Chapter 22 The World Through (Radically) New Eyes Illustration 1: The formula... m = Music Very early in this text, a graphic of a strange looking formula was presented to illustrate the complex relationship of music to the era that generated it. The formula was meant only as an illustration an actual formula would be many orders of magnitude more convoluted. There are many factors that shape the music and art of an era. Let s examine a few of the most obvious. One of the most important factors is the economic one. Can a musician earn a living as a musician? In what way? Who will pay him? Who is his audience? Whose story is told in his music? What role does music have in the lives of the general population? Do they have disposable income that would trickle down to publishers and instrument makers... and concert promoters? Who can and will make a profit off of musicians and their music? And so on... What institutions in society have evolved where music (and the musicians who perform and compose it) was able to find a niche? What adaptions may have been needed? Is music heard in large public forums and giant open spaces? Or, is it reserved for small intimate settings, perhaps mostly utilitarian? What social functions does music fit into? Religious? Government? Public concerts? In many ways it s relatively easy to make the case that much Western classical music has a strong parallel to religious ceremonies. Someone on a stage interprets the word (his own special enlightened version) for an attentive audience who came to hear the
gospel written by revered prophets of old... perhaps these similarities might be how music and religion have gone hand in hand for so many thousands of years. Another important factor is the technology available at the time. Historically, musicians have almost always been the first to embrace the latest technology to create their art. When there were only animal skins, musicians made drums. When computers became available, musicians were some of the first to exploit them. What is the technology available to musicians? What s available to the creators and maintainers of instruments? To the target audience? Does reproduction of the notated music or the sound of a performance exist? How accessible is it (refer to the above paragraph re economic factors)? Technology may well have a subliminal effect on the music of an era. There seems to be a close correlation between the scientific understanding of any era and the complexity and structure found in its music. Coincidence, or is it because they are related? And, of course, technology in the distribution and sales of music (recorded or printed) would affect the outcome. Not to mention that when it is overwhelming, that psychological element appears in the music and art. Another significant factor is the religious and political effects on free speech of the time. How much control does a government or a church have on what artists can say? Is it direct, or does it come as an incidental byproduct of economic policies? How much influence do those power structures have on audiences? Do governments subsidize artists? How far can an artist go before he gets suppressed? When a musician is able to work as a musician, how much do these factor in? And then, the quirky, the unpredictable: one needs to take into account random chance in the lives of the composer, performers, and audience. When we begin throwing in quirky factors such as wars, climate change, plagues, natural disasters, et cetera, we may get an idea of how complicated this is. And this is only scratching the surface.
Illustration 2: "Improvisation 31 (Sea Battle)", Wassily Kandinsky, 1913 Sometimes the best way to understand it is not try to understand the machine from examining a few gears, but instead look at the output and deconstruct. When we do that we see that there are some striking similarities between the Romantic Era and our own contemporary era. When we look back at the music of the Romantic era, we see individuals telling their own stories. We see a public demanding virtuoso performers who dazzle them with technique and fire their imagination with their visions. We have music becoming in essence multimedia in that much important music is now about something literary or historical. We have a market for musicians who push the envelope as far as it will go and who are the masters of their own financial destiny. In earlier eras, there was no such thing as a rich and powerful musician. Occasionally musicians were somewhat well known, but there was never anything like what we see in the Romantic era where a Franz Liszt toured Europe and lived like a rock star. In the late 19th century we see writers like Frederich Nietzsche seeing the end of the influence of religion as a motivating factor for morality and human motivation proclaiming God is dead! in his novel, Thus Spake Zarathustra.
Compared to the artistic atmosphere from less than 400 years earlier, it is almost like we are taking a look at a completely different planet. As author James Burke tells us, we see what our knowledge tells us we are seeing, their knowledge had certainly changed. The world the Romantic Era was seeing was drastically different from anything before. And... maybe not that different from the music and the zeitgeist of our current era. In the concert hall and via recordings, the music of the Romantic Era remains highly popular. Its style and sounds are regularly borrowed for film scores, commercials, and television soundtracks. Many film scores, such as those by John Williams, are not very far removed from the style of Romantic music. And small wonder by the end of the Romantic era the role of music and musicians had reached a point quite similar to that of the contemporary era. Musicians were entertainers, but also visionaries, rebels, social critics. Probably not sheer cooincidence--this artistic upheaval happened in an era of an economic and technological upheaval known as the Second Industrial Revolution. In the modern era, we deify our special creative icons musicians (and other artists) who were extraordinarily talented, but whose lives ended tragically early, cut down in the prime of life. Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Marilyn Monroe, John Kennedy, Tupac Shakur, etc. A few generations back, the identical stereotype known as the Romantic Hero equally worshiped Mozart, Bizet, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Schumann, etc. We can see, from the similarities, the foundations of our modern musical thought as well as the role music and musicians play in society began here in the Romantic Era. We see musicians living lives of promiscuity as they do their concert tours. There is music written describing the influence of hallucinogenic drugs. Musicians talk about about revolution, criticize religion and blast the audiences with the loudest music possible; some create elaborate light shows along with concerts; many do things for the sake of shock value. No that last paragraph is NOT about the rock and roll era. If there is any doubt that our music of the current era is firmly rooted in the 1800s, everything mentioned in the previous paragraph happened in the Romantic Era.
We are still living in the shadow of the Romantic Era more than we might think. Illustration 3: "Procession, Seville", Francis Picibia, 1912 Material copyright 2016 by Gary Daum, all rights reserved. All photos and illustrations by Gary Daum unless otherwise noted. Unlimited use granted to current members of the Georgetown Prep community.