For your first daily blog entries (due Tuesday, January 7 at 9 am), each student should write between 250-500 words,
addressing the following points:
·
What did you know about today’s subject before
the listening and/or discussion session?
·
What did you find most surprising about today’s
subject?
·
What would you like to know more about after
experiencing today’s class?
Here are the points that are either new to me or I think is really important. I learned mostly in music history 101, but it is still good to go through these again:
ReplyDeleteSymphony 4th: first performed in private concert, which is a smaller scale than perform in public. It then get published and went into the market.
Symphony 5th and 6th: published for Beethoven’s own profits. Beethoven published the symphonies to charm the market, make himself famous, and make it to be able to perform public.
Here I finally figured out that there’s already nobel who owns an orchestra and they would like to buy the score; there are also people who’d like to just put the scores in their house.
For the first 10 years of the 19th century, the merchantiles raised, who has taken some of the nobel’s places as the patrons.
Elements for performed symphonies: space - concert halls, which appeared at the middle 19th century in Vienna, opera house, theater, schools, and outside; musicians - orchestras that belong to the nobel.
Classical Style vs. Romantic Style:
It is hard to define when the classical ends and when the romantic starts.
Classical style music (example from Haydn, String Quartet in E flat major, op.33, no.2, movt. Iv (“The Joke”) has a clear structure and diagram. In Haydn’s string quartet, there are classical repetitions, rounded binary forms, elements that similar to the sonata form (an exposition, a development, and a recapitulation), variations that goes back to the beginning at the end of the section, and also pedal tones going through the whole section. The phrases are perfectly balanced. The quartet is performed mostly in a small music room for the nobilities and sometimes professional musicians.
Romantic style music (example from Schubert, “Erlkonig”) does not share the same structure with the classical style. In Erlkonig, the importance of the piano accompaniment and the vocal is in equivalent. There’s text painting proved in the piano part - the piano is imitating horses and steps of waltzes when the vocalist goes to different characters. The motivic structure also changed. It does not follow a strict form of ABA anymore.
Beethoven is somewhere between the romantic and the classical area.
In the following class, I’d like to go deeper into the specific details of each symphony.
Aside from a knowledge of the historical background of the period (patrons, Napoleonic wars, etc.) I went into class today essentially blind. For example, I had assumed all orchestral music made in a certain time period fit under the term "classical music," I had no idea that classical was just one type of orchestral music and that it differed from baroque and romantic. The demonstration of the structure in the Haydn piece was pretty eye-opening for, especially compared to the Schubert piece set against the Goethe poem. My understanding of classical music now is that it makes extensive use of repetition and can use a "rounded binary" form. The Schubert piece, representing a more romantic style, is less repetitive and even shifts form throughout, going from a tight rhythm representing the gallop of a horse to something looser and evocative of waltz music.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed the discussion on the ways that classical musicians of the period debuted their work as well as the ways they tried to make money. The image of Beethoven playing music in a tavern was really something; these days its hard to imagine music like that happening anywhere outside of a million-dollar concert hall, let alone a riding school.
After today's class, I'm left wanting to know more about what prompted Beethoven to take the leap from piano virtuoso to a symphony writer. Did many musicians in the period write extensively as well as perform music or was Beethoven a separate phenomenon?
Most of the information that I knew today I recalled from music history 101. It was really a reminder of many of the ideas that I learned about in that class. I knew that Haydn (depicted in expensive blue!) was a servant in the entourage of the Esterhazy royalty. I knew that there was a big shift over time between musicians/composers being servants and being independent agents. I think that I was aware the Beethoven was in some sort of a crossover period, but I didn’t realize how important his place in history was for that.
ReplyDeleteI was most surprised by learning about academies, which were performances that composers put on for themselves. I didn’t realize that they put together the programs, printed the tickets, and took care of all the other parts of putting on a performance. It was neat to learn that this was a way for composers to make profits. It seems that Beethoven emulated Mozart’s behavior here by putting on annual academies like the older composer did. Additionally, I was surprised to learn that there weren’t really any concert halls in the beginning half of the 19th century. It was unexpected to learn that orchestras re-purposed other buildings, including theaters and riding schools, for symphony performances. Because space was hard to come by, I think it’s interesting that most people heard the symphonies through their piano reductions.
I think the thing I’d like to learn the most about that was mentioned during the lecture today was the bridge between the classical and romantic styles that Beethoven represents. I can’t wait to dive into the symphonies and hear specific musical examples that show how he included elements from both eras in his compositions.
Most of the things I knew before today’s class were all mostly general, not very specific things about Beethoven. I knew he wrote nine symphonies, many piano sonatas, and many string quartets, and wrote them all throughout his three stylistic periods. I also know that he had a musical background outside of composing, and wrote music for patrons. I’m curious to learn more about Beethoven’s relationships with the patrons he wrote his symphonies for, as they seem like a greatly varied bunch based off of today’s class, which goes in tandem with him occupying a transitionary period between the Classic and Romantic Era. We spent a bit of time talking about the years of overlap between the Classical and Romantic period, looking specifically at some commonalities in form between Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 and a Haydn string quartet, but I’m curious to know more about how Beethoven thought of himself. Did he think of himself as a specifically classic or romantic composer? Did it change from one to the other throughout his lifetime? I know that the terms classic and romantic did not exist at the time, but I wonder if Beethoven defined himself as one or the other in different words.
ReplyDeleteThe thing I found most surprising about today’s class was the fact that Symphony No. 5, Symphony No. 6, and the Choral Fantasie were all premiered on the same day. Perhaps surprising isn’t quite the right word, but this was something I was previously unaware of, and found very interesting.
Having taken Music of the Romantic Era and Music Theory I-IV, I came into this class generally knowing the content. I was familiar with Classical Era forms and how it changed and developed in the early Romantic Era. I had studied Schubert lieder and a few Beethoven symphonies and sonatas and have heard lectures on the structure of each work and how it related to the history of musical structure. I was aware of the relationship between the composers of the Classical Era and the aristocracy, and how the identity of composers changed in the Romantic Era from less of a servant to more of a celebrity.
ReplyDeletePerhaps the most surprising thing about today’s class for me was the way Beethoven’s symphonies were published, marketed, and performed during Beethoven’s lifetime. Publishing symphonies in segments or as piano reductions primarily makes sense considering the accessibility of professional orchestras vs. amateur pianists, but to consider how most encountered Beethoven’s symphonies in the early 19th century is surprising in that it’s very different from the ways we experience them today. While we have access to numerous recordings, as well as the orchestral score at our fingertips through imslp, the symphonies were not nearly as accessible to the mercantile class at the time. It is difficult to imagine how the mercantile class related to music of this nature. I’d like to know more about this aspect of Beethoven’s music. Specifically how did it rise in popularity? When did Beethoven become a household name and why? How did Beethoven’s music come from being published as a piano reduction to being universally recognized in some cases, including the ‘Ode to Joy’ theme and the main motif of the 5th?
I was generally familiar with most things presented in Monday's lecture, but I gained a few new pieces of knowledge: Symphony No. 8 is the only one of Beethoven's without a dedicatee; academies were started by Mozart; a large mercantile class in Vienna (larger than in any other major European city at the time) is what made it more feasible for composers to earn money outside of funds from patrons; the industrial revolution and Napoleonic wars are what specifically lead to the decline of the aristocracy in Europe (I'm not up on my European history outside of Russia), and this in turn lead to musicians finding new ways to "preserve and present culture," namely by creating societies and presenting academies; Sir George Smart of the Philharmonic Society of London would go on tour in Great Britain, bringing with him at least a partial orchestra and parts for Beethoven 5, which he had performed everywhere he went; riding schools were potential large venues for symphonic concerts (this wins "most surprising," although I feel like I remember hearing about a giant performance of Handel's Messiah taking place in a similar venue...); many of Beethoven's string quartets were presented in a tavern (sneaking suspicion I've heard that before); Baron Gottfried van Swieten (a spy, among other things!) introduced the music of Handel and J.S. Bach to Mozart and Haydn; a lot of Haydn's music was heard and performed in Bonn.
ReplyDeleteThe brief examination of "The Joke" and Erlkonig was a great review. I'll add Norrington to the queue of Beethoven interpretations to listen to!
I now really want to know the complete early history of publicly performing classical music and funding it independent of noble patrons. Any recommended reading?