Changes in Music – From Classical to Romantic

By Orion Music and Arts, Cambridge MA, 2023-2024

Copyright, ©, Orion Music and Arts MA 2023-2024, 

All Rights Reserved

Philosophy, Music, and Form

As the music historian Barbara Hanning has written, one important change that occurred in the transition between Classical to Romantic music was a sense of organicity or the organism in the latter.

This sense of organicity in music can be directly traced to the writings the German philosopher Goethe.

It was Goethe who argued, as Hanning writes, that artists should shape their works in way that allowed all their parts to be ‘united’ as if being ‘derive[d] from a common source’ the way ‘plants’ did, even as they metamorphosed from seed to seeding.

The emphasis, here, is not only on that of a greater part to whole relation, but the integrity of each part for the whole, and as a unity (402). 

Historically, this relationship can be realized in musical performance of German Romantic music in a number of ways – a unity that belies variety, for instance, and the sense in which part of a musical whole may fit together more singularly than one might imagine, or might perhaps assume of a work that was not Romantic and not conceived of along the lines that Goethe advanced.

FURTHER INFORMATION

For more educational material on the subject, violin lessons, violin accompaniment, or anything in between, please feel free to reach us using the contact form or at violinpedagogies@yahoo.com, a teaching artistry service by Orion Music and Arts, Cambridge MA

By Orion Music and Arts, Cambridge MA, 2023-2024

Copyright, ©, Orion Music and Arts MA 2023-2024, 

All Rights Reserved

For Purchase

If you would like to purchase a short guide, here recommended, to the work of Goethe, please click this link here – we recommend Oxford University Press’s A Short Introduction to Goethe.

If you would like to purchase a history of Western classical music by Barbara Hanning, please click this link here.