The romantic generation
Rosen examines how 19th Century composers extended the boundaries of music, and their engagement with literature, landscape and the divine.
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What Hacker News says
- >The next level of explanation is to say: “Yes, I recognize that D-sharp and E-flat sound the same, but they function differently, and the spelling communicates this functional difference.” This explanation always bothered me, because if the “function” is limited to the page and isn’t audible, then is it even a real thing?
A feature of notated music (which is what most of us mean when we say "[western] classical music") is that there can be things notated and not heard. Similarly, there are also different notations which correspond to the same sound. Notation is ambiguous, and this can be a source of both frustration (for the students) and invention (for the composers). Charles Rosen opens his book The Romantic Generation with a fascinating discussion about music which is seen and not heard which deals with this philosophical issue.
Of course this practice goes back much further. Composers have been playing with notation for a long time and it reached a peak of sophistication in the 15th century, as Emily Zazulia demonstrated in her PhD thesis and book[1]. This quality is obviously absent in musical cultures which do not rely on notation. I imagine to the outsider it appears as if the notation itself has taken on a life of its own to the detriment of the sounding music. Of course there is a certain elitism involved as well since explaining subtleties in notation is also a sure way of ostentatiously demonstrating one's erudition, which may explain why these kind of discussions are perennially popular here ;).
[1] https://global.oup.com/academic/product/where-sight-meets-so...
- There's a great book called "Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science" by Richard Holmes that is about the period between Newton and Darwin in which science and art were mixed -- you had poets like Coleridge who were amateur chemists (no, he wasn't making his own drugs, to spare the obvious joke given his habits), and chemists like Humphrey Davy who were amateur poets.
- Really? I've seen the terms "pastiche" and "parody" carefully delineated in scholarly works, though these have been commenting primarily in the classical eras and later, long after the parody masses. Charles Rosen (whose The Romantic Generation is now a classic, if controversial text) in particular has pointed out quite a few works he sees as pastiches as opposed to parodies.
