Musical historicism signifies the use in classical music of historical materials, structures, styles, techniques, media, conceptual content, etc., whether by a single composer or those associated with a particular school, movement, or period.
The term "historicism" has acquired various, sometimes confusing meanings over a wide range of disciplines. The British philosopher Karl Popper, who disliked modern music and strongly preferred the works of Bach, Mozart, and Schubert, spoke of "the failure of the historicist propaganda for the modern in music."[This quote needs a citation] He opposed the socioscientific doctrine of historicism that discoverable laws of historical change make it possible to predict future developments. Repudiating the claim that Schoenberg was "an inevitable historical force", Popper dismissed the idea of wishing to do work "ahead of its time" as "nothing but historicist propaganda" (Gopnik 2002).
When referring to the arts, however, the term "historicism" generally denotes something distinctly different from the historicism targeted by Popper's critique. It designates "a style (as in architecture) characterized by the use of traditional forms and elements" (Merriam-Webster 2003a), or a style or movement characterized by "regard for or preoccupation with the styles or values of the past", frequently used pejoratively (OED 2012). Modernism is, on the other hand, "a self-conscious break with the past and a search for new forms of expression" (Merriam-Webster 2003b). The two concepts come together in what is called "historicist modernism", represented compositionally by Max Reger and Ferruccio Busoni. It is neither nostalgic nor conservative, but rather attempts to bridge perceived historical gaps without denying, collapsing, or attempting to retreat over them to return to the past. In historicist modernism, "musical techniques from the remote past are used prominently and vigorously as a way of achieving a distance from late Romantic styles" (Frisch 2005, 139).
Whereas the historicism of the Ancient Airs and Dances for Lute (1917–31) by Ottorino Respighi is readily apparent to the ear, since the composer drew directly on the works of 16th- and 17th-century composers, the historicism informing the Music of Changes (1951) by John Cage, based on the ancient Chinese I Ching, is deeply embedded in the compositional process (Tomkins 1976, 111–12).
Many physicists, including Einstein, have maintained that the familiar division of time into past, present, and future is an illusion, from which it necessarily follows that "old" and "new" are terms as relative as "up" and "down" (Davies 2006, 9).[clarification needed]
History
17th century
By the second decade of the 17th century, the idea of cultivating the stile antico (as exemplified by the music of Palestrina) had become a conscious effort at historicism on the part of composers of the seconda pratica, or stile moderno. Francesco Soriano revived Palestrina's Missa Papae Marcelli (with "improvements") in 1609, and the next year Claudio Monteverdi, until then a staunch adherent of the stile moderno, composed his Missa in illo tempore, a parody mass based on a motet first published in 1538 by Nicolas Gombert. Monteverdi published his mass together with his Vespro della Beata Vergine, a sharply contrasting work of the seconda pratica(Atlas 2006, 119).
Creating new music that closely follows the style of an earlier composer or period has provided a creative outlet for both major and minor masters. Mozart, whose music was richly informed by his contact with the antiquarian music circle of Baron Gottfried van Swieten, exhibited a particular gift for the baroque style in such works as his Suite in C Major (sometimes subtitled "in the style of Handel"), KV 399 (385i), which includes an ouverture, allemande, and courante. (A fragmentary sarabande and Eine kleine Gigue, K. 574 also document his skill as an historicist composer.) In a letter to his father of 7 February 1778, he proudly states, "As you know, I can more or less adopt or imitate any kind and any style of composition" (Solomon 1995, 119).
A more eclectic approach to historicism in which multiple historical style influences are evident was adopted by Louis Spohr in his Symphony No. 6 in G Major, op. 116 ("Historical") "in the Style and Taste of Four Different Periods": 1. Bach-Handel'sche Periode, 1720, Largo – Grave; 2. Haydn-Mozart'sche Periode, 1780, Larghetto; 3. Beethoven'sche Periode, 1810, Scherzo; and 4. Allerneueste Periode ["very latest Period"], 1840, Allegro vivace. Though not characteristic of his later style, Sergei Prokofiev paid tribute not only to the "classicism" of Haydn but also to the baroque gavotte in his Symphony No. 1 in D Major, op. 25 ("Classical").[citation needed]
The Cecilian Movement, beginning formally with the founding of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Cäcilienverein in 1868 but conceptually reaching back to the Council of Trent (1545–63), had as its goal the restoration of traditional religious feeling and the authority of the Catholic Church. Emerging from the early stages of industrialization and the Romanticism of the late-18th and early 19th centuries, the Cecilian Movement grew out of a longing for simplicity and unworldliness, but also on an historicizing desire to return compositionally to models from the past, in particular the Renaissance masters of the 15th and 16th centuries. Palestrina was taken as the chief representative of this contrapuntal music of the stile antico, sung with little or no instrumental accompaniment, which was regarded as more suitable to church music than the more emotional style that had emerged during the 18th century (Gmeinwieser 2001).
The fusion of historical and emergent styles, forms, techniques, and content in a given work is encountered with great frequency in the music of most periods. The fugue, for example, whose origins can be traced to the imitative counterpoint of the late Middle Ages and which reached full maturity in the works of Johann Sebastian Bach, figures prominently in the musical styles of a number of important composers in the 19th century and beyond, including Beethoven, Mendelssohn (whose early works were modelled on symphonies of C. P. E. Bach), Reger (whose works for solo cello, viola or violin closely imitate Bachian forms), Shostakovich, and Hindemith.
A closely related instrumental genre that first appeared in the late Renaissance, the toccata achieved particular prominence in the keyboard works of Buxtehude and J.S. Bach and has since been revived by such distinguished composers as Schumann, Debussy, and Prokofiev.
In the 20th century Carl Orff attempted a revival of ancient Greek practices of musical theater (he also regularly contributed his own texts in Latin and Ancient Greek to his own musical works).
Contemporary music
In contemporary art music, the entire gamut of historical style periods has served as a creative resource.
Interest in musical historicism has been spurred by the emergence of such international organizations as the Delian Society, dedicated to the revitalization of tonal art music, and Vox Saeculorum, whose composer members have a specialized interest in baroque idioms (Colburn 2007).
In classical music, a fugue is a contrapuntal, polyphonic compositional technique in two or more voices, built on a subject that is introduced at the beginning in imitation, which recurs frequently throughout the course of the composition. It is not to be confused with a fuguing tune, which is a style of song popularized by and mostly limited to early American music and West Gallery music. A fugue usually has three main sections: an exposition, a development, and a final entry that contains the return of the subject in the fugue's tonic key. Fugues can also have episodes—parts of the fugue where new material is heard, based on the subject—a stretto, when the fugue's subject "overlaps" itself in different voices, or a recapitulation. A popular compositional technique in the Baroque era, the fugue was fundamental in showing mastery of harmony and tonality as it presented counterpoint.
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina was an Italian composer of late Renaissance music. The central representative of the Roman School, with Orlande de Lassus and Tomás Luis de Victoria, Palestrina is considered the leading composer of late 16th-century Europe.
Johann Georg Albrechtsberger was an Austrian composer, organist, and music theorist, and one of the teachers of Ludwig van Beethoven. He was also a friend of Haydn and Mozart.
Johannes Brahms was a German composer, pianist, and conductor of the mid-Romantic period. Born in Hamburg into a Lutheran family, he spent much of his professional life in Vienna. He is sometimes grouped with Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven as one of the "Three Bs" of music, a comment originally made by the nineteenth-century conductor Hans von Bülow.
Johann Baptist Joseph Maximilian Reger was a German composer, pianist, organist, conductor, and academic teacher. He worked as a concert pianist, a musical director at the Leipzig University Church, a professor at the Royal Conservatory in Leipzig, and a music director at the court of Duke Georg II of Saxe-Meiningen.
In music, a canon is a contrapuntal (counterpoint-based) compositional technique that employs a melody with one or more imitations of the melody played after a given duration. The initial melody is called the leader, while the imitative melody, which is played in a different voice, is called the follower. The follower must imitate the leader, either as an exact replication of its rhythms and intervals or some transformation thereof. Repeating canons in which all voices are musically identical are called rounds—familiar singalong versions of "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" and "Frère Jacques" that call for each successive group of voices to begin the same song a bar or two after the previous group began are popular examples.
Hermann Scherchen was a German conductor, who was principal conductor of the city orchestra of Winterthur from 1922 to 1950. He promoted contemporary music, beginning with Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, followed by works by Richard Strauss, Anton Webern, Alban Berg, Edgard Varèse, later Iannis Xenakis, Luigi Nono and Leon Schidlowsky. He usually conducted without using a baton.
In music, a chorale prelude or chorale setting is a short liturgical composition for organ using a chorale tune as its basis. It was a predominant style of the German Baroque era and reached its culmination in the works of J.S. Bach, who wrote 46 examples of the form in his Orgelbüchlein, along with multiple other works of the type in other collections.
A chorale cantata is a church cantata based on a chorale—in this context a Lutheran chorale. It is principally from the German Baroque era. The organizing principle is the words and music of a Lutheran hymn. Usually a chorale cantata includes multiple movements or parts. Most chorale cantatas were written between approximately 1650 and 1750. By far the most famous are by Johann Sebastian Bach, especially the cantatas composed in his second annual cycle of cantatas, started in Leipzig in 1724.
The organ repertoire is considered to be the largest and oldest repertory of all musical instruments. Because of the organ's prominence in worship in Western Europe from the Middle Ages on, a significant portion of organ repertoire is sacred in nature. The organ's suitability for improvisation by a single performer is well adapted to this liturgical role and has allowed many blind organists to achieve fame; it also accounts for the relatively late emergence of written compositions for the instrument in the Renaissance. Although instruments are still disallowed in most Eastern churches, organs have found their way into a few synagogues as well as secular venues where organ recitals take place.
Johann Sebastian Bach was a German composer and musician of the late Baroque period. He is known for his prolific authorship of music across a variety of instruments and forms, including; orchestral music such as the Brandenburg Concertos; solo instrumental works such as the cello suites and sonatas and partitas for solo violin; keyboard works such as the Goldberg Variations and The Well-Tempered Clavier; organ works such as the Schubler Chorales and the Toccata and Fugue in D minor; and choral works such as the St Matthew Passion and the Mass in B minor. Since the 19th-century Bach Revival, he has been generally regarded as one of the greatest composers in the history of Western music.
Prelude and Fugue in A minor, BWV 543 is a piece of organ music written by Johann Sebastian Bach sometime around his years as court organist to the Duke of Saxe-Weimar (1708–1713).
In music a voluntary is a piece of music, usually for an organ, that is played as part of a church service. In English-speaking countries, the music played before and after the service is often called a 'voluntary', whether or not it is so titled.
The Great Eighteen Chorale Preludes, BWV 651–668, are a set of chorale preludes for organ prepared by Johann Sebastian Bach in Leipzig in his final decade (1740–1750), from earlier works composed in Weimar, where he was court organist. The works form an encyclopedic collection of large-scale chorale preludes, in a variety of styles harking back to the previous century, that Bach gradually perfected during his career. Together with the Orgelbüchlein, the Schübler Chorales, the third book of the Clavier-Übung and the Canonic Variations, they represent the summit of Bach's sacred music for solo organ.
A melodic line that is the reverse of a previously or simultaneously stated line is said to be its retrograde or cancrizans. An exact retrograde includes both the pitches and rhythms in reverse. An even more exact retrograde reverses the physical contour of the notes themselves, though this is possible only in electronic music. Some composers choose to subject just the pitches of a musical line to retrograde, or just the rhythms. In twelve-tone music, reversal of the pitch classes alone—regardless of the melodic contour created by their registral placement—is regarded as a retrograde.
The Clavier-Übung III, sometimes referred to as the German Organ Mass, is a collection of compositions for organ by Johann Sebastian Bach, started in 1735–36 and published in 1739. It is considered Bach's most significant and extensive work for organ, containing some of his most musically complex and technically demanding compositions for that instrument.
Carl Weinrich was an American organist, choral conductor, and teacher. He was particularly known for his recitals and recordings of Bach's organ music and as a leader in the revival of Baroque organ music in the United States during the 1930s.
A chorale is the name of several related musical forms originating in the music genre of the Lutheran chorale:
Throughout the 18th century, the appreciation of Johann Sebastian Bach's music was mostly limited to distinguished connoisseurs. The 19th century started with publication of the first biography of the composer and ended with the completion of the publication of all of Bach's known works by the Bach Gesellschaft. A Bach Revival had started from Mendelssohn's performance of the St Matthew Passion in 1829. Soon after that performance, Bach started to become regarded as one of the greatest composers of all times, if not the greatest, a reputation he has retained ever since. A new extensive Bach biography was published in the second half of the 19th century.
References
Atlas, Allan W. 2006. "Music for the Mass". In European Music, 1520–1640, edited by James Haar, 101–29. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music 5. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press. ISBN978-1-84383-200-3 (cloth); ISBN978-1-84383-894-4 (pbk).
Cherlin, Michael. 2007. Schoenberg’s Musical Imagination. Music in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN978-1-1394-6389-8.
Colburn, Grant. 2007. "A New Baroque Revival."Early Music America 13, no. 2 (Summer): 36–45, 54–55.
Davies, Peter. 2006. "That Mysterious Flow." Scientific American, 16, no. 1, special edition: 6–11. Reprinted from Scientific American 287, no. 3 (special issue: "A Matter of Time"): 40–44, 46–47.
Frisch, Walter. 2005. German Modernism: Music and the Arts. California Studies in 20th-Century Music. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press. ISBN978-0-520-25148-9.
Hailey, Christopher. 1997. "Schoenberg and the Canon". In Constructive Dissonance: Arnold Schoenberg and the Transformations of Twentieth-century Culture, edited by Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey, 163–78. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press. ISBN978-0-520-20314-3.
Oxford English Dictionary. 2012. "Historicism, n.2". Oxford English Dictionary, third edition. Oxford University Press (online) (subscription required).
Smith, Douglas Alton. 2002. "Hoax or Art" Lute Society of America Quarterly, (February): 4.
Solomon, Maynard. 1995. Mozart: a Life. New York: Harper Collins.
Tomkins, Calvin. 1976. The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-Garde, expanded edition. New York: Penguin Books.
Further reading
Applegate, Celia. 2005. Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohn's Revival of the St. Matthew Passion. Cornell University Press.
Böggemann, Markus. 2007. Gesichte und Geschichte: Arnold Schönbergs musikalischer Expressionismus zwischen avant-gardistischer Kunstprogrammatik und Historismusproblem. Vienna: Lafite.
Bryn-Julson, Phyllis, and Paul Mathews. 2008. Inside Pierrot Lunaire: Performing the Sprechstimme in Schoenberg's Masterpiece. Lanham and Plymouth: Scarecrow Press. ISBN978-0-8108-6205-0 (pbk); ISBN978-0-8108-6225-8 (ebook).
Carl, Robert. 2001. "Introduction: Historicism in American Music since 1980". Contemporary Music Review 20, no. 4:1–7.
Cox, Frank. 2004. "Musical Progress? New Music and Perils of Progressivist Historicism". In The Foundations of Contemporary Composing, edited by Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, Frank Cox, and Wolfram Schurig, 11–34. Hofheim: Wolke Verlag. ISBN9783936000146.
Dahlhaus, Carl. 1983. Foundations of Music History, translated by J. Bradford Robinson. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Dahlhaus, Carl. 1989. Nineteenth-Century Music, translated by J. Bradford Robinson. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press. ISBN978-0-520-07644-0.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 1965. "Quotation and Originality." The Portable Emerson, edited and with an introduction by Mark Van Doren. New York: The Viking Press.
Gardiner, Patrick L. 1995. "Historicism." The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Garratt, James. 2002. Palestrina and the German Romantic Imagination: Interpreting Historicism in Nineteenth-Century Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Garratt, James. 2004. "Mendelssohn and the Rise of Musical Historicism." The Cambridge Companion to Mendelssohn, edited by Peter Mercer-Taylor, 55–70. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Grout, Donald J., and Claude V. Palisca. 1996. A History of Western Music, fifth edition. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.
Headlam, David John. 1996. The Music of Alban Berg. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. ISBN0-300-06400-4.
"Lament." 1975. Harvard Dictionary of Music, second edition, revised and enlarged. [full citation needed].
Lenz, Eric David. 2002. "Neoclassicism in Claude Debussy's Sonate pour violoncelle et piano." DMA diss., University of Alabama.
Lippman, Edward. 1994. A History of Western Musical Aesthetics. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press.
MacKenzie, James C. 1995. The Text of Time: Musical Quotation and Historicism in Berio's Sinfonia. Ottawa: National Library of Canada (Bibliothèque nationale du Canada).
Mahnkopf, Claus-Steffen. 2004. The Foundations of Contemporary Composition. Hofheim: Wolke.
Mercer-Taylor, Peter. 2004. The Cambridge Companion to Mendelssohn. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Mihailovic, Alexander. 1999. Tchaikovsky and His Contemporaries: A Centennial Symposium. Westport, Connectivut: Greenwood Press.
Reese, Gustave. 1959. Music in the Renaissance. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.
Reese, Gustave. 1968. Music in the Middle Ages. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.
Roth, Michael S. 1994. Rediscovering History: Culture, Politics, and the Psyche. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Sachs, Klaus-Jürgen, and Carl Dahlhaus. 2001. "Counterpoint". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan Publishers.
Saffle, Michael, and Rossana Dalmonte. 2003. Liszt and the Birth of Modern Europe: Music as a Mirror of Religious, Political, Cultural, and Aesthetic Transformations. Proceedings of the International Conference held at the Villa Serbelloni, Bellagio (Como), 14–18 December 1998. Hillsdale, New York: Pendragon Press.
Toews, John Edward. 2004. Becoming Historical: Cultural Reformation and Public Memory in Early Nineteenth-century Berlin. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Trachtenberg, Marvin, and Isabelle Hyman. 1986. Architecture from Prehistory to Post-Modernism: The Western Tradition. New York: Harry N. Abrams.
Watkins, Glenn. 1994. Pyramids at the Louvre: Music, Culture, and Collage from Stravinsky to the Postmodernists. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Weaver, Robert Lamar, Norma Wright Weaver, Susan Helen Parisi, Ernest Charles Harriss, and Calvin M. Bower. 2000. Music in the Theater, Church, and Villa: Essays in Honor of Robert Lamar Weaver and Norma Wright Weaver. Warren, Michigan: Harmonie Park Press.
Wiora, Walter (ed.) 1969. Die Ausbreitung des Historismus über die Musik: Aufsätze und Diskussionen. Studien zur Musikgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts 14. Regensburg: G. Bosse Verlag.
Wolff, Christoph. 2004. "A Bach Cult in Late-Eighteenth-Century Berlin: Sara Levy's Musical Salon." 1886th Stated Meeting. American Academy of Arts and Sciences. House of the Academy, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 15 December.
Zon, Bennett. 1999. Nineteenth-century British Music Studies. Aldershot [Hampshire]; Brookfield [Vermont]: Ashgate.
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