Although actually, the movement started essentially by Beethoven, the musical Romantic movement (which runs more or less parallel in both time and intent to the Romantic movement in poetry) was anti-Classical, in that the classical forms of Mozart, Haydn etc had deteriorated into more or less mindless formalism devoid of emotion. Actually, Romanticism was a radical shift away from the earlier movements in music, and runs basically from Beethoven through maybe Wagner and Bruckner, after which it itself began to stagnate and become somewhat syrupy and repetitive (Rachmaninoff etc.). Accordingly it produced an anti-Romantic and anti-Classical movement of the "modernists" (Stravinsky, Hindemith, Schoenberg, Messaien etc.), who are much more at home with non-12-tone scales.
I'm afraid I have a tendency to be rather Eurocentric in my views of music. In both Indonesia and Thailand I have sat through hours of gamelan concerts, had the various subtleties explained to me at length, and I'm afraid I just don't bite. In Western art, the development is basically dialectical in that most major "schools" or "movements" which develop are largely reactions to the ossification of the previous "school" or movement. This is not the case to such an extreme extent elsewhere.
As to Father Terrence, I have still not determined just how on the one hand irrational thought is not acceptable, yet a work of art which basically appeals to the irrational in the self (Wagner's Ring des Nibelungen is a good example) and which may even drive one to irrational impulse is okay. Perhaps if I ruminate upon a boulder somewhere it will all come to me. |
