body of musical knowledge that the musicians must master.[1] And by this standard, the music of the griots, the professional class of West African musicians who sang the praises of kings and told historical stories through songs, certainly qualifies as classical music.

Sadly, however, the griots’ music has not been documented in the New World. Their music varied between different African cultures; Americans have spent the most time studying the music of the Mande people, whose jalolu still preserve in song the epic story of the great king Sundiata Keita of Mali (d. 1255). This is not a written music, but is passed down between family members. And while it’s possible that some professional musicians survived crossing the ocean, the social networks that enabled the survival of an oral tradition were routinely disrupted in America by the relocation of enslaved people. This is probably the greatest reason that African epic poetry and its accompanying music did not survive long enough to be documented in North America.

Another difficulty in re-creating West African classical musics in America had to do with instruments. The Mande jalolu played a variety of instruments, including the kora, a harp with twenty-one strings, on which they improvised elaborate polyphony; the ngoni, a guitar-like instrument that you can still hear on recordings by the great Malian singer Ali Farka Touré; and the balafon, an instrument related to modern xylophones. In the lands that now comprise modern Senegal, there are also accounts of professional musicians (géwël) who told stories while playing drums.

African musicians who found themselves in colonial North America had to reconstruct their instruments from memory, based on the materials they had at hand, in their limited free time. And instead of the instruments played by professional musicians, they often made an instrument that we now know as the banjo. This instrument bears a striking resemblance to the Senegambian akonting, and is even played in a similar manner. The akonting, however, was an instrument that professional musicians rarely played in West African societies; it seems to have been more associated with ordinary people and amateur musicians. Thus early American scholars, in seeking the origins of the banjo, tended to see it as a uniquely American variant of the griots’ ngoni; these early narratives thus acknowledged vague African roots while still taking pride in its unique “American” qualities. Daniel Jatta, a Senegalese scholar who drew attention to the akonting connection, was at first treated poorly by American academics; now his ideas enjoy general acceptance.

There are enough surviving references to drumming to suggest that it survived in the Americas. Surviving written accounts from spectators describe drumming at African festivals, such as Pinkster (Pentacost) in colonial New York, Election Day, and Jonkonnu. Most notably, the Place Congo in New Orleans was the site of weekly gatherings of enslaved Africans: the evidence suggests that the dances were at their height from 1786 to 1818, and may have lasted through the 1840s. The surviving accounts, while fragmentary, describe the presence of both dancers and musicians, including drummers, apparently organized by tribal affiliation.

Drumming also features prominently in accounts of revolts, such as the Stono Rebellion of 1739. The following year, the colonial government of South Carolina banned the use of loud instruments, such as drums, for fear of their use as signaling devices. The attempt to suppress African musical practices when they could be used as tools of resistance is striking. Even in Albany, New York, Pinkster celebrations were banned in 1811, while the dances in the Place Congo seem to have been suppressed by the 1850s.

You might have noticed that most of the evidence we have centers on instruments—physical objects which can be studied. African people sang as well—indeed it seems very likely that the “blue” notes we hear in jazz and blues originated in African singing styles.[2] African American singing styles have been poorly served by Western staff notation. One of the first serious efforts to transcribe a large body of African American song into notation was Slave Songs of the United States (1867); its editors admitted the basic inadequacy of their notation to describe the microtonal efforts with which these songs were sung.

The fragmentary nature of this evidence means that historians have often had to pour cold water on stories that have regularly caught the popular imagination. One rumor—that the dances at Place Congo lasted into the 1880s and are directly linked to the birth of jazz—has been particularly persistent, partly because it would be wonderful it were somehow true.[3] Another story—that all African drumming was uniformly banned across colonial North America and the early United States—is believable because it represents what the plantation owners probably wanted, even though it was impossible to enforce everywhere.

Finally, a half-truth—the concept of “African rhythm”—remains popular today. Certainly West African traditions are often rhythmically interesting, but emphasizing this aspect of music over all others reduces the music to a rhythmic, bodily activity—a stereotype of African musicality that has long been appealing to white Westerners. Some African languages, such as Ewe (an important language in Ghana) do not even have a word for rhythm; as the African musicologist Kofi Agawu notes, the conversation about African rhythm has largely been shaped in terms that make sense to Western audiences.[4] Thus, when we seek traces of African heritage in contemporary musical culture, we need to be careful not to essentialize the past.

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[1] This definition is derived from Michael Church’s stimulating book, The Other Classical Musics: Fifteen Great Traditions (Boydell Press, 2015).

[2] See Danielle Fosler-Lussier’s Music on the Move, p. 71–80, which summarizes research on the connection between blues and West African musics.

[3] Henry A. Kmen, “The Roots of Jazz and the Dance in Place Congo: A Re-Appraisal,” Anuario Interamericano de Investigacion Musical 8 (1972), 5 – 16.

[4] Kofi Agawu, “The Invention of ‘African Rhythm,’” Journal of the American Musicological Society 48 no. 3 (1995), 380–395.

Changes in instrumentation

Presentism is a constant risk for students of music history. For lack of imagination or knowledge, it’s easy enough to assume that the way that we do things now is the way they always were; in this way, the researcher can unintentionally impose their own worldview on the past. Musical instruments offer a great opportunity to spot such assumptions. Almost every instrument that we play today has a historic ancestor which differed from it in important ways, and these differences affected both the sound of the instrument and the ways that people created music on them. The following essay sketches major changes in Western instruments in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Keyboard instruments in the home and elsewhere. In 1700, the most common European keyboard instrument was the harpsichord, which used a set of mechanical picks to pluck strings whenever a key was pressed. Like the guitar, the harpsichord used elaborate passagework to compensate for its inability to sustain notes; it also could not produce a wide variety of dynamic effects. The first direct ancestor of a modern piano was invented by Bartolomeo Cristofori in the early 1700s. The fortepiano (loud-soft) owes its name to its unique ability to produce loud or soft tones depending on the pressure of the player’s fingers. The “piano,” as the instrument came to be known, coexisted with the harpsichord throughout the 1700s, but eventually replaced it as a default instrument in the 1800s. The decline of the harpsichord also corresponds to the decline of continuo playing; the harpsichord’s bright tone could cut through a large ensemble and allow the performer to provide rhythmic and harmonic cues to other players, while the piano’s mellower tone blends with a string ensemble more easily. However, these early pianos still differed significantly from modern pianos in their size and volume; the instrument gradually grew larger and more powerful as it was used with increasingly large orchestras.

Stringed instruments. Despite the general popularity of violins today, they existed in competition with the older viol family. Viols came in various sizes and ranges, typically had up to six strings and were tuned in fourths. They were fretted, which meant that they used a version of equal temperament even before it was broadly accepted. The violin, on the other hand, had four strings, was tuned in fifths, and was unfretted. At first, the violin seems to have been associated with Italian instrument makers (Stradivari, Amati, etc.) and musicians (Arcangelo Corelli, Antonio Vivaldi, etc.). It spread throughout Europe with the migration of Italian musicians and musical standards, gradually displacing the viol. King Louis XIV of France (d. 1715), notably, had an ensemble of twenty-four violins that performed at his court. The viol, however, remained in use throughout the early 1700s, even after large ensembles turned to the violin. The modern double bass, which is tuned in fourths, owes something to both the viol and the violin families. Today, the viol is chiefly played by specialists in historical performance (such as the members of the Viola da Gamba Society of America). The violin, meanwhile, has also undergone significant changes since its origins; few players now use the traditional gut strings.

Brass and wind instruments. These instrument families saw the greatest growth. In 1700, the chief wind instruments available were flutes and oboes; trumpets were the most commonly used brass instrument. The clarinet was invented around 1710, and gradually became an essential element of wind ensembles and orchestras. Trumpets and horns increasingly used keys or valves that gave them the ability to play fully chromatic music, rather than simply relying on the notes which could be played with the mouthpiece alone. The saxophone family was invented in the 1840s by Adolphe Sax, and it survived (unlike many other forgotten instruments) because its inventor was able to secure a contract to provide band instruments to the French army. Meanwhile, historic instruments, such as the serpent, gradually fell from use, and were eventually replaced by the tuba and euphonium.

Instruments in popular culture. The guitar underwent several fascinating transformations in this period. Its old competitor, the lute, added more and more courses, eventually reaching thirteen courses. The lute thus became increasingly difficult to play. The guitar, which generally had no more than six strings, increasingly replaced the lute, especially with amateur performers. By the turn of the 1800s, professional guitarists such as Fernando Sor had emerged, but the guitar never lost its popular and domestic associations, and was rarely treated as a “serious” instrument before the twentieth century. It was portable, easy to learn, cheap, and small (modern acoustic guitars are much larger). Thus the guitar travelled widely. In Spain, it was closely associated with the local Roma population (who were left little option but to live a nomadic lifestyle) and the music that would later be called flamenco. In Mexico, the guitar and its local variants (guitarrón and vihuela) became an essential element of mariachi music. European sailors introduced the machete, a variant of the guitar, to Hawaii, where it morphed into the ukelele. Hawaiian styles of playing the guitar were later exported back to the United States.

Another instrument that never really earned a place in contemporary “art music” was the accordion. A European imitation of the Chinese sheng, the accordion rapidly earned a place in popular culture and folk music, while being almost completely ignored by “serious” composers and musicians. Like the guitar, its portability made it an excellent instrument for sailors. For this reason, a variant of the accordion, the bandoneon, became a defining instrument in the Argentine tango scene, which started in the port district of Buenos Ayres. 

Orchestras, orchestration, and conducting. With all these changes in instruments, ensembles changed too. An early eighteenth-century orchestra typically featured a core of strings supported by continuo instruments such as the harpsichord, with flutes, oboes, and perhaps trumpets. By the century’s end, the clarinet had been added to the orchestra and the continuo was disappearing. By the early nineteenth century, composers for the orchestra could add count on trumpets and drums as a regular presence in the orchestra.

Orchestras also grew increasingly large during the nineteenth century. While an ensemble of 40 players is sufficient for most eighteenth-century works, larger ensembles became increasingly common in the nineteenth century. By the early 1900s, the modern 100-piece orchestra, with its massive string section, was firmly established. Some earlier music, when played by large orchestras, suffers greatly, as balance between string, wind, and brass instruments is greatly out of proportion.

The rise of such large orchestras led musicians to pay increased attention to arranging and orchestration in the nineteenth century. Well-known composers, such as Hector Berlioz (1843)and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1913), wrote treatises on orchestration that are still studied today. With the standardization of orchestras across Europe—a kind of cultural homogenization—it became possible for composers to be far more prescriptive about the types of sounds they wanted. Their demands on the orchestra became increasingly specific—such as up to eight French horns, clarinets in multiple tunings, the use of tubular bells, tam-tams, piccolos, contrabassoons, and multiple harps. Some scores even called for new instruments specifically invented for the occasion, such as the Wagner tuba and the Aida trumpet—a luxury that would have been unthinkable in the eighteenth century.

Conducting also changed in the nineteenth century. Early eighteenth-century conducting often took the form of a continuo player at the harpsichord playing chords with the left hand and providing cues with the right—whether through physical gestures or through playing relevant melodic passages. In music which did not use a keyboard, the head of the violin section typically directed, sometimes using the bow to indicate the beat. Sometimes, especially in France, a musician was employed to beat time, audibly marking the beat with a stick. By the early 1800s, the time-beater had morphed into something like a modern conductor; the conductor’s baton emerged around 1820. As ensembles grew larger, the conductor became an increasingly authoritarian figure.

In summary, instruments and their sound, and the cultures associated with them changed dramatically over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Many of the instruments that are now commonly used today have been relatively unchanged for the last hundred years. But in the past, there was a dizzying variety of instruments whose very existence is often forgotten by musicians today. They reveal fascinating insights into the changing nature of musical culture.

Notation and performance

The academic study of music in the United States has traditionally been dominated by the use of notated scores. Undergraduate students, in particular, are often told that they must perform a score exactly as it is written, as the score reflects the composer’s intentions. This approach is very useful for students who are using scores as tools for learning performance techniques. However, it can have a bad effect on the way that we approach scores when we study music history: it can lead us to imagine scores are unchanging and authoritative.

For example, suppose you find a score by the musician Dietrich Buxtehude (d. 1707), such as his Passacaglia in D minor. Here is a score excerpt to look at:

There is a grand staff consisting of treble and bass clefs, labeled “manual”; and a lower staff (bass clef) labeled “pedal.” This is traditionally understood as notation for the organ, with the “pedal” part being played by the organist’s feet, and the “manual” part with the hands. There is no key signature, but the regular presence of both C-sharp and B-flat supports the idea that the music is indeed in D minor.

Both these assumptions are essentially correct. Buxtehude spent over forty years (from 1668–1707) working as a church organist in the German city of Lübeck, and the piece was probably intended for the organ (although it could just as easily have been played on a pedal harpsichord). Similarly, although modern terminology such as “D minor” hadn’t yet quite emerged in Buxtehude’s time, the music does mostly seem to follow tonal procedures and to use a D minor scale. The music seems easy enough to understand and reconstruct accurately.

At the same time, everything I’ve just said relies on a number of unquestioned assumptions about scores. In what follows, I’ll break them down one by one.

1. Tuning. We don’t actually know precisely what Buxtehude meant when he tells us to play the note “A.” Modern tuning systems tend to treat A as a multiple of 440 Hertz vibrations per second. This was not established as international standard tuning until 1939, and many ensembles still deviate from it slightly (often going up to around 445). Historic evidence of tuning standards is hard to codify, but depending on the type of instrument, the time period, and the place, the note A could fall between 388 and 487 Hertz. This means that in modern terms, the notated pitch A could sound anywhere from modern G to modern B. In Buxtehude’s case, we can refine this a little bit, based on the tuning of historic German organs, which suggests that his A was somewhere between 416 and 487 (roughly G sharp to B natural), with 463 (roughly a B flat) being quite common.

2. Temperament. Modern keyboard instruments are tuned in an equal-tempered system, so that A-flat and G-sharp, like all other black keys on a keyboard instrument, are equivalent to each other, just as all major scales are exact transpositions of each other. This was not always the case. A variety of tuning systems existed in the past. The traditional basis for tuning instruments derives from the pure mathematical ratios associated with Pythagoras. If one tries to employ Pythagorean intervals with a chromatic scale, some intervals sound unpleasant. Mean-tone tuning provided an effective workaround, but again with problem – one interval (usually a fifth) would be sour, meaning that depending on your tuning, some keys would be unusable (especially keys with multiple sharps and flats—this is why early notated music often sticks to keys with less than four sharps or flats). Consequently, multiple tuning systems arose; modern transposing instruments (such as the clarinet) reflect these older tuning traditions.

At the same time, these systems had a unique benefit. Because each semitone was not necessarily the same size in mean-tone temperament, a C major and D major scale were not exact transpositions of each other. Instead, each key had a unique sound based on its intervallic content. Because temperament wasn’t standardized and could vary in different places, broad agreement on the exact difference between G minor and C minor was rare, although musicians left behind many contrasting descriptions of the emotional differences between each key. The modern system of equal temperament makes all the keys usable, but at the cost of each key’s unique intervallic and emotional qualities.

Scholars still debate whether Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Well-tempered clavier” (book 1: 1724) used an early form of equal temperament or another tuning system which made all keys used while retaining their unique qualities. Buxtehude’s organ was probably tuned in mean-tone, but it might have used an experimental tuning developed by the organist Andreas Werckmeister.

3. Timbre. This is a simple point, but worth considering: the sound of the organ itself has changed since Buxtehude’s time. The number of stops and the sounds they produce have changed. Some organs are now powered by electricity rather than the traditional bellows, and the amount of air pressure that it’s possible to exert through the bellows has also changed, affecting the volume of the instrument. Certainly, it’s possible to play the music well on a modern instrument, but a modern performance will sound different. Related issues arise when we perform music written for the harpsichord on a modern piano, or if we perform lute music on a guitar. While we would have to do more research to learn about the organs that Buxtehude played when he created this piece, in later life he played an organ with fifty-four stops.[1]

4. The notation itself. So far, everything here assumes that we are indeed looking at a score written by Buxtehude, which is a faithful representation of what he meant us to see. But in fact, Buxtehude’s surviving manuscripts are generally written in organ tablature, not in lined staff notation. He might have copied his piece into staff notation himself, or someone else might have. And there might be mistakes or errors in a transcription from one form of notation to another. So how did we wind up with this music written in staff notation?

If you check the score example above again, there’s a German annotation: “Herausgegeben von Philipp Spitta. Neue Ausgabe von Max Seiffert” [edited by Phillip Spitta. New edition by Max Seiffert]. I found this score by going to the International Music Score Library/Petrucci (imslp.org), where one can download music that’s out of copyright. They helpfully provide the publication date of 1903 for this edition, which is roughly 200 years after Buxtehude’s death. Spitta (1841–1894) published an edition of Buxtehude’s music in 1876–1877, and is best-known for his multi-volume biography of J. S. Bach (finished 1880). Seiffert (1868–1948) was another music historian (Spitta’s student), who issued his own edition of Buxtehude in 1903, including updated versions of his teacher’s editions of the music. Both Spitta and Seiffert were involved in the business of establishing what Buxtehude wrote and creating a performable, readable text that contemporary musicians could play and scholars could study (organ tablature has generally fallen out of use). That means that whenever Buxtehude’s own notation was contradictory or unreadable, they would correct it and resolve any ambiguity; and if there were two contrasting versions of the piece available, they would decide which one seemed more authentic.

While both Spitta and Seiffert were respected scholars—among the foremost authorities on Buxtehude’s music in their own time—the score they created reflects their impression of Buxtehude. The 1903 edition does necessarily not reflect the composer’s unfiltered original concept, but unless we do more research, we can’t tell how much their edition alters Buxtehude’s music.

Sometimes, editors can impose too much on a score, transforming it to meet their own agendas.  Because of this, some performers prefer to use “urtext” scores, which are supposed to represent the composer’s original notation and to clearly indicate any editorial changes.

In conclusion, it’s easy to take a lot for granted when we look at a notated score. But in reality, there are a number of variables to consider. Historic scores are far less fixed, prescriptive, or reliable than they look.

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[1] Malcom Boyd, Bach (Oxford University Press, 2000), 21.

Nineteenth-century virtuosos

The nineteenth century was the first period in Western music history in which the virtuoso truly emerged. Virtuosos, as you may know, are performers with tremendous skill on their instruments (singers are not usually called virtuosos). Of course there had been skilled performers before, but the nineteenth century saw the virtuoso emerge as a pop culture phenomenon. They gave public concerts for large audiences and became fixtures in pop culture. In a way, this was the first time that instrumental performers began to rival opera singers as international performing stars. (Remember Farinelli and the divas we talked about earlier?). Even the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, for all his skill, was an orchestra leader who spent much of his career in Paris and did not give concert tours.

The existence of the virtuosos contrast heavily with the idealistic philosophizing common in Romanticism. These performers were renowned for their raw skill as performers; many composed music to show off their skill, which admittedly is often more powerful to watch in action than it is to hear. Virtuosos were also renowned for their carefully crafted stage personas.

As you can imagine, virtuosos were loved by audiences and often criticized by those who prized expression over showmanship. In other words, the virtuosos raised—and still raise—questions about authenticity and the purpose of music. What is the right way to use your talent?

Nicolò Paganini (1782 – 1840), one of the first sensational virtuosos, offers a few answers to these questions. A phenomenally skillful violinist and guitarist, he became famous for his violin pieces—both concertos and pieces for the solo violin. These works were designed to show off his incredible technique—including pieces to be played on one string of the violin. His first published works, the Caprices, op. 1, are a tour-de-force in violin technique and are still studied today. Caprice 24 (played here by Maxim Vengerov) is a set of variations which demonstrates among other things, the ability to play alternate strings rapidly, to play harmonies (difficult because the violin has a curved neck), to move rapidly up and down the neck of the violin, to pluck the violin like a guitar instead of bowing it, etc.

Paganini was, of course, criticized as a sensationalist for the way he flaunted his skills. The myth that his musical skills arose from some contact with the forces of darkness gave him a unique presence on stage (he does not seem to have attempted to discourage this).

Compared to Paganini, the pianist Ferenc “Franz” Liszt (1811 – 1886) had a completely different public reputation. A child prodigy (he gave his first concert in 1820), a touring pianist, a charming young man with long flowing hair, Liszt was mocked for his great popularity with female fans, especially during the height of his touring activity (1839 – 1847). But Liszt was more than a sensational performer who could expressive melodies that could only be played by repeatedly crossing your hands over each other. He invented the term recital for a concert given by a single musician, and his concerts took the piano from being a domestic instrument best played in the home, to an instrument that could be played solo in front of crowds of 3,000 people or more (it helped that the modern concert piano, with its tremendous volume and power, was effectively invented during his lifetime). He also played an important role as an arranger, publishing arrangements of his favorite opera tunes (Mozart, Bellini, Meyerbeer, Donizetti, etc.) and piano versions of Beethoven’s symphonies long before orchestras were playing them regularly. After Liszt retired from public performance, he became a renowned conductor at the court of Weimar, in Germany, where he championed Wagner’s music and wrote a series of symphonic poems in the Romantic style.

Perhaps the most influential virtuoso was Clara Wieck Schumann (1819 – 1896), who successfully balanced the skill of a virtuoso with the aesthetic authenticity of a Romantic musician. A gifted composer, she married the composer and critic Robert Schumann, had eight children between 1841 and 1854. She composed little after her marriage, although she continued to play concerts. Her husband’s death in 1856 led her to return to the concert stage to support her family; as a widow, she was able to remain respectable despite appearing on stage by herself. She gave at least 1299 concerts during her career (her last was in 1891), serving as her own agent and impresario. It is because of her example that we now expect soloists to perform from memory.

There were many other famous virtuosos, such as the pianist Frederic Chopin, who rarely played public concerts (he preferred to perform in aristocratic salons instead) and who only wrote complicated music when it was musically necessary, and never for show—we’ve already heard some of his work when we looked at the concept of Romanticism. And there are many other musicians who are relevant here, such as Henri Vieuxtemps, Ferdinand David, Joseph Joachim, Sigismund Thalberg, Henry Litoff, etc., etc. But I’d like to put two American musicians on your radar as well.

Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829 – 1869) was one of the first composers from the United States to have an international reputation, although he was quickly forgotten after his death. A Creole from New Orleans, he studied music in Paris, and toured Europe, the United States, and the Caribbean. His interest in black and Caribbean musics is audible in much of his work, especially in pieces such as A Night in the Tropics, which seems to anticipate a samba feel (it was first performed in 1860 in Cuba), or Souvenir de Porto Rico, which contains the q.   q.    q    (3 3 2)  rhythm that jazz musicians later called the “Spanish tinge.”

Finally, you should know about the most famous American virtuoso of the later nineteenth century: Blind Tom (his last name is given at times as Wiggins, Green, or Bethune). Born in slavery in Georgia in 1849, he was blind, and was possibly autistic. His talent was discovered early, and the people who claimed ownership over him, the Bethunes, had him play public concerts as early as 1857. During the Civil War, the Bethunes donated revenues from his concerts to support the Confederacy; after the Civil War, they were appointed legal guardianship over him. He gave his last concert in 1905. Blind Tom composed 100 pieces of music, including the Battle of Manassas, which is a programmatic piece describing the battle.

Music drama

Music drama

Richard Wagner (1813–1883) is a complex figure. He wrote essays, poems, and music at a prodigious rate. His music has remained in the modern repertory, despite controversy and scandal (he was an ardent anti-Semite): his influence is too great to sidestep or ignore. In particular, he transformed the way that music and drama worked together, inventing a new form of opera called music drama, which has influenced modern film score composition in a major way. He also popularized bold chromatic harmonies, and pioneered the use of the orchestra pit in theaters.

Wagner’s career is a curious mixture of contradictions. His failure to launch himself in Paris led him to reject the commercial mainstream of opera, which at the time was dominated by the music of Giacomo Meyerbeer (Meyerbeer was Jewish, and his continued success fed Wagner’s anti-Semitic paranoia). Wagner achieved local successes in Germany, but ran afoul of local governments by actively participating in the 1848 democratic revolutions. He spent much of his life in exile as a political dissident, before eventually securing the patronage of King Ludwig II of Bavaria (who built the prototype for the Disney castle), who supported Wagner financially. Eventually, Wagner was able to build the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, Germany, a theater which still performs his works to this day. So despite his revolutionary ideals, Wagner was in the end supported by royalty, like many a musician of the seventeenth century.

Wagner’s magnum opus was a set of linked music dramas called the Ring Cycle (begun c. 1850, finished 1874), consisting of four works: Das Rheingold, Die Walkuere, Siegfried, and Goetterdaemmerung (the Twilight of the Gods). He wrote the music and the poetry and designed the staging for these pieces himself: they are examples of what he called a gesammtkunstwerk (unified artwork). Derived from Germanic and Norse mythology, these works drastically revise operatic norms. There are no isolated songs, no breaks for applause, no coloratura to entice star singers, little ensemble singing. The scores are not divided into separate songs, but rather consist of a continuous flow of music that lasts for a whole act at a time (usually each act is an hour long). The entire cycle takes about sixteen hours to perform, and is traditionally given on four successive nights.

The structure of each drama is created by a web of recurring motives played by the orchestra—some as short as two measures. Each of these is associated with a character in the story, a concept (such as love, anger, etc.), a place, or a physical item (such as the god Wotan’s spear). Recurring themes had appeared in opera before; the difference is that Wagner’s themes were modified and developed as the story progressed. Wagner himself hoped that listeners would understand the music at a subconscious level, but his supporters began printing guides to the recurring themes with explanations of their significance. It was also his supporters who came up with the name leitmotiv for these recurring themes. Today, leitmotivs in the Wagnerian style remain a common tool for film composers.

At the same time, Wagner’s singers had to compete with a powerful orchestra which had most of the interesting musical material. The singing style involved requires tremendous physical strength, as the singers need to project over an orchestra of about a hundred players—and they need to sing intelligibly so the audience can follow the dialogue. The light, agile voices needed for Italian opera are generally out of place in a Wagner score.

Wagner was skilled at self-promotion, and he explained his working procedures by invoking the legacy of Beethoven, that icon of the Romantic Movement. Wagner had effectively shifted the chief interest in dramatic music to the orchestra and relied on thematic development to create structure in opera. He claimed that he was following the path opened by Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which combined a full orchestra, soloists, and chorus. This claim was a way for Wagner to justify his radical work by reference to a revered ancestral figure; it also legitimized him as a leading musical Romantic.

Another element of Wagner’s cultural significance derives from his commitment to German nationalism. Germany only became a unified country during Wagner’s lifetime, and the Ring Cycle was in some part an attempt to provide national unity for a nation that did not yet exist in political terms. Wagner’s hatred of Jews and distrust of French and Italian opera also relates to his nationalist agenda. After his death, the emerging Nazi party used his music for political purposes, and it is still controversial to perform Wagner’s music in Israel.

Finally, Wagner’s harmony is still studied today. A famous example is the Prelude to Tristan und Isolde (1859), a music drama about star-crossed lovers which ends in both their deaths. The opening few minutes (seen in a reduction below) are tonally ambiguous: they consist of a short phrase which is stated in A minor, C minor (note the enharmonic spelling of G-sharp/A-flat), and E minor without reaching a clear resolution in any key (each phrase ends of the V chord of the given key).

Notice that these keys are a third apart—Wagner was very fond of mediant relationships. This harmonic sequencing allowed Wagner to suggest keys without fully cadencing in them. This type of chromatic harmony points the way toward the rise of atonal music in the following generation.

Conventions in nineteenth-century century opera

In the modern American imagination, opera is separate from popular culture. Dominated by a repertory of works in foreign languages (especially French, Italian, and German), limited by expensive ticket prices, and often presenting historic works, opera seems elitist and rarified. However, for a lengthy period—at least 1810 to 1900—opera played an important role in Western popular culture.

Opera’s popularity was caused by several factors. (1) An international standard repertoire developed, driven by the repertoire in Paris and Italy, and spread by Italian émigré musicians. (Italy did not become a nation-state until 1859, so musicians often left Italy to pursue the opportunities only found in an imperial capital such as Vienna, Paris, or London). (2) Opera increasingly turned away from conventional middle-class topics and instead focused on melodramatic and shocking plots which appealed to general audiences. (3) Opera became fully integrated into a global music industry that relied on the sale of printed arrangements of songs. (4) Opera was increasingly governed by a set of generic conventions that lent all its music a readily identifiable character.

Cultural elements

Composers of successful operas enjoyed significant profits and celebrity status. Rossini, for example, practically retired from composition by the age of forty, as he had become rich enough to support a comfortable lifestyle. Meyerbeer, whose operas dominated the Parisian stage from the 1830s to the early 1910s, cultivated relationships with members of the press and may have been the first musician to give press conferences. Verdi, who was one of the best known composers of Italian opera in the later nineteenth century, invested heavily in land and joined the Italian parliament.

Musicians in government might seem strange, especially since musicians were working-class people on the whole, but opera and politics had long been intertwined. European governments often supported opera theaters: opera entertained the public. Many civic governments actively censored the texts of the operas for fear of inciting public unrest.[1]

Opera composers faced a basic problem: how could one create music that had a real level of popular appeal, one that would create profits for the theaters, the composers, and performers? And what type of music would achieve that goal?

Nineteenth-century opera composers gradually turned toward serious topics. This trend loosely corresponds to the Romantic Movement, particularly as found in the works of popular novelists such as Victor Hugo. Vincenzo Bellini summed up something of the artistic moment in a letter to an inexperienced poet:

Carve into your head…[an opera] must draw tears, terrify people, make them die, through song…Musical artifice kills the effect of the situations, still worse is poetic artifice in a drama for music; poetry and music, in order to make an effect, require naturalness and nothing more…if the heart is moved, one will always be right, even in the face of many, many worthless words.[2]

Sometimes the plots of these operas rely on intentionally upsetting scenarios, such as mother who burns her own child in a fireplace, a woman who has had children with a soldier from an occupying army, or a woman who is forced into an arranged marriage and murders her husband.[3]

The best known of these operas never have left the modern repertory. Yet they were long denied entry into the scholarly canon of music history. Unlike abstract symphonic music, these operas have tear-jerking plots combined with catchy tunes and vocal acrobatics. They’re simultaneously disturbing and exhilarating, realistic and campy, and their plots constantly return to sex, violence, and the suffering of women. They are, in other words, deeply embedded in their cultural and economic contexts.

Opera’s formal principles: the lyric prototype, double aria, and duet form

As the nineteenth century continued, vocal music was increasingly written out in more detail, and singers were expected to improvise less. Like modern pop music, Italian opera relied on a similar set of standard forms.

The first of these is usually called the lyric prototype in English. Melodies from Italian opera are usually structured in four phrases, all of the same length—usually four or eight measures per phrase—with at least one repeated phrase. In other words, patterns such as AABB (two unique phrases, each repeated), AABC (three unique phrases, the first repeated), or AABA (two unique phrases, with the third contrasting with the rest) were common.

Here is a basic example from the popular opera Il barbiere di Siviglia (the Barber of Seville) by Gioachino Rossini (1813). This aria depicts Rosina (music and score here, text and translation here), reflecting on her love for the mysterious Lindoro (really a nobleman in disguise). The vocal melody appears from 0:45–1:42, and is divided into four phrases of four measures long, in the pattern AA’BB’ (A’ and B’ refer to variations). There is a brief section that is sung on repeated pitches—this is called parlato or speech-like style—and then part of the original tune comes back. Note that the singer doesn’t sing the music exactly as written, but adds a variety of ornaments—some of them certainly rehearsed, others perhaps created on the spur of the moment. (This type of elaborate, heavily ornamented singing is called coloratura).

The second half of the track is faster, and has a new tune—the tune we’ve just heard won’t come back. Linking two songs for the same character together like this is another convention: the “double aria.” The following table illustrates this larger form, while the bottom row shows the words that reflect the start of each section in our example.

Scena OPTIONAL	Cantabile	Tempo di mezzo OPTIONAL	Cabaletta
*Dialogue or solo reflection to set up the scene *Does NOT use the lyric prototype	*Slow song *Lyric prototype used *Can have an instrumental intro	*Transition, sometimes in dialogue with another character *Can be in recitative	*Fast(er) song *Lyric prototype used *Can have an instrumental intro
N/A	Una voce poco fa, etc.	N/A	Io sono docile, etc.

The basic concept—a slow cantabile followed by a faster cabaletta—serves musical and dramatic purposes: it allows the character on stage to reflect on an issue (the slow section) and reach a decision (in the fast section), and it allows the singer opportunities for all kinds of vocal effects, especially in the fast section.

The second half of “Una voce poco fa” presents a new melody based on the lyric prototype starting at 3:05. This second melody, beginning on the words “Io sono docile” (I am well-behaved), is anything but predictable. It opens with an AA’B pattern (the lines beginning Io sono docile/sono obediente/mi lascio regere), but then what would be the last phrase (ma se mi toccano) sparks a long extended section as Rosina describes all the tricks she will play if she doesn’t get what she wants. The music, in other words, doesn’t follow the expected form, just as Rosina herself doesn’t follow the rules.

A similar form is used for duets between characters: as can be seen through Verdi’s opera La traviata (1853) (link here). As duets are the dramatic core of an opera, it’s important to be able to put the musical form in its dramatic context.

This opera tells the story of Violetta, a sex worker who falls in love with one of her customers, Alfredo.[4] They elope together but family obligations and pride lead them to break up. The lovers reconcile just before Violetta dies of tuberculosis, literally gasping for breath on stage in a heartbreaking scene. (Tuberculosis was widely considered to be a sexually transmitted disease in the nineteenth century).[5]

This affecting story is naturally told through long, extended duets which function somewhat like the double aria form: there is a slow aria for the two singers (a largo) and a fast aria (a stretta). I’ve put in timings for the reconciliation duet from Act III of La traviata in the bottom line. These are separated by dialogue sections, as follows:

Scena OPTIONAL	Tempo d’attacco	Largo	Tempo di mezzo	Stretta
Recitative	*Rapid exchange of dialogue   *modulates	*Slow aria     *Stable key   *Lyric prototype	*Rapid exchange of dialogue   *Usually interrupts the mood of the Largo	*Fast aria     *Stable key   *Lyric prototype
	An unexpected visitor	The lovers reunite	Violetta feels ill	They realize her death is inevitable
NA	1:38:00	1:39:31	1:43:00	1:44:46 – 1:46:21

Notice that in both the largo and stretta, each singer gets a verse of the melody, and then the two singers sing in harmony. This little convention allows each singer to display their skill and each character to express their perspective. Also note the dramatic use of the low brass in the tempo di mezzo around 1:43:50-1:44:20—trombones were associated with funerals in this period, and this is the moment at which Violetta realizes she will not recover.

Verdi did not invent duet form, although he refined it. The whole thing was so common that it’s become known by the Italian phrase solita forma, meaning “standard form.” Essentially, forms like this allowed composers to integrate melodic-centered writing (the largo and stretta) into a drama without making the plot stand still. Solita forma thus furthered both the drama and the music, gave the singers plenty of opportunities to show their skills, and provided the type of emotional spectacle that kept audiences coming back for more.

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[1] For example, the opera La muette de Portici helped inspire revolutionary unrest in Belgium (1830).

[2] Bellini to Carlo Pepoli, quoted in Pierlugi Petrobelli, Music in the Theater: Essays on Verdi and Other Composers, p. 168.

[3] Il trovatore (1853); Norma (1831); Lucia di Lammermoor (1835).

[4] Violetta is a “courtesan,” meaning that she had middle- and upper-class clients, and did not work for a pimp.

[5] Verdi wanted the opera staged in contemporary costumes, but agreed to stage it in 17^th-century dress to get past the censors.

Domestic song traditions in the nineteenth century

Look over any standard history of music in the nineteenth century, and you’ll learn about a set of gifted songwriters who released published volumes of songs for solo voice and piano. These songs are often described as lieder (the German word for songs), simply because so many German-speaking musicians wrote them: Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, etc. It’s also common to describe a parallel repertoire of mélodies (the French word for melody) by composers such as Charles Gounod, Jules Massenet, and Gabriel Fauré. There’s also a tradition in the United States at the same time called “parlor song”—the best known example of such a song is Stephen Foster’s “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair.”

            Some historians try to combine these styles by talking about “art song” as a category that includes both lied and mélodie, but I personally find the term art song to be a bit backhanded—it seems to imply that the other songs aren’t art (the parlor song is rarely meant when people say “art song”).

            All these genres, despite their differences, were designed to be played in one’s own home. In other words, they were domestic music, strongly associated, like instrumental chamber music or solo piano music, with family music making—with the all the feminine associations that you might imagine for a period in which women were expected to be homemakers. The practice of performing these songs in public recitals, in front of a silent, appreciative audience, is actually a relatively modern development. Certainly singers performed these songs in some public concerts during the nineteenth century, but many more of these songs were sung in private concerts organized in people’s homes, particularly in the salons of rich women in major cities.

            In other words, when we talk about “art songs,” imagining songs written for the concert hall, we distort a lot of the real context of this music. They were much closer to pop culture in their own time, in that they were designed for a clearly defined social use and had a clear economic function. Songs also made good economic sense for composers. They were cheaper to publish than massive symphonic works, and a large audience of amateur musicians was willing to buy them.

            The trend of composing songs for voice and keyboard seems to have started in German-speaking lands in the 1760s. The earliest German lieder were designed for amateurs to sing and play. During the Romantic era, the keyboard parts generally got harder and more musically important, and there was increased attention to setting the text in an evocative manner. Not surprisingly, the increasing difficulty of these songs led toward the professionalization of domestic music. By the end of the nineteenth century, song recitals by professional singers were becoming more common (as were concerts by professional string quartets).

            Songs were usually published in sets of three or more. Beginning with Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte (To the Distant Beloved), 1816, composers experimented with publishing sets of songs that were linked together in some way. Since these songs were usually settings of well-known poems, it was possible to construct a narrative out of unrelated poems by rearranging them or to set a series of poems about the same characters. Composers also experimented with musical unifying devices, such as key structures, so that the songs had to follow each other in a set order. To make a comparison with modern music—the song cycle is essentially the nineteenth-century equivalent of the concept album.

            Franz Schubert (1797–1828) is particularly associated with song cycles. Although Schubert died young, he wrote music in almost every genre—and struggled to find an audience for his work: his operas and symphonies were rarely performed during his lifetime. His 600 songs remain some of his best-known compositions. His Die schöne Müllerin (The lovely girl from the mill), 1825, contains twenty songs and tells the story of a young, suicidal man who is unlucky in love. Schubert’s second cycle, Winterreise (the winter’s journey), 1827, contains 24 songs, and depicts a heartbroken wander traveling through desolate landscapes. It seems unlikely that most people who bought these songs actually performed them as a set in their homes; cycles such as these, however, provided a unified work that singers could perform in public concerts.

            Later in the nineteenth century, song composers increasingly turned toward arranging folk songs in a nationalist context. While Beethoven had published arrangements of many folk songs, most of his work had focused on songs from foreign lands (especially Irish and Scottish songs). Later composers published folk songs from their own countries: Johannes Brahms (1833–1896) published sets of German folksongs (1858 and 1894), while Mily Balakirev (1837–1910) did the same for Russian music (1866, 1898).

Program, characteristic, and absolute music

During the nineteenth century, musicians and critics began developing new ways of talking about and categorizing types of instrumental music. These new categories—which are now commonly described as program, characteristic, and absolute music—did not emerge overnight. They’re significant both through their relationship to modern musical practice, and because they reveal a major divide inside the Romantic movement.

The basic concept of Romanticism in music, remember, was that music is a uniquely powerful form of art, which create a spiritual experience. Vocal music was generally considered a less powerful form of music, because it partly relies on lyrics for its effect.

The issue at stake with program, characteristic, and absolute music is: how much we should allow non-musical elements to affect the ways that we make music, that we think about music, and that we listen to music. This question, of course, is a matter of personal taste; individual musicians answered it in different ways in different contexts.

Program music’s basic concept is: instrumental music is accompanied by a detailed prose narrative which explains the story, concepts, or ideas that the music depicts. A common example is Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique (1830), a massive symphony in five movements, which depicts a variety of scenes, including a drug trip (program here). Another common version of program music does not contain a written narrative, but refers extensively to a written work that would have been familiar to listeners: for example Chaikovsky’s symphony after Lord Byron’s poem “Manfred” doesn’t need a written narrative—it depicts the poem, and the title alone is a clue for any listener who wants to understand the strange sequence of moods.

Characteristic music, on the other hand, has an evocative title, but no written narrative, and does not refer to a stand-alone text. “Dreaming” and “The Sick Doll” are examples of this.

Absolute music, finally, has an abstract title that gives the listener no clue as to how to interpret it. Mendelssohn’s “Octet in E flat major” is an example of this type of piece.

So these categories are less about the sound of the music, than about the level to which the composer tells the listener what to think about while listening to the music. In other words, these categories describe cultural rather than musical elements of the work.

At the same time, plenty of people certainly ignored the composer’s directions. Interpretative listening—in which the listener makes up a story to explain the emotions and feelings that music seems to suggest—was practiced by prominent music critics such as Robert Schumann, who opened his review of Chopin’s piano variations, op. 2., in the following manner:

Part of Schumann’s strategy as a critic is to explain how different types of listeners will interpret the same music in different ways; therefore, he created alter egos (including Florestan and Eusebius) who usually argue about the meaning of the music they hear, so that his reviews often present the reader with several possible interpretations of the same piece. Note that Schumann doesn’t mean to suggest that the listener will literally see a basilisk from looking at or listening to this music; he implies that the experience is so extraordinary that it requires a verbal explanation.

The intentional writing of programs for instrumental music makes more sense in this context. If your audience subscribed to Romantic ideals and was willing to translate their experience into words, why not simply forestall them by providing a ready-made story so that your work would not be misinterpreted? If your goal was to create a particular emotional, even spiritual experience, wouldn’t you want to make sure that everyone who heard your piece got the message?

At the same time, this process risked relying on words, rather than music, for the effect of your work, which would weaken its ability to serve as a conduit to a spiritual experience—and in fact, some critics attacked program music for relying on words to explain music instead of letting music speak for itself. Others insisted that one should be able to ignore the program, that the music should make sense on its own, and that programs were only there for those who needed it. Yet—and this is important—musicians also increasingly wrote autobiographical program works. Some of these programs were made public, and others remained hidden and private.

Programs that were made publically available need to be taken with a grain of salt. They are, in a way, an attempt to control the audience’s perceptions, and an attempt to control one’s public image. Even the program for Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, which is based on his own life (it is subtitled “episodes in the life of an artist”) was not definitive, and was in fact revised over time (this link contains both versions).

Characteristic music, on the other hand, sidestepped all these issues. Effectively, the composer places greater trust in the listener’s ability to understand the music as music, with minimal explanation or direction. Listeners weren’t always comfortable with this. Felix Mendelssohn wrote a series of characteristic pieces called “Songs without words”—a poignant concept, suggesting meaning, but leaving it completely up to the listener. One fan wrote to Mendelssohn, asking him to explain the meanings of the pieces; the composer responded:

If you ask me what I had in mind when I wrote it, I would say: just the song as it is. And if I happen to have certain words in mind for one or another of these songs, I would never want to tell them to anyone, because the same words never mean the same things to others. Only the song can say the same thing, can arouse the same feelings in one person as in another, a feeling that is not expressed, however, by the same words.[1]

     Absolute music, on the other hand, gave the listener nothing to work with but the sound of the music—or, to put it another way, made the most demands on the listener’s intelligence and perception. The Romantic emphasis on the power of music meant that absolute music was often held up as the ideal, the ultimate expression of musical thought. This attitude survives today in the respect given to abstract symphonic music, which has long enjoyed higher cultural status than program music or opera. Absolute music, interestingly enough, was actually a new idea in the nineteenth century and arose in response to the emerging Romantic aesthetic; program and characteristic music were not invented by the Romantics (one can find them in the Baroque period if not earlier).[2]

                Ironically, musicians working in all three genres could claim descent from Beethoven if they chose. Beethoven’s Symphony no. 6, “the Pastoral,” has descriptive titles which link each movement to experiences to a day in the country, including a thunderstorm. This of course is not really program music, as Beethoven did not provide a detailed story to go along with it, but composers of both program and characteristic music could claim it as precedent. Similarly, the composers of abstract symphonies could claim inspiration from Beethoven’s similarly abstract works (such as the fifth and seventh symphonies).

Spending all this time on cultural concepts, however, should not make us deaf to each genre’s economic and social contexts. Characteristic music tended to sold in collections of short pieces for the piano, sometimes specifically marketed toward amateurs and domestic musicians (especially women). For example, one can look at Schumann’s Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood) which portrays a series of topics associated with childhood—note the pieces are not for children to play! Program music was often written for large orchestras and could employ novel effects, which would have been shocking if there were no program to explain them away. Absolute music (associated with symphonies and chamber music) often took over the abstract forms of the classical period, such as sonata form and variations, and used them as vehicles for Romantic expression. Musicians whose work remains canonic chiefly enjoy this status through their long, symphonic works (Brahms and Chaikovsky are good examples), while musicians who chiefly wrote short pieces are often dismissed as minor talents (Edvard Grieg is perhaps the most typical example). And yet even the canonic musicians’ most popular works were usually the short ones, as these were most likely to sell sheet music: thus Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances (for piano) would have sold more copies than a symphony for full orchestra.

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[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Songs-Without-Words

[2] For example, one can think of Vivaldi’s Le quattro stagioni, which depict the four seasons of the year, in turn.

The Romantic aesthetic in Western music

This lesson is designed to introduce you to the “Romantic” movement. Standard histories of music often present the music of the Romantic movement as being the single, most important type of music that you should know about from the nineteenth century. It’s true that the music of Franz Schubert, Fryderyk Chopin, Robert Schumann, Felix Mendelssohn, Richard Wagner, Johannes Brahms, Hector Berlioz, Pyotr Chaikovsky, and Antonin Dvořák (to name just a few of the best-known Romantic composers) is still performed today and remains influential. It’s easy enough to assume that the music that orchestras regularly perform today enjoyed the same popularity in its own time.

The reality was a bit different, particularly before 1850. Romanticism emerged as a movement around 1815, and it was a reversal and a development of many of the values of the Classical aesthetic. Romanticism did not replace Classicism overnight; plenty of musicians rejected Romanticism and continued to write in an old-fashioned style. Beethoven, who extended Classical forms to their breaking point, was an inspiration for many Romantic musicians, particularly in central Europe, but his innovations were not universally accepted by the general public in Europe or the Americas. Even after 1850, Romantic music regularly inspired mixed reviews and passionate debate. It’s unclear how much the general public actually cared about these debates; written history, however, has a way of centering the concerns of literate people. Certainly other styles of music more rooted in popular culture—such as broadside ballads, vernacular dance music, folksong, even minstrelsy etc.—coexisted with Romantic music and probably enjoyed a wider audience.

Definitions

The key concept of the Romantic style lies in its aesthetic values—its beliefs about what makes music good—rather than in any specific musical technique. The prominent critic E.T.A. Hoffmann summarized the role of music in an essay about listening to Beethoven: “Music discloses…an unknown realm, a world that has nothing in common with the external sensual world that surrounds [us], a world in which [we] leave behind all definite feelings to surrender to an inexpressible longing.”[1] Hoffmann was proposing that music had the ability to transport the listener away from the physical world toward a zone of pure, true feeling. This is music that is designed to be more than entertainment. This zone of pure feeling is hard to explain in words; Romantic writers spoke of “transcendence,” the “noumenal,” the “infinite” in their efforts to capture it.

The idea that music can help you escape from daily reality is powerful, but it made even more sense in the context of the times. Musical Romanticism emerged in a period dominated by violent conflicts: the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815), the liberation of South America from Spanish colonial rule (1808–1826), rampant unrest across all European nations (culminating in the revolutions of 1848), and conflicts leading to the creation of Italy and Germany as unified countries (1859, 1866, 1871). Conflicts did not always occur at home: throughout the nineteenth century, Britain and France expanded their colonial empires through violent conquest, while Spain’s gradually collapsed. Even more than during the preceding musical era, this was also a period of heavy industrialization, with many poor people leaving the countryside to work in urban factories, living in crowded slums. In these contexts, it makes sense that musical aesthetics might develop in the way that they did.

Value systems

This idea of music as a gateway to a spiritual experience is not new, but it was new to emphasize this as the chief and most important purpose of music. Romantic aesthetics had major effects on the value systems of Western musical culture.

First of all, it affected the role and status of musicians. If one believed in Romanticism, then music channeled powerful spiritual forces. The Romantics sometimes adapted religious language, such as talking about themselves as priests of art, to reflect the seriousness of their task as musicians. The Romantics helped popularize the idea of musicians as creative geniuses worthy of the greatest respect (although they would never have applied this concept to popular musicians, as we do now). In short, they promoted the concept of the “Great Composer,” which survives in American culture today, and its corollary concept, that performers should be faithful servants of the notated score.  And of course, given their view of themselves and their art, Romantic musicians were likely to be critical of music which enjoyed wide public acclaim or which served as entertainment, such as opera, operetta, broadside ballads, or minstrelsy.

Second, Romanticism affected the types of music that enjoyed public prestige. If music itself was such a powerful channel to the infinite, then the best, most important music could not have any external elements—like words or staging—to get in the way of the music. This means that instrumental music was valued over vocal music, with the symphony for full orchestra as the most prestigious genre. Early Romantic composers were shy of opera: it relied on words and staging and costumes for part of its effect. Later composers in the Romantic style, such as Richard Wagner, wrote opera with the explicit aim of improving and elevating it above its role in popular culture.

Musical techniques

Most of the compositional techniques of Romantic music derive directly from the Classical style: melodies are still often structured in two- and four-measure phrases; formal patterns such as sonata form, rondo, theme and variations, and ternary song form are still present. The development of short musical motifs into extended forms (“organicism”) is, if anything, more prominent than in the earlier era.

One area of innovation was in harmony: chords of the 9^th and 11^th became increasingly common, and chromatic harmony went from being just a coloristic effect (such as an occasional flat VI chord) to a fundamental feature. Tonal structures became more sophisticated, with symphonic composers trying to follow Beethoven’s footsteps in creating long pieces with complex modulations to distant keys. At times, Romantic composers pushed tonality so far that it’s difficult to tell what key the music is in, even though the music relies on tonal principles. By the early 1900s, one branch of Romanticism would morph into the Modernist movement, which embraced atonality.  

Orchestration was another area which became important in the nineteenth century, as musicians searched for unique tone colors to heighten the emotional effect of their music. Two of the standard orchestration manuals still studied today—by Hector Berlioz and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov—both date to the Romantic movement. In keeping with this interest in unique sounds, orchestras became larger as the century went on, with public concerts sometimes featuring hundreds of performers.

                Romanticism was in many ways a style devoted to extremes of feeling. As the musician’s goal was to provide the listener with a spiritual experience, any musical device could serve this purpose, and any technique was sanctioned as long as it made the listener feel something. So while this was a period in which in forms were stretched to great lengths, it also saw forms shrink and contract. Short pieces of a minute or less could provide also window into the infinite.

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[1] “Beethoven’s Instrumental Music,” 1813.