So this is probably a highly misleading title, but it's happened again. Somebody didn't know what the fuck romantic music was about. I've had enough. I'm explaining this to the world. Ok, TL. Ok, the people who compulsively read blogs. Ok, the ones of them who haven't stopped reading by now.
Dammit, baby steps.
Right, you boys and girls listen up because this shit is important. People these days like to sniff at classical music. They prefer creativity and vision and expression over complexity. Smart kids. Good thoughts. But then they don't know what romantic music was, or is and I have to get out the axe. Classical music as is generally understood is actually divided into periods. The actual 'classical' period was fairly short, bounded on one end by the baroque (bach and co) and on the other by the romantic period.
Romantic music was a period where all these crazy skilled, stressed out and often drug addled composers that went through classical boot camp decided enough was enough with the rules and basically went teenager on everyone. The landscape shifted from mathematical precision to gut instinct and spur of the moment flair. If classical music is the perfectly executed timing push, Romantic music is the game where nobody tops 80 supply and the game ends with a 10 supply elimination race after fourty minutes of nonstop scrapping. Romantic music is what happens when you take broodwar pros and put them in an SC2 game against each other with no prior experience. Incredible skill, intuitive understanding of mechanics and absolutely not a single fuck given about how win is accomplished.
Classical music was about purity, clarity, order, the refinement of an abstract ideal.
Romantic music was about Fear and Anger,
About Madness and Suicide
About Joy and Majesty (the conductor in this one is hilarious)
About Awe and Turmoil:
About Pride and Strength:
About wild parties and serious hangovers:
About Fate and Fortune
And sometimes just about fuck yeah bitches look at me goooooooo! Haters gon hate!
Romantic music formed the foundations of hollywood classicism that's scored so many of the great films of the last twenty years, it was a foundational element of disney's cartooning career (pretty much all the music in fantasia is romantic), it shaped national consciousness and basically developed how we set the modern world to music, equating sounds with emotion as vibrantly as we do.
So get to know the romantics. You probably already know a bunch of them, but you don't know you know, because people constantly steal romantic work to re-appropriate for other purposes. They were the rockstars of the 1800's, and they wrote their own friggin music.
Any thread that expands people's (typically crappy) musical horizons deserves a 5/5.
I used to love classical music, but it was hard for me to find GOOD classical music. I would wade through 20 crappy random downloads before I found something I liked. I will listen to these for sure OP.
Great selections overall. The Planets is one of my overall favorite pieces. I am personally a huge Mozart fan. After listening to something like the Requiem, there is no better piece to me that signifies death and mourning. EDIT: but overall, I am more a fan of the Baroque and Classical periods than the Romance.
I lived in LA for a few years, the main classical station down there (K-mozart) turned me off in a big way. The music was oh-so trite and superficial in my opinion. Everything was so neat and nifty and clever and--utterly dull and passionless. Moved back to seattle last year, KING fm (98.1) is SO MUCH BETTER OMG. Now thanks to this post I know a bit more about why I prefer it so much--I think king fm plays more romantic music.
For reference, I love chopin, debussy, phil glass, rachmaninoff, and the like. Can't really stand mozart, and not much of a fan of most stuff by handel or that baroque era. Bach being the only exception.
Thanks for the post, was only familar with like 3 of these songs before. I especially liked danse macabre, which was new to me ^_^
edit - @amazombie, I was surprised to see holst in this lineup actually haha. I can tell we have polar opposite taste in classical music, but I'm wondering... Is the planets really a romantic piece even? I of course have no idea...
On July 22 2011 17:47 aidnai wrote: wtf @ alien pictures in copland's fanfare 0_0
I lived in LA for a few years, the main classical station down there (K-mozart) turned me off in a big way. The music was oh-so trite and superficial in my opinion. Everything was so neat and nifty and clever and--utterly dull and passionless. Moved back to seattle last year, KING fm (98.1) is SO MUCH BETTER OMG. Now thanks to this post I know a bit more about why I prefer it so much--I think king fm plays more romantic music.
For reference, I love chopin, debussy, phil glass, rachmaninoff, and the like. Can't really stand mozart, and not much of a fan of most stuff by handel or that baroque era. Bach being the only exception.
Thanks for the post, was only familar with like 3 of these songs before. I especially liked danse macabre, which was new to me ^_^
edit - @amazombie, I was surprised to see holst in this lineup actually haha. I can tell we have polar opposite taste in classical music, but I'm wondering... Is the planets really a romantic piece even? I of course have no idea...
Yeah, most definitely. The main attribute of the Romance period was not just the dates of the music, but the style and in the style of Romance it is like musical-painting. Where Baroque was more based on melodies, Classical added more countermelodies, counterpoint, and harmonics into the picture, romance focused more on using the music to not just convey emotion, but an overall picture or series of pictures. Think of "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun" by Debussy or "La Mer" even and how he attempts to use the music to convey a morning instead of just a simlpe melody or a simple emotion.
yes, most definitely. It's considered one of the great romantic suites alongside the pastoral symphony, pyr gynt, symphony fantastique, the rite of spring and pictures at an exhibition. The evocation of themes throughout the suite is masterful and the dynamism and tonal variation is absolutely iconic of the romantic style. I mean, the jupiter segment I used, the composer is literally in tears during the anthemic bit. I get the same way to be honest, it's such an incredible theme and the tone is so beautifully crafted to lift in pitch and volume, it straightens your back and lifts your mood so powerfully.
You're definitely a romantically minded person from what you said. Certainly check out all of the above if you haven't already. I come to it from the exact same angle as you, I hated classical because it was so clean and concise and.. .well, bland. I guess I didn't hate it, it just seemed so expressionless compared to music like the starwars themes, say, or the lord of the rings soundtrack. No story, no evocation, no oomph. But, when I was a kid my parents got me this set of cassettes that had a story on one side set to some music, and the straight music on the other side. most of it was romantic (with a few modern ones like rhapsody in blue) and it got me hooked so hard.
@Amazonzombie: sad to hear it . I don't mind some of the really big names of classical, stuff like mozart's the magic flute or swan lake, but even there it's the more evocative, image oriented classical music. And baroque was just, well, crazy. Some harpsichord stuff is awesome, and a lot of awesome choral music comes out of the baroque, but much of it is pre-baroque as well, plainsong like this:
god, that gives me the shivers just listening to it now...
@_awake_ will give it a listen, thanks for the suggestion ^^. though I must say, I love the shortish, powerful romantic hits over the long sweeping overtures that tell whole narratives. It's so hard to be consistently powerful, but for a little time something like the witches sabbath or dies irae can really blow your head off.
Romantic music was a period where all these crazy skilled, stressed out and often drug addled composers that went through classical boot camp decided enough was enough with the rules and basically went teenager on everyone. The landscape shifted from mathematical precision to gut instinct and spur of the moment flair. If classical music is the perfectly executed timing push, Romantic music is the game where nobody tops 80 supply and the game ends with a 10 supply elimination race after fourty minutes of nonstop scrapping. Romantic music is what happens when you take broodwar pros and put them in an SC2 game against each other with no prior experience. Incredible skill, intuitive understanding of mechanics and absolutely not a single fuck given about how win is accomplished
Uh... this description of romantic music although interesting, and appropriately flowery and overdone, does quite the disservice the people who wrote during this period, especially those like Brahms, Mahler and Strauss (Richard) who were very far from spur of the moment people. As an example it took Brahms 20 yrs to finish his first symphony...
Also, please remove Copland (1900-1990) from your list, he is not even remotely close to a romantic composer, note his dates. I mean by adding him on here you could also add George Rochberg into the mix, and hell, he started out writing 12 tone music before his switch.
Laud the intent though, more people do need to go out and listen to other musics.
as someone has mentioned, romantic wasn't really a period, it was an intent, a style and a methodology. I admit I'm not a scholar on the period, just an enthusiast. I'm not however trying to say that all romantic music was actually gut instinct, but this is the feel it gives. It is more visceral, more emotive than classical pieces. It might, as you say, have taken a writer a long time to achieve that level of emotion to perfection, in fact that was probably the norm, but the intent was to draw attention away from this fact as much as possible, to evoke the feelings of the composer's choice, not to showcase their technical proficiency within a system. As with any movement, there were more reserved members, such as Liszt, and more audacious ones like Stravinsky. I admit I'm biased towards the latter, because I think that embodies what romantic music was all about, the rejection of classical systematic music.
I had just recently (like 2 months ago) had my eyes opened to "classical music" and that it was divided into a bunch of different periods so now I think it's funny I'm seeing a blog post about it :D
EPT
. I don't mind some of the really big names of classical, stuff like mozart's the magic flute or swan lake, but even there it's the more evocative, image oriented classical music. And baroque was just, well, crazy. Some harpsichord stuff is awesome, and a lot of awesome choral music comes out of the baroque, but much of it is pre-baroque as well, plainsong like this: 
