Frederick Chopin (1810-1849) was a Romantic composer of Polish nationality. The individuals of Haydn and Mozart’s time thought Bach was old fashioned and boring with all those fugues and things. And they wished something new – not so difficult – with pretty tunes and easy accompaniments, music that was elegant and refined and nice. And this was right in line with the occasions; it was a time of class and refinement, good manners, correct etiquette; it was a time of lace cuffs and silk fits and powdered wigs and jewelled fans for the lades and gents of the courtroom. So out came beautiful, elegant music for them through which the primary thing was the tune. The tune needed to be good. Now take heed to this marvelous tune from a piano concerto by Mozart. Notice there isn’t any Erector set right here; only the gorgeous melody, with a simple little accompaniment beneath. Easy, but oh how lovely.
One additional distinction between romantic music and impressionism was the musical forms employed. Whereas romantic music sees long form musical constructions such because the symphony and the concerto broadly used impressionism employed short kind buildings such because the prelude and nocturne.
To avoid changing into overly entangled in music concept, my superb music historical past would describe works, composers and durations by way of three general ideas: time, tonality, and timbre. This piece was by no means published throughout Beethoven ‘s lifetime and it wasn’t even found till forty years after his dying.
As such, music throughout this period moved away from the ornate nature of music before, as a substitute trying to find clarity. Typically, there would be just one melody, and this was performed with each instrument contributing its personal vary and voice to the piece as a whole.
Debussy was one of the most influential composers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and is regarded as the founder of musical impressionism. Reacting in opposition to the dominant influence of Germanic music with its logical rigours of kind and development, he sought a brand new music of colour, sensation, fleeting mood and relaxed type that will be distinctively French, in addition to distinctively his personal. He developed a extremely original system of harmony and musical structure and his music was perceived as sharing sure characteristics with the Impressionist painters. Hearken to ‘ Clair De Lune ‘, perhaps Debussy’s finest-liked piano piece, from Suite Bergamasque.
It was also a interval of fervent mental endeavor, political upheaval, and scientific and technological triumph. Private and court fortune replaced the church as patron of the arts, and some composers were really making careers as freelancers, beholden to no one. Across most of his life, Haydn was very almost an indentured servant. Beethoven would owefealty to no individual.
The music of the Austrian Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) grew farther and farther from nineteenth-century harmonic models, until he was writing music that has been referred to as “atonal,” meaning that, in a certain technical respect, no be aware in it’s extra central than any other. (Almost no music from Gregorian occasions by means of the nineteenth century had been atonal.) In the 1920’s, Schoenberg launched the “twelve-tone system,” a brand new method for organizing music without the need for a central word. Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, setting poems of Albert Giraud, dates from before his twelve-tone period. The poems transport Pierrot, the stock character of the Italian commedia del’arte, into alien, psychologically charged conditions. Pierrot Lunaire uses a method called Sprechstimme (“speech-sound”); it isn’t fairly spoken, not quite sung.