Should I post here? How does Unsung Composers define "romantic music"?

Started by Mark Thomas, Monday 13 August 2012, 17:48

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Mark Thomas

Unsung Composers is "for the open-minded lover of music from the romantic era". Our members are interested in the music and lives of nowadays less well known composers writing in the "romantic" style and also in the unsung works of the great romantic composers.

A necessarily loose definition of romantic music:
The new Grove Dictionary takes 5200 words to describe Romanticism in music without being able to define it and yet, generally speaking, we know it when we hear it: it's music written by the likes of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Wagner, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, Mahler and Bruckner to name some of its most famous exponents.  Traditional time frames for music's "romantic era" have it beginning with Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony (1808) and ending with Stravinsky's Sacre du printemps (1913) or, alternatively, lasting from the end of the Napoleonic wars to the end of the First World War (1815-1918). But it's not as simple as that: some composers who are arguably "romantic" flourished outside those time frames: Beethoven and Schubert before the start and Elgar and Rachmaninov after its close for example. Some composers did not actively compose until well after the traditional period and yet wrote, and still write, in a recognisably romantic idiom: examples being Marx, Korngold, Atterberg, Furtwängler, many composers of film music and, until his death in 2013, Schmidt-Kowalski. The romantic idiom itself changed hugely from the early post-classical romanticism of Mendelssohn, say, to the very late-romanticism of Mahler, via the revolutionary innovations of Wagner and Liszt. Overall, though, music of the romantic era still shares recognisable attributes: the restrained employment (if at all) of dissonance, a reliance on 19th century models of harmony and construction and the fundamental importance of melody. Mere tonality, without strong elements of these other characteristics, does not qualify music as being romantic in style.

The focus of UC has now shifted to being solely about romantic music but previous posts about music in later styles have not been deleted, so do not rely on the fact that a composer or piece of music has been discussed previously as an indication of eligibility now.  Please do not post about composers or compositions which clearly fall outside our definition of "romantic". Your post will not be approved. If you are in any doubt, and in any event if the music was written after 1918, please email or PM a moderator before posting.

To preserve the knowledge which they contain, the forum's Archive boards have many posts about 20th century composers and music in particular which would not now fall within the focus of Unsung Composers.