OPPapers.com

The Ideals Of Instrumental Music

The Ideals of Instrumental Music


At one point in the study of the Romantic period of music, we come upon
the first of several apparently opposing conditions that plague all attempts to
grasp the meaning of Romantic as applied to the music of the 19th century.  This
opposition involved the relation between music and words.  If instrumental
music is the perfect Romantic art, why is it acknowledged that the great masters
of the symphony, the highest form of instrumental music, were not Romantic
composers, but were the Classical composers, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven? 
Moreover, one of the most characteristic 19th century genres was the Lied, a
vocal piece in which Shubert, Schumann, Brahams, and Wolf attained a new union
between music and poetry.  Furthermore, a large number of leading composers in
the 19th century were extremely interested and articulate in literary
expression, and leading Romantic novelists and poets wrote about music with
deep love and insight.
The conflict between the ideal of pure instrumental music (absolute
music) as the ultimate Romantic mode of expression, and the strong literary
orientation of the 19th century, was resolved in the conception of program
music.  Program music, as Liszt and others in the 19th century used the term,
is music associated with poetic, descriptive, and even narrative subject
matter.  This is done not by means of musical figures imitating natural sounds
and movements, but by imaginative suggestion.  Program music aimed to absorb
and transmit the imagined subject matter in such a way that the resulting work,
although "programmed", does not sound forced, and transcends the subject matter
it seeks to represent. Instrumental music thus became a vehicle for the
utterance of thoughts which, although first hinted in words, may ultimately be
beyond the power of words to fully express.
Practically every composer of the era was, to some degree, writing
program music, weather or not this was publicly...