The "Bridge to Being" Blog

By

This is why, in part, that romantic concert music, especially on the grand scale, is my soul music.  In spite of the prevalent gangsta-rap culture, it remains impossible for me to believe that this earlier vital strand in our species’ creative tradition will ever die out.  So the preservation and promotion of the grand romantic tradition becomes a mission of sorts for me.

In this post, I introduce some selections of exciting and moving spiritual music that have been created in the modern idiom but belong squarely within the tradition of romantic concert music on the grand scale.

“This is how it began.

 “What most people call “classical” music tends to include all so called “serious” music: the baroque, the classical, the romantic and the so-called modern works; most of it was composed for concert performances, typically using strings, woodwinds, brasses and percussion. Classical music in this sense is the music to be carefully listened to.  It is also the music whose popularity is best measured over large time scales, rather than from last week’s sales charts.

“The 19^th century was a period of heroic exploration, risk and revolution. Unsurprisingly, various epic and romantic visions of the human condition began breaking into in art and literature. It was only a matter of time before these grand impulses found musical expression of equal grandeur. Beethoven’s musical output straddled the classical / epic-romantic divide and the romantic epic symphonic form probably began with the 1805 premier of his Third Symphony.

‘In spite of atonal “modernism” – the epic symphonic tradition lives on as the grand scale film music for epic movies.

‘The epic romantic symphony remained a major musical genre, becoming, in the popular mind, the archetypical “classical” music, until “modern” atonality and dissonance began to dominate.  Symphonic music became increasingly less accessible in the second half of the 20^th century, often devolving into a radically distorted form. Often explicitly anti-heroic and anti-romantic, it began to sound like the music of a mental disorder.

For a romantic like me, this was concert’s music’s “dark age”, a period when beautiful and stirring music gave way to the experimental and off-putting music of chaos and anxiety. 

Many concert goers voted with their feet. 

My earlier piece lists some of the most remarkable products of that earlier epic age of great music, a period that lasted through the first half of the 20^th century. As I pointed out then, the romantic tradition survived in the movies; and many of the great soundtrack scores have a new life on the concert stage.

To be fair, the experimental period, while driving away listeners, did enrich the musical palate, giving serous composers new sonic tools to fold into a renewed romanticism, should that kind of music ever make a serious comeback on the concert stage.

The good news is that the listeners and concert goers – who, after all, never really abandoned tonal beauty and noble emotional expression as the core concert experience – have won the day.  The experimentalists still find their way into the repertoire, but their worst music no longer dominates it.  And a new generation of serious romantic composers has emerged….

http://www.jaygaskill.com/MusicII

Another excerpt:

My personal favorite is the set of Judeo-Christian pieces by jazz composer, the immortal Dave Brubeck, whose early secular work for orchestra and jazz combo, Elementals, was deeply impressive.

But Brubeck’s “Easter Oratorio”, “Pange Lingua Variations” and “Voices of the Holy Spirit” (so far available only on Telarc in a 2 disc set) are classics for all time. The concluding piece, Regret, is deeply personal to the composer and only nominally secular.