Composer Genre Questionable

[pml]

With due respect, re-read my post. :) I have no trouble with the majority of Elgar's works being considered Romantic, however there is a significant portion of it which as I said, I feel is modernist enough to sit comfortably as "early 20th century", when you look at what most other English composers were doing at the time: for a while Elgar was the leading progressive face of British music until the arrival of younger figures. Both of the symphonies, Falstaff, the cello concerto, and parts of Gerontius (which only just is excluded from the 20th C, being written in 1900), are to me more easily aligned with early 20th century on the grounds of the actual technical construction and orchestration, like works written by Strauss and Mahler at the exact same time.

Brahms you might consider a related but opposite case, since he was accused of pouring “new wine into old bottles” (i.e. romantic music fixed in traditional forms). One could similarly describe the more technically advanced Elgar works as “old wine in new bottles” – and with a straight face moreover.

Regards, Philip

[Carolus]

My own impression of Elgar's music - the mature works at least - is not one of romanticism in the sense I associate the term with Robert Schumann or Chopin. Even though his musical language was conservative by the time he composed the Cello Concerto, his overall approach strikes me as being more in keeping with that of Nielsen or Sibelius than that of earlier composers. This is not to say that his music sounds like anyone but his own, but it is not anachronistic or nostalgic either. I think it's possible to assign the different periods to each piece individually, which is a good thing for a number of composers who lived well into the 20th century.

[allegroamabile]

Erich Wolfgang Korngold would also be difficult to classify since his music has strong charateristics of Late Romaticism but he lived almost his whole life in the 20th century.

I think we can all agree that Alexander Glazunov is definitely a Romantic....wow I just love his music.

[Lyle Neff]

I'm surprised nobody has yet mentioned the ever-useful "Post-Romantic" category. With this, you can have your cake, and eat it too - especially for composers like Elgar, Mahler and Richard Strauss. [...]

That's not really a useful category. It's still Romantic -- in a "hyper" sense. For the music appreciation class I teach online, my comments on the textbook specifically tell the students not to pay attention to the terms "post-Romantic" and "post-Impressionist" in their textbook -- mainly because the authors don't really even define them.

[allegroamabile]

I tend to categorize pieces such as Copland's Appalachian Spring and some of Barber's works as post-romantic when there is not an early 20th century genre available. That's plausible, right?

I also do not describe the post-romantic period as being "romantic." I consider it a movement outside the period where composers fuse romantic tonality with new, modern ideas. A little like how Yagan described Samuel Barber's music as "building on the past rather than marching into the future."

To Yagan- Do you have an Australian accent?

[Yagan Kiely]

Erm... probably. Australian accents are less pronounced than American or English so I am not sure how strong it is.

<rant>Musical Genres are stupidly confusing. Modern, Post-Modern, and Contemporary have all been used up in certain genres of the 20th century, what do we call now? Post-Romantic, Neo-Romantic, Post-Neo-Romantic...Neo-Neo-Romantic? Then there is Classical vs. Romantic. The Classical era was named so by the Romantics (who in turn described their era as Romantic), and named it so in comparison to theirs proclaiming theirs more emotional - total rubbish, all eras are emotional. And why is the 19th century Romantic anyway? Schönberg and Vivaldi both used emotion effectively, why aren't they Romantic also? How come I am not a modern composer? I'm composing now. It's all completely ridiculous!</rant>

[Carolus]

About Yagan's rant: Ah feel your pain! (Sorry, couldn't resist) That's why your idea on the other thread about having period vs. style is really a very useful one. Period is a simple shorthand for historical epoch, while style can be applied to each piece individually. That way the Contemporary composer Yagan is free to compose one piece in Barqoue style and another in an Expressionist style.