![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
acroyeardammit i did it again and posted what should have gone to classical_music into my main blog...crapity crap crap crap...but generally, what musical genre within the classical forms is most often used to classify the 20th century English composers (Holst, V-W, Elgar, Britten, Tippett, Walton, etc...)?
They seem neo-classical and/or neo-romantic to me, given that they tend to stick to late-romantic tonality (with occasional exceptions), form, expressiveness, and certainly their "nationality" (ala Dvorak & Tchaikovsky; contrast to the atonality of the Shoenburg school and the "objectivity" of the Stravinsky and Prokofiev approach post-1920). But I was just curious as to how musicologists tend to label (given that they do even when they shouldn't) them. Certainly Holst and Elgar are still in the time-frame of late Romantic, but both lived on past the standard "end" of that era (1910), continuing to compose well into the 20th century...
And to whomever told me to dig a little deeper into Vaughn-Williams's 8th, thanks again. It's fantastic.
They seem neo-classical and/or neo-romantic to me, given that they tend to stick to late-romantic tonality (with occasional exceptions), form, expressiveness, and certainly their "nationality" (ala Dvorak & Tchaikovsky; contrast to the atonality of the Shoenburg school and the "objectivity" of the Stravinsky and Prokofiev approach post-1920). But I was just curious as to how musicologists tend to label (given that they do even when they shouldn't) them. Certainly Holst and Elgar are still in the time-frame of late Romantic, but both lived on past the standard "end" of that era (1910), continuing to compose well into the 20th century...
And to whomever told me to dig a little deeper into Vaughn-Williams's 8th, thanks again. It's fantastic.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-11-02 08:56 pm (UTC)doing my own studying (from a Bernstein lecture series from 1975), I could see how the experiment was missing the point. dissonance is actually much more complicated than he was trying to present, and in actuality the "tempered" 12-tone chromatic scale is itself a violation of natural tonality.
the overtones from a "low C" are
C -> C -> G -> C -> E -> G -> ?? -> C -> D -> ...
where ?? is actually neither A nor B flat, but the quarter-tone in between. just by first hearing tempered tonal music, we're already training our ears and our perceptions to accept a violation of the "natural" order of sound.
The chinese, on the other hand, held onto that quarter-tone in creating their penta-scale. Their music, therefore, is actually more "natural" sounding than ours but is alien to anybody who's been exposed to any piece that hits the major 6th or minor 7th in its progression.
"In tuning an instrument, we tune ourselves." -- Robert Fripp