Jerome Kleinsasser Lecture 2002

Academic Decathlon
Bakersfield Convention Center
November 6, 2002
Afternoon Lecture

Jerome Kleinsasser
Professor of Music
California State University, Bakersfield

Our Academic Decathlon theme for this year is "Understanding the Natural World," and the music selected was drawn from the Romantic Era because, more than ever before, in the 19th century musicians concerned themselves with music that made a statement about their time and the world in which they lived. This is an idea that seems so commonplace to us that we don’t even think about it, but one must keep in mind that before that time, hearing art music, or concert music, was restricted to the privileged few. In the 1800s, though, the industrial revolution had created a middle class that had the discretionary income to spend on things such as musical instruments and concert tickets. So more than at any time in previous history, music of the Romantic Era was music for the ordinary person.

Here’s our plan. I will examine what the Romantic Era was and what it represented in music. We will hear performed several examples of music for solo piano and also for voice which illustrate some of these ideas, and then we will touch upon materials of music as discussed in your study guide. If time permits, I have a few questions ready for a pop quiz warm-up.

But first, as always, we begin with a word of advice:

We all know that learning to play a musical instrument takes many hours, weeks, months and years of practice, but few of you will be musical performers; most of you will be musical consumers, but that is also a very important part of the musical process. If there were no audience, there would be no one to attend concerts and hear this music produced by dedicated musicians (and no one to buy their recordings). Listening will probably be the way in which most of you participate in the musical process, and listening takes practice. I challenge you to challenge yourself in selecting the music you listen to; don’t be a victim of music marketing; listen to music that challenges both your intellect and emotions. You will become a more balanced and informed person for it.

The music of the Romantic Era embraces most of the 19th century (1820-1910). This was an exciting time in which to live: revolutions were breaking out all over Europe; the Industrial Revolution was in full swing - making people’s lives somewhat easier and also providing jobs; like today, technology was changing people’s lives (though not at the rapid rate you and I experience); and attitudes toward religion, politics, the home, and sex roles were changing. But what exactly is the meaning of "Romance"? What is the meaning of "Romantic?" What exactly is "Romanticism?"

My dictionary defines the term "Romance" as "a novel or other prose narrative typically characterized by heroic deeds, pageantry, knightly exploits, etc., usually in a historical or imaginary setting." These could be drawn from medieval tales such as the Arthurian legends, or Robin Hood, or any of hundreds of similar stories.

The adjective "Romantic," is defined as "fanciful; impractical; imbued with or dominated by idealism, a desire for adventure, etc." If someone says, "O, you’re such a Romantic" what they usually mean is, you are a dreamer or someone out of touch with reality.

"Romanticism," the period we are considering, was "the 19th-century movement which emphasized individualism and subjective feeling" - note the word "feeling" because to romantics, feeling is more important than thinking; one should trust one’s heart, not one’s intellect - or at least that is the theory. Creative artists sought a unique artistic voice or style.

Goethe - perhaps the greatest poet and playwright of early Romanticism, said "Classicism is health, romanticism is sickness," meaning, I think, that one of the charms of romanticism was its illogical nature and off-center character. This was a time when the disturbed mind was often thought to have a surer path to truth than that of a clear thinker.

There are a number of themes that run through the music, art, and literature of Romanticism, beginning with Love and Death, more particularly love that finds its fulfillment in death. To the Romantic mentality, there is no such thing as a happy ending - the phrase "they lived happily ever after" has no place in this time. A literary example might be Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, where, unlike the sanitized Disney version you all saw a few years back, where in the end the gypsy girl rode away with the hero on his white horse, - in the original novel, the love of Quasimodo and Esmeralda is culminated when the two are united in death on a smoldering slag heap outside of Paris.

 

Idealization of Nature - and this is our most important connection with the over-arching theme of the Decathlon this year. The arts were permeated with references to, and settings in, Nature. People began to realize the Industrial Revolution, for all its wonders, was having a deleterious effect on the air and the water and the beauty of Nature (sound familiar?).

Nationalism and Folk Traditions - It was an age of Revolution. People newly took pride in their national heritage and in their music’s indigenous qualities and customs. Folk music was elevated to the level of high art when composers like Brahms and Dvorak and many others created concert music based on the folk music of their land.

The Exotic and Strange: in addition to their own culture, people took interest in foreign and distant cultures. Beginning in the late 18th century Europeans became fascinated with Native Americans, paraded them in full regalia before royalty who fussed over these exotic creatures from another hemisphere.

The Supernatural and Unknowable: spirits of various kinds could be evoked in music and poetry. Examples might be any of the many musical settings that draw from the Faust legend, where a human being trades his soul for earthly fortune and pleasure, or another example is Weber’s opera Der Freischütz with a scary Wolf’s Glen Scene with ghosts and supernatural creatures. The Unknowable is seen in metaphysical subjects of music and poetry, Franz Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes.

The Far Away and historical distant: a simple person living in Germany might imagine something about Scotland by hearing a symphony by Mendelssohn, or glimpse the distant past by hearing an opera by Bellini set in Roman times.

Fantasy and the Irrational. Long before Sigmund Freud came on the scene, the subjects of dreams and irrational thought were popular among poets and musicians. The story in Berlioz’s Fantastic Symphony is supposedly the result of an artist imbibing too much opium, and the listener is taken on a journey into fantasy - which is what Fantastic means.

One of the things I find so engaging about the Romantic Era is that it is a hugely contradictory period. To cite just one example, it is a broadly secular age where established religion was being challenged from all sides, and churches themselves were splintering, yet religious revivals were rampant in this country and in Europe. Decades ago, in his book The History of Western Music, Donald Grout nicely captured the essence of these contradictions in what he called Romantic Dualities. Grout lists eight of these contradictions and how they were manifest in the music of the time.

The first duality is Music and Words. Music and words are two different concepts, both of which can be artistic, but in Romanticism they combine in new genres - the art song and also in instrumental program music or descriptive music.

The second duality is "The Crowd and the Individual." The Industrial Revolution produced a huge middle class which had the discretionary income to buy musical instruments and tickets to public concerts, thus composers were forced to produce music for a mass culture, but at the same time there were composers, such as Beethoven, Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner, creating revolutionary music for a distant time.

Professional and Amateur Music-making. Technological advances in travel allowed performing musicians to accept engagements in distant cities. Thus virtuosos, such as violinist Nicolo Paganini and pianist Franz Liszt, could perform before these middle class crowds in various countries. On the other hand, it was a time when amateur music making, which had been around since the 16th century, could flourish as never before. Amateur musicians seemed to be everywhere. The parlor piano was as much a part of the well-turned out home as is the home entertainment center of today. In fact, due to its many uses, the parlor piano WAS the home entertainment center of the 19th century ("the common person’s orchestra" your study guide calls it).

Man and Nature: the human subject is seen in art and literature as being both part of, and detrimental to, Nature. Note how many paintings or songs or poems are about an individual and also the number of references to the natural world they contain.

Science and the Irrational. The sciences made many important advances in the 19th century (Darwin’s On The Origin of Species began its publications in 1859), so the importance of empirical evidence becomes paramount in human thinking, but at the same time the arts become fascinated with subjects drawn from irrational sources such as dreams.

Materialism and Idealism: That newly emerged middle class I mentioned could own and play musical instruments of many kinds - it was a new kind of materialism. At the same time composers were often idealists who largely ignored established religion. They composed masses and requiems and other kinds of sacred music, but this was music intended for the concert hall where it would be heard by a generalized public; it was not designed exclusively for a community of believers in a church or cathedral.

Nationalism/Internationalism. Some music of the 19th century was international in its appeal. Certainly this was true thirty years earlier in the music of Mozart; it was true of Beethoven’s music. But nationalism was evident when folk and ethnic music inspired larger concert works for orchestra.

Tradition/Revolution: The 19th century saw the birth of the discipline of musicology, where the rules of evidence one found in the sciences were applied to the study of music, particularly music of earlier eras. For the first time people began to look at music through a rear-view mirror, by studying and performing the music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the Baroque and Classic eras-traditions of the past were carried forward.

Composers wrote music that often reflected ideas from the past, but revolutionaries also sought new paths of composition and shockingly different harmonies and forms. And composers wrote essays on music that reflected this change; Wagner produced an essay called "Art and Revolution," and also one called "The Art-Work of the Future." It was a time that freely mixed older traditions with revolutionary ideas.

These are some of the contradictions that make musical Romanticism such a fascinating subject. In one way or other, they are ideas that remain with us in the music we hear every day in our lives.

We now turn our attention to some examples of music that represent some of these concepts, beginning with the duality of Music and Words, which is manifest in the musical genre known as the "art song" (often referred to by its German plural term, "Lieder."

We all know many kinds of song; folk songs, work songs, popular songs of various kinds. The thing that distinguishes those types of song from art song is that an art song should begin with a text that first stands on its own literary merit. Unlike today, in the 19th century many people bought and read collections of poetry - read and re-read it in their spare time - and committed their favorite poems to memory. Composers such as Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms and many others took these poems and set them to music for voice, often in a dramatic fashion.

An art song will have three characteristics that separate it from most other kinds of songs: 1) its text already had a life of its own as poetry; 2) the accompaniment is specified by the composer, not left to the improvisation of performers; and 3) the accompaniment is collaborative in that it supports the text, perhaps in a pictorial manner.

In a moment we will hear performed a song by Franz Schubert, who wrote over 600 art songs in his brief life of 31 years. The song is entitled Gretchen am Spinnrade or Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel.

Written when the composer was merely 17 years of age, its text is drawn from Goethe’s Faust. Gretchen is doing a common household task of the time - spinning thread, but her thoughts are on Faust. You will hear a whirling figure in the piano accompaniment that represents the spinning wheel, but also reflects Gretchen’s agitated mind. The accompaniment figure whirls continually, but stops at one point when she recalls "his kiss," and then gradually resumes as she restarts the spinning wheel.

As you listen to the performance I am going to attempt to provide you with an English translation of the German text. You will notice the song begins in an agitated sound of the minor key (D Minor) and then for variety the composer moves through a contrasting section of modulations. In the second modulation, where the singer reflects on the physical appearance of her lover, the music settles momentarily in the relaxing key of F Major before it grows in passion until it stops ("his kiss"). When the spinning wheel resumes we return to the original key of D Minor. The piece ends with a fragment of the refrain - as if left unfinished.

Soprano Peggy Sears and pianist Bonnie Farrer will now present Schubert’s "Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel".

Next we turn to a musical example of Nationalism - Frederic Chopin’s: Étude (Study), Op. 10, No. 12 in C Minor, "Revolutionary."

If I juxtapose a painting of Chopin by Eugéne Delacroix with a photograph of Chopin, one may see how the Romantic view of an individual may be at odds with reality. First the painting with its sense of mystique and distance - as the subject is looking past us into the future - and then the photo of Chopin (which, by the way, may be the earliest photograph of a famous musician). We see the stark reality of an individual in ill health, staring at us as if we have no right to be looking at him.

Frederic Chopin’s: Étude (Study), Op. 10, No. 12 in C Minor, "Revolutionary." "A revolutionary music manifesto written in Vienna at age 22. Inspired by an uprising in 1830 by Polish Nationalists against Russian rulers, it embodies techniques possible with the newer pianos, as well as the spirit of revolutionary Poland.

Note the combination of keyboard figurations, lyrical melody, and dynamic contrasts. It is subjective music in that it allows for interpretation of the performer."

[Performance - soloist, Grace Liu]

Chopin was a virtuoso pianist, but not the touring kind such as Franz Liszt. He tended to perform for smaller audiences in private circumstances. When someone offered to sponsor him on tour, Chopin shunned the lucrative life of the touring soloist. He said "I’m a revolutionary, money means nothing to me." - Chopin (1832)

The popularity of the piano led to the creation of a new musical genre: the character piece: a short, programmatic work, usually for piano, and with a descriptive title. Romance, op. 28, No. 2 (1837) by Robert Schumann.

"Compared to the Chopin "Revolutionary Study," Schumann’s Romance is a more personal, reflective and meditative work. The term "Romance" here simply implies an intimate or poetic mood, as in a ballad."

Soloist: Ashley Haymond

 

The great piano virtuoso of the 19th century, and one by whom all piano technique ever since has been measured, was Franz Liszt. Liszt elevated piano technique to a level beyond which it has not transcended since his death in 1886.

Liszt: "Dance of the Gnomes." One of two "concert études" from 1863, it is a work of great velocity and technique. It alternates between two themes: "Presto scherzando" in F-sharp minor and "Un poco più animato." Listen for the progressive changes in tempo and the successive interchanges of these sections.

[Soloist: Bonnie Farrer]

Now we turn our attention to some fundamentals of music itself.

 

Most all music is comprised of melody, rhythm, harmony, texture, form and timbre or tone color. Let’s quickly take a look at them, one at a time, and make some comparisons with them in the Romantic Era compared with the previous period, the Classic Era.

MELODY = a series of consecutive pitches that our minds tend to group in phrases. (Informal - the part you might whistle or hum.)

 

Here are two brief examples of melody: first, the balanced, predictable, symmetrical phrases of the Classic tradition drawn from Mozart’s familiar Symphony No. 40 in G-minor. Notice it comes to rest in about 20 seconds.

[recorded example]

Melody in the Romantic Era, however, will be much more expansive, have a much wider range of notes, and contain some chromatic pitches for added color. Here is the opening of Wagner’s Prelude to his opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, which will take over a minute to settle down.

[recorded example]

As you know, melodies often reoccur in music and in the Romantic Era that idea takes on two forms - the Leitmotive and the Idée Fixe. Two composers to remember in this regard are Richard Wagner for the leitmotive and Hector Berlioz for the Idée fixe.

Here is a melody from Wagner’s opera The Valkyrie, the second of the four operas in his great ring cycle. Listen for the melody as played in the brass, below all the energetic figures in the strings and woodwinds:

[recorded example]

After having heard that melody numerous times, a couple of hours later a revised version of the melody reappears in slower, longer notes (still in the brass instruments) which emphasize its importance in that point of the story.

[recorded example]

Berlioz, in his Fantastic Symphony, uses a melody to represent his beloved in each of the five movements of his symphony. Here are five versions of the same tune. It is a beatiful melody, as befits the loveliness of his beloved. He serves up about four minutes before he lets us hear it, but this is the way it is heard first in the opening movement:

[recorded example]

In the second movement, entitled "A Ball," he sees his beloved in the distance at an elegant ball, and her tune assume the character of a graceful waltz:

[recorded example]

After the romance has soured he seeks solace in the solitude of the countryside, but his memories are challenged by unpleasantness:

[recorded example]

Now we come to the fourth movement, the March to the Scaffold with which you should be familiar. He has killed his lover, is being marched to his execution at the guillotine. We find him with his head in the block and the blade poised ready to drop. His last thought is of her, and her tune is heard in the solo clarinet. But the tune is incomplete because the orchestral slam cuts it short as the blade falls, severing his head from his shoulders. Here is that incomplete idée fixe:

[recorded example]

The final appearance is in the fifth and final movement - the Dream of a Witches Sabbath - where she appears, but she is no longer beautiful. She has become a gnarled old hag - a witch. Berlioz presents the melody, again in solo clarinet, but with many trills added, as if they are warts on an ugly face. Here is the idée fixe from the last movement:

[recorded example]

Now an example of rhythm - the organization of time in music. Rhythm may be subdivided in the beat - the basic rhythmic pulse in music, and meter - recurring patters of emphasized and unemphasized beats.

The biggest change in rhythm between the Classic and Romantic eras had to do with its added flexibility in Romantic music. Most of the music you hear today hits one basic rhythmic groove and tends to stay there. Romantic music, however, often has many subtle nuances of rhythm which allowed for speeding up, slowing down, and various other fine changes in rhythm.

Here are two examples of piano music, one Classic the other Romantic. Note how the music of Mozart is rhythmically rigid and almost mechanical:

[recorded example]

An example by Chopin, however, demonstrates the built-in flexibility of rhythm in the Romantic Era:

[recorded example]

Harmony - "The progression of chords which acts in support of the melody." Melody is usually in the foreground, while harmony stays behind or beneath the melody and fleshes out the fullness of sound. Often referred to as "the vertical aspect of music."

Once again contrasting Mozart and Chopin, here are two brief examples, again of music for piano. The harmony of the Mozart example is untroubled, agreeable and lovely:

[recorded example

But by contrast, the Chopin Nocturne contains harmonies that are moody and tense. Chopin sets up a minor key harmony in the introduction, then notice how the first note of the melody unexpectedly clashes with the harmony below it:

[recorded example

Romantic era harmony often contained surprises and was important in setting moods.

Texture - music has texture that is described as the general pattern of sound created by the melody, harmony and other sounds.

Here are four kinds of musical texture drawn from the examples on your music CD: 1) monophony - single line music

[recorded example]

2) homophony - melody and accompaniment; the most common kind of texture we hear. A single melody is in the foreground with the harmony in the accompaniment.

[recorded example]

3) polyphony - when multiple melodic lines are heard simultaneously. Cascades of melody [recorded example]

4) and homorhythmic or "chordal" texture, when all parts move in even rhythm.

[recorded example]

Music has structure or form. It takes the length of time a piece of music lasts to judge its form, and obviously time does not allow here to do so.

But you may look up strophic form (in vocal music, the repetition of music for various verses of text - Anvil Chorus and Toreador Song);

Through-composed form where the music continues without repetition of sections (Night on Bald Mountain or Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra);

Sonata form - a continuation from the Classic Era utilizing Exposition/Development/and Recapitulation (Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Brahms and Tchaikovsky all utilized Sonata form.

Variations - where a theme is presented and then systematically changed but is still recognizable. Most classically oriented composers wrote variations (Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Brahms.)

Timbre has to do with the unique qualities of sound that distinguish one instrument or voice from another. The orchestra of the Romantic era was much larger and contained a greater variety of instruments than its Classic counterpart. The string instruments did not change perceptibly, there their numbers increased. Where in a Mozart symphony there might be required only about two dozen string instruments, in a symphony by Mahler there could be twice that many strings. But the winds and percussion sections grew exponentially in the 19th century, adding a whole new pallate of color to the sounds.

HERE NOW ARE SOME WARM-UP QUESTIONS:

(Answers given below)

1. Name the appropriate country associated with each of the following composers: Sibelius; Borodin; Grieg; Verdi; Dvorák; MacDowell; Rimsky-Korsakov; Chopin.

2. Who am I?

I am credited with being the first to use the term "Romantic" in connection with a developing arts movement. (Jean-Paul Richter; E. T. A. Hoffmann; Jean Jacques Rousseau; Friedrich Nietzsche; Johann Wolfgang Goethe)

3. One of pre-cursors of Romanticism, my best-seller (1762) was The Social Contract, but I also wrote an early music dictionary. I pushed the idea of Nature as a state of inner consciousness and also that of the "Noble Savage." (Jean-Paul Richter; E. T. A. Hoffmann; Jean Jacques Rousseau; Friedrich Nietzsche; Johann Wolfgang Goethe)

4. Though I never played an instrument in public, in 1843 I wrote my Treatise on Instrumentation and Modern Orchestration, - the most important such treatise to that time. (Wagner; Berlioz; Beethoven; Chopin; Liszt)

5. When I heard Napoleon had crowned himself emperor, I shouted "He’s a tyrant like all the rest!" and angrily scratched his name from the dedication page of my third symphony. (Wagner; Berlioz; Beethoven; Chopin; Liszt)

6. An ardent musical nationalist in my homeland, I came to the United States in 1892 and urged American composers to create a school of composition drawing upon the traditions of African Americans and Native Americans. (Dvorák; MacDowell; Grieg; Sibelius; Tchaikovsky; )

7. While acquainted with the composers called "The Mighty Five," I was not part of their circle. Though much of my music too honors my native Russia, it is also connected with European styles. I died after intentionally drinking tainted water during a cholera epidemic. (Borodin; Tchaikovsky; Glinka; Rimsky-Korsakov; Balakirev)

8. The musical instrument that gained dominance among Romantic composers was the (violin; guitar; piano; trumpet; harp)

9. The symphony in five movements with titles reflecting feelings inspired by nature is the ("Pastorale Symphony" "Italian Symphony" "Fantastic Symphony" "William Tell Symphony" "Symphony in C-minor")

ANSWERS:
  1. Sibelius (Finland); Borodin (Russia) Grieg (Norway); Verdi (Italy); Dvorák (Bohemia); MacDowell (U. S.); Rimsky-Korsakov (Russia); Chopin (Poland).
  2. Jean-Paul Richter;
  3. Jean Jacques Rousseau;
  4. Berlioz;
  5. Beethoven;
  6. Dvorák;
  7. Tchaikovsky;
  8. piano;
  9. "Pastorale Symphony"

GOOD LUCK TO ALL DECATHLETES!
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