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It's all about the music, dude! Sit down, relax and listen to some tunes.

Illuminating

Sure, many have encountered at least some analysis of the famous Tristan chord. It's sinewy influence - almost serpentine - on subsequent generations of composers and even other art forms [No Tristan - No Schoenberg - no exeggeration] can't be overstated. Lot's has been written about it, including lots of liner notes, which for many, have served as their sole exposure to analysis.

And yet, the post above has been presented in such an illuminating way.

In fact, your post right here is the kind of thing that this place needs. Personally, that one paragraph of yours is the best thing I've read all month.

This is exactly the kind of thing that opens up insights into the music - like shafts of light entering a cave - and in addition, illuminates the historic practice of the time. It even affects how we may proceed to view the latest, up-to-the-minute-mod-dude conclusions of the HIPs.

Most folks [at least those around here] haven't spent years of their short lives pouring over books of music analysis and history. But, if you have, then over and over and over and over you find, in books and articles, the condemnation of the practices of the Romantics for precisely the kinds of harmonic procedures that you've outlined. In the endless tomes produced during the 20th century, the attitude veers from hostility to flat out war-like aggression and anger aimed at Romantic composers - ALL OF WHOM - ironically, created the most popular music in the literature of classical music.

Armed with one's own insightful analysis, such as yours above, it's easy to see how the hostile musicologists came to their source of irritation. None of the music of the Romantic period fits the classical era forms to which the Romantics clung. The sonata had to be stretched, and as we say today - morphed - to accomodate the Romantic style of expression.

Indeed, musicologists have even developed a new model with which to grapple with the harmonic procedures of the late Romantics: SONATA DEFORMATION, or the distorted sonata form.

The old school scholars and critcs - all of them, to a man - with out a SINGLE EXCEPTION - concluded that the Romantics had corrupted music with their unruly practices, and thus that their music was pretty much worthless.

Thankfully, audiences don't read much music analysis, and blissfully continue to love Tchaikovsky, Brahms [yep - even he suffered some "corruption"], Berlioz, Mahler, Strauss, Wagner, Dvorak, Sibelius, etc., etc.

It's staggering to consider that nobody's ever challenged that academic view. EXCEPT ME.

It's so simple. Of course, the old sonata form had been changed by the Romantics. And - this is the bombshell right here---->>

IT IS ABSOLUTELY 100% VALID IN IT'S THEN NEW, ROMANTIC TRANSFORMATION.

The application of powdered-wig, aristocracy-ruled-society-with-zero-human-rights, Haydn/Mozart-era-music rules was now OBSOLETE. NULL AND VOID.

The orderly movement from tonic to dominant, with clever and witty accouterments along the way, was no longer RELEVANT. No longer applicable. The walls had long ago been shattered. The Romantic symphony was a new invention; partly based on the old, but filled with its own bolder, newer harmonic adventure and mode of expression.

Thus, the constant and constantly growing harmonic restlessness and wandering that increased as the 19th century progressed was, in fact, progress towards the goal of ever greater self-expression; NOT evidence of corruption and ineptitude.

Ralph Vaughan-Williams speaks more deeply to me than Mendelssohn, and Mendelssohn more deeply than any single note of Mozart. They speak more immediately and deeply because their expression reaches a deeper and more personal level than the formal, solid and stolid rule-abiding style of the classicists. And, millions of listeners feel the same way.

Your analysis [which, BTW, is, as you've said, nothing we haven't seen before - but very clearly laid out] demonstrates with crystal clarity why the old rules of analysis no longer apply, and were no longer relevant to a bold new style of expression. Rather than accepting and understanding that, the academics and professional analysts stubbornly insisted on applying Mozart-era standards to a new age.

Oh, and they haven't completely stopped. Although much of the modernist/serialist-fueled hatred toward late Romanticism has faded somewhat, it still persists. I often wish I could throttle some of those bozos in person.



Severius! Supremus Invictus


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