Defining the Musical 20th (or 18th) Century
[I’m writing posts this semester alongside those of my students in the course MUS 533: Music of the Twentieth Century, at the University of Arizona. To find their posts, look for the #mus533 tag.]
One of my favorite articles from the satirical publication The Onion highlights the fun — and the problems — with trying to define a period in music history. In “Area Woman Will See Any Movie That Takes Place Between 1743 and 1919,” we learn this tidbit about the article’s (fictional) subject: “There’s just something about the span of years between between the War of Austrian Succession and the end of the Spanish influenza epidemic that sweeps her right off her feet.”
If there’s something absurd about the limits of this person’s tastes, it also points up the (also) arbitrary way we musicologists define periods in music history. What’s so special, for example, about the stretch of time from 1600 to 1750 that makes us so commonly refer to it as “The Baroque”? (The most straightforward answers have something to do with the beginnings of opera around 1600 and the death of J.S. Bach in 1750—two very different kinds of criteria). And then, with this apparent divide in the year 1750, and the so-called “Classical” period starting somewhere in the later 18th century, what happens to the possibility of viewing the 18th century itself as its own period?
My tentative solution to this kind of problem is inspired by Robert L. Marshall’s remarks in the Prologue of Bach and Mozart: Essays on the Enigma of Genius. Marshall writes of being assigned to teach a course on 18th-century music and, in turn, of being determined to understand the 18th century as just such a single period, going against the grain of seeing 1750 as a big dividing point. I haven’t looked closely, but I suspect you’re much less likely to find a course on 18th-century music that deals with Corelli, Vivaldi, and Bach alongside Haydn and Mozart than you are to find separate courses on the “Baroque” and “Classical” (or “Pre-Classical” and “Classical” periods). But Marshall’s task revealed continuities—stylistic and otherwise—across the century that, in the usual view, might otherwise have gone unnoticed.
Marshall concludes his thoughts by doing what many of us who think about periods in music history do: he tries to determine a (or the most) plausible date to serve as a starting point or an endpoint for the 18th century, and he settles on “around 1700” to either 1798 (Haydn’s Creation) or 1803 (Beethoven’s Eroica). But the lesson I take from Marshall’s work is that we might be better off avoiding that instinct to settle on the span of years that best defines the 18th century and, instead, thinking about a span of years as one of many possible lenses on the past — lenses that can be switched in and out, or expanded and contracted, to yield new insights.
Returning to the 20th century, does it start in the 1890s, with works by Debussy, Mahler, and Strauss? With the end of World War I, or an apparent turn against Romanticism in the 1920s? Was there a “long” 19th century that actually ended in 1945 with the close of World War II? Did it simply go from 1900 to 1999? Has it ended? Are we really dealing with one long romantic period from, say, 1700 to, well, now?
I see these not as questions to be answered but as opportunities to make sense of music and the past — and, in the process, to go beyond having to define the “music” or a certain “period.” Rather than making a strong case for a certain period designation, I like the idea of starting with a period designation — or perhaps a few of them at once—to see what new insights, continuities, and conflicts arise when we use these as different lenses, without the pressure of ensuring that whatever we decide to call a musical period holds together according to pre-determined standards.
Of course, if this becomes too challenging, we can always settle with watching movies set between 1743 and 1919.
