The Ideals Of Instrumental Music Essay -- essays research papers

At one point in the study of the amorous period of music, we come upon the first of several apparently opposing conditions that blight all attemptsto grasp the meaning of Romantic as applied to the music of the nineteenth century. This opposition involved the relation between music and words. If instrumentalmusic is the perfect Romantic art, why is it acknowledged that the great master ofthe symphony, the highest form of instrumental music, were not Romanticcomposers, but were the Classical composers, Haydn, Mozart, and van Beethoven? Moreover,one of the most characteristic 19th century genres was the Lied, a vocal music piece inwhich Shubert, Schumann, Brahams, and Wolf attained a new amount between music and poetry. Furthermore, a large number of leading composers in the 19th centurywere extremely interested and articulate in literary expression, and leading Romantic novelists and poets wrote about music with deep love and insight.The difference of opinion between the ideal of pure instrumental music (absolute music) as the last-ditch Romantic mode of expression, and the strong literaryorientation of the 19th century, was contumacious in the conception of program music. Program music, as Liszt and others in the 19th century used the term, is musicassociated with poetic, descriptive, and even narrative subject matter. This is throughnot by means of musical figures imitating natural sounds and movements, but by imaginative suggestion. Program music aimed ...