Teaching music appreciation this past semester, I was constantly in search for language that could speak music to non-musicians. The textbook spent a couple of chapters on musical terms ranging from pianissimo to presto, tonic to sonata. And while some of those words might be necessary, we spent way too much time for the amount the students actually absorbed. I still got a lot of papers saying things like "I felt that this piece had a lot of chord progression."
When we got to the Romantic period, I searched for language that could describe the difference between the Romantic and the Classical eras. I explained that both use the tonal language and so contain an inherent drama. (The tonal system--tonality--establishes one key as the "home key" and then spends the rest of the time going away from and back to that key to create tension and release.) Because of this, both can be heard as containing narrative, but the difference is in the way the story is told. Classical music is a story told from the outside by an omniscient narrator, while Romantic music has a more first-person perspective. The former, we would assume, would tell the story more objectively since it is not involved in the action; the latter perspective, we often forget, is distorted by the close proximity of the narrator to the action.
This fits with each aesthetic. The Classical Era in music, coming at the tail end of the Enlightenment, was based on a preference for reason over emotion, objectivity over subjectivity. The great thinkers of the time--Locke, Rousseau, Montesquieu--envisioned governments and societies set up according to rationalist principles. (We can still hope, right?) The Romantic Era, however, inheriting these very societal advances, saw the rise of the individual. Whereas, using rational methods, we should arrive at the same answer, in our emotional lives, we are unique.
I think this duality, this continuum, can be applied to other periods of music. Stravinsky certainly wrote objective music, even calling his output "objects":
"My Octet is a musical object. This object has a form and that form is influenced by the musical matter with which it is composed....My Octet is not an 'emotive' work but a musical work based on objective elements which are sufficient in themselves." (more)
Other composers of the twentieth century are more subjective, more expressive. John Adams, for one, has called himself a "neo-Romantic," having grown out of the "classic" minimalism of Glass and Reich.
Ultimately, this is just another way of categorizing composers and their music. Instead of thinking chronologically, it may prove interesting or helpful to group music along the subjective-objective continuum based on various mixtures of intellect and emotion. Ideally, then, it would help listeners draw connections between, say, a Haydn symphony and a Webern opus or a Gesualdo madrigal and a Liszt etude. I have my hunches as to where I fall on this continuum, but I'll leave that to you.
On a side note, I've been ensconced in simplicity at a cottage in Michigan the whole week. I plan on doing this every week during the winter, coming back to Chicago on the weekends. I started another blog to detail the more mundane aspects of my life up here.
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