Yves here. This post doesn’t reach a conclusion so much as talk through an issue. What “classical” means in many fields and how that shifts over time is food for thought. But Rosser posits the counterpoint as revolution, when I imagine some shifts away from what would have been considered classical were incremental. And isn’t the opposite of classicalism usually modernism?
By Barkley Rosser, Professor of Economics at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Originally published at EconoSpeak
For those of you of a branch of Orthodox Christianity still using the Julian calendar, such as the Russian branch, Merry Christmas! I am tempted to comment on the situation in Kazakhstan, but I think we do not know what is going on there yet, so not now.
Instead somehow I have been thinking about something that has something to do with economics, but I am going to look at it in other fields, namely the relationship between classicalism and revolution. That this is complicated in that in economics we think of “classical economics” as something that is old and out date, the economics of Adam Smith, highly conventional if somewhat simplistic. But then we usually identify Karl Marx as being a classical economist, but then he was also a revolutionary. However, modern neoclassical economists use this “classical” label to dismiss him as out of date, even as they retain the ideas of Adam Smith to some extent.
Anyway, I want to look at the use of this term in other disciplines and where it came from and how this curious relationship has operated. If one examines the origins of the term, it came from French, “classique,” with this connected to “class.” In older French something classique is of a higher class in some way, and thus presumably of a high quality. However from at least the 1620s in English the term also came to be applied to things that are from or inspired by the Greek and Roman civilizations. Most of this discussion in English at that time applied to literature, especially poetry.
Probably the earliest movement that sought to revive Greek and Roman models was in architecture and happened not long after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. This was in architecture and started after 800 CE when Charlemagne founded the Holy Roman Empire, which indeed consciously attempted to revive the Roman Empire and its models. For the next 200 years what is known as Carolingian architecture dominated northwestern Europe, especially in Germany and France, which consciously imitated styles from the late period of the empire such as those found in Ravenna. A supreme example is the cathedral in Aachen, Germany, where Charlemagne is buried. It would be succeeded by the Romanesque style.
The Renaissance would see another round of this in architecture. This was stimulated by the discovery of the writings of the great Roman architect, Vitruvius, whose ideas became the foundation for much of architecture from that period on.
As it is the field where I see the dynamic between classicalism and revolution is in music, where none of this has anything to do with ideas from Greece or Rome, much as is the situation in economics. So what is called “classical music” is something very broad, the music that is not popular music, rock or jazz or country or whatever. In recent decades the divisions between these have at times been fuzzy, but we still generally know what is in what category. And even in the past when classical music was very clearly identified, classical composers would often draw on folk music or tunes as inspiration for their compositions. But that is not the crucial issue.
Within classical music itself there is a subset of it that is called “the Classical school” or period. This is a style most prominently associated with Josef Haydn and Wolfgang Mozart, who mostly composed in the latter part of the 18th century, with Haydn actually lasting to 1809 while Mozart died young in 1791. This style and period followed the Baroque period, whose most famous members were J.S. Bach and Handel, although it originated earlier in Italy with Arcangelo Corelli with Antonio Vivaldi also a leading part of it. The Classical school would be followed the Romantic school, led by Beethoven, a student of Haydn’s, who started out in the Classical style but moved on, with the Romantic style dominating pretty much of all the nineteenth century.
So Beethoven is seen as a revolutionary who modified and liberated music from a rule-dominated and formal school before him. Indeed, not just the Romantic school, but “modern” twentieth century classical music and beyond went further, breaking more and more of the rules and structures that Haydn and Mozart followed, being in a key, certain numbers of movements in symphonies and concerti, and especially the use of the sonata allegro form within movements, with two themes and variations. This almost became Freudian, with Haydn being called “Papa Haydn,” whom all these later classical composers would rebel against, more and more, going to polytonality and atonal forms.
But then we have this other fact: in creating the Classical school, Haydn and Mozart themselves were revolutionaries who created new forms. Some of these were actual types of pieces or sets of instruments, such as the string quartet. Mozart, of course, was a star all his life, a prodigy who performed for royalty from age 5. But it is not well known that Haydn spent much of his career in obscurity at the Esterhazy estate in Hungary, toiling away on his composing. It was actually fairly late in his life that he was really discovered, helped out ironically by Mozart when he was finally able to get to Vienna in the 1780s, with his real triumph coming in the 1790s when he spent time in London, on the verge of Beethoven’s beginning to undo the structure he and Mozart had established.
Ironically possibly the most revolutionary core of the Classical school came from somebody else, someone famous and successful in his day, but who has been if not completely forgotten, pushed way down with his important role not known by many. This was the person Haydn and Mozart called “Papa Bach,” the person who actually invented the sonata allegro form. No, this was not the great Baroque composer, J.S. Bach, but the most important of his sons, Karl Phillip Emmanuel Bach. He was the actual revolutionary who founded the Classical school, with both Haydn and Mozart drawing off him. But he would become forgotten both because he was superseded by Haydn and Mozart, but also in the nineteenth century after Mendelssohn revived the father, J.S. Bach, Somehow between his father and his followers, the real revolutionary who created the Classical school of classical music has been largely forgotten.
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Nice piece. I’d add, though that Haydn was also heavily “cured” of his Esterhazy “elevator musack” style after experiencing Handel’s music – especially his oratorios – in London. His own two Oratorios are glorious to sing (even though the English translations are odd in places – “flexible tigers”…. Or maybe he just was visionary in recognizing their ability to get Netflix shows).
Thus Haydn looked backwards as well as forwards. As did Mozart (seek out his arrangement/revamp of Handel’s Messiah).
I’m not sure that conflating classicism in music and architecture makes much sense. By the 19th century ‘classical’ architecture had become one style of choice with a political meaning which varied across Europe and the US. In Ireland it went from being the architecture of the anglo elite to becoming the architecture of the catholic church – the anglo elite in the 19th century retreating to various forms of gothic in their homes and churches and public building. In much of Europe too, pure classical architecture become associated with catholic triumphalism while protestantism preferred other forms. But there were numerous exceptions, as much down to the taste of local bishops/lords/capitalists or whatever.
What I’ve always found fascinating is how every age has its equivalent of the PMC, trying to enforce what is considered good taste on the aristocracy and merchant classes. When they succeed, you end up with periods (as in the late 18th century in much of Europe) characterised by magnificently tasteful architecture almost everywhere. When they fail, as in the 19th century in the UK and US, and the ambitions of the rich outstrip their education and taste, you end up with visual anarchy, which is either to your taste or it isn’t.
“I’m not sure that conflating classicism in music and architecture makes much sense”
Possibly I am misunderstanding you, but I thought he distinguished them – classical architecture being “of Greece and Rome” while music is “where none of this has anything to do with the ideas of Greece and Rome” (as is the situation with economics).
What this ultimately comes down to is a change of mentality a couple of hundred years ago.
Until, very broadly , 250 years ago, it was taken for granted in the Arts, Philosophy etc. that the greatest age of humanity had been in the past, and all since had been progressive decline. The best models of cultural production were therefore those which explicitly referred back to the past and tried to emulate it. Thus, the Epic was considered the highest art form, with Homer and Vergil to be admired and emulated, but never equalled in modern times. Tragedy was next, and it’s striking how much of the drama of authors like Racine, Corneille, and in England Johnson and Dryden, is a direct imitation of classical models. (There was a popular tradition also, which influenced Shakespeare, but even much of his drama is inconceivable without classical models). In Philosophy also, it was considered that the Ancients had said pretty much all there was to say, and much teaching consisted just of exegesis. (Dante calls Aristotle “the master of those who know”, and doesn’t even see a need to identify him by name.) Evidently, all Christian theology was backward-looking, because the truth was in the Bible and just needed to be understood. Even “revolutionary” theologians such as Luther and Calvin saw themselves as going back to the texts to try to uncover their real meaning, not making any new doctrinal suggestions.
The idea that we might be able to make cultural products that were not pale imitations of the past is really a consequence of the rise of scientific rationalism in the 18th century, which for the first time proposed an intellectual framework that was purely secular, and owed nothing to the great names of antiquity. (Indeed, one of its first acts was to end Aristotle’s two-millennium dominance of scientific thinking). The central political event here was the French Revolution, with its belief in an entirely human-constructed political legal and ethical system dating from Year 1 (for all that meany of the revolutionaries had had a solid classical education themselves). This unleashed an uneven burst of creativity which produced Romanticism, whose essential theme was Me and How I Feel: we’re still in the Romantic era today in many ways.
Beyond that, all we can really say is the “Classical” music and architecture were forms of art produced in the era when people looked to the past for inspiration. (Virtually all of the Operas of Lully, Rameau, Handel etc have classical themes). But this is more of a coincidence of timing than anything else. Music, in particular was in a state of radical evolution in the 18th century – but then it helped that there were no symphonies in the time of Plato.
on the philosophical/ideological front, would that make neoreactionaries and even neomonarchists…like Moldbug…”classical”?
throughout history, people forget what came before(“history teaches, but it has no pupils”-Gramsci)…then someone rummages in an attic and rediscovers some sliver of what came before, and declares it comforting and sensible in the face of the chaos and disorder.
discovering Moldbug…and that he was the actual court philosopher to Thiel(billionaire vampire guy)…was pretty scary, to me.
but it did make me read Hoppe and even de Maistre, which are not for the faint of heart…but, sadly, probably important if we want to keep abreast of what our neofeudalists are thinking.
(Moldbug requires Scotch, and keeping notes; he has perfected the Gish Gallop)
context for the above: somewhere in the middle of my grand research frenzy attempting to understand the american right, i had an epiphany…(“And then I realized, like I was shot — like I was shot with a diamond…a diamond bullet right through my forehead.”-Kurtz)…that the goal of this movement, as seen from the tippy top, was not only to Undo the New Deal, which was pretty obvious…but to undo the enlightenment…to return the masses to 1100AD, but with smartfones and chicken nuggets.
Sherlock had his Mind Palace… Napoleon, his “bureau with many little drawers”…I, eschewing the Bird’s Eye View as far too limited for such large things, have my Tarpaper Shack on the Moon, next to the Hill of Picard, overlooking the Mare Crisium.
From there, neofeudalism, with Corps(e) in the place of states, seems a plausible outcome.
OK, now do Coke.
Sorry, couldn’t help myself…
I’ve not seen the binary classicism/revolution before, so it must be in economics this is used. I can see it more in terms of conservative/liberal, but the revolutionary is only, to me anyway, seen in that the status quo is being shelved. The Tories are out, and the Whigs are in. Leave it to economics professors to rename what is basically a desire for stasis and traditional structures, often hierarchical, over change and a levelling of those structures, say aristocratic forms over democratic forms.
In literature, at least in England in the late 17th and the 18th century, the term classical was not only related to the ancients and the rediscovery of ancient forms in literature but took on aspects that might be called conservative in that it took form to be highly important, along with measured rational thought over innovation in forms and emotion. This was also a reaction to the ecstatic aspects of religion that brought about the beheading of a King and Cromwell’s rule. In France the divine right of kings and the chain of being hierarchy order was seen as the natural order art least until the storming of the Bastille and the aftermath. Thus, the ecstatic was frowned upon and disciplined adherence to form over feelings, as seen in the works of John Dryden or the later Alexander Pope’s. Samuel Johnson was a great example of this conservatism, and forms like iambic pentameter were heralded.
Thought the seeds started a bit earlier as seen in works of Thomas Gray or Robert Burns. The date 1798 and the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads is sometimes associated with the beginning of the Romantic age, which was a reaction to not only the aristocracy but also against the straitjacket of forms and the lifting of emotion and feeling as preeminent values. The Napoleonic age is represented in Beethoven in music. This may be simplistic, but it is the way these terms were taught when I was back in college decades ago.
In order to posit a theory of change, one must first posit a before and an after.
Charles Rosen’s “The Classical Style” (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/401550.The_Classical_Style) is considered by many to be the go-to scholarship on Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. His observations still challenge the easy definitions floating through the dilettante mind. Particularly, his assertion that Haydn was in many ways more romantic, more revolutionary (and thus, closer to Beethoven) than Mozart. Here’s a good essay he wrote in 1979:
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1979/06/14/rediscovering-haydn/
On a somewhat smaller level, Haydn could be more daring and more shocking than Mozart. His use of silence is the most dramatic in the history of music. His sudden changes of harmony often take one completely unaware, and the orchestration is often intentionally astonishing—in its combinations of solo wind instruments it comes closer to Mahler …
It’s true that Bach’s son initiated the formal structures with which the “Classical” period is musicologically defined, but his more important and ultimately far more influential father was never a forgotten composer
the revival of J.S. Bach by the early nineteenth century, is a myth: Bach had never been forgotten, his music was greatly admired from his death in 1750 until the end of the century, and the keyboard works were studied and played. Little had been published, but manuscript copies were common enough. The romantic revival of Bach was basically a campaign of publishing, coupled with a series of performances of the choral works, which had remained largely ignored…
‘the revival of J.S. Bach by the early nineteenth century, is a myth: Bach had never been forgotten’
Not forgotten, but certainly eclipsed by CPE and for a time in England even by CPE’s younger brother JC. I picked this up reading the formidably well-researched seafaring novels of Patrick O’Brian, the twin protagonists of which (Cap’n Jack Aubrey and Dr Stephen Maturin, on violin and cello respectively) often played of an evening in more or less congenial seas. Back then ‘Bach’ meant CPE, who was Berlin-based. Jack had an uncle who had commissioned pieces by ‘London Bach’ (JC, who had been Queen Charlotte’s music master) and Jack much later went rummaging around one day in said uncle’s pantry to find them. He failed, but did discover some pieces by ‘Old Bach’ (JS):
‘I mean the piles were kept in the pantry. Mice and blackbeetles and cook-maids had played Old Harry with some cantatas and a vast great passion according to St Mark, in High Dutch; but lower down all was well, and I brought away several pieces, ‘cello for you, fiddle for me, and some for both together. It is strange stuff, fugues and suites of the last age, crabbed and knotted sometimes and not at all in the modern taste, but I do assure you, Stephen, there is meat in it. I have tried this partita in C a good many times, and the argument goes so deep, so close and deep, that I scarcely follow it yet, let alone make it sing. How I should love to hear it played really well — to hear Viotti dashing away.”
And later: ‘Now when the fiddle sang at all it sang alone: but since Stephen’s departure he had rarely been in a mood for music and in any case the partita that he was now engaged upon, one of the manuscript works that he had bought in London, grew more and more strange the deeper he went into it. The opening movements were full of technical difficulties and he doubted he would ever be able to do them anything like justice, but it was the great chaconne which followed that really disturbed him. On the face of it the statements made in the beginning were clear enough: their closely argued variations, though complex, could certainly be followed with full acceptation, and they were not particularly hard to play; yet at one point, after a curiously insistent repetition of the second theme, the rhythm changed and with it the whole logic of the discourse. There was something dangerous about what followed, something not unlike the edge of madness or at least of a nightmare; and although Jack recognized that the whole sonata and particularly the chaconne was a most impressive composition he felt that if he were to go on playing it with all his heart it might lead him to very strange regions indeed’
I suppose that CPE and his followers Haydn and Mozart might have regarded JS Bach and the music of his time
as ‘classical’ to their ‘modern’. Was the term ‘baroque’ even used at that point? Perhaps it only occurred out of the need for a third term once a third ‘school’ had arisen. In a sense, there is only ever movement from one popular template to the next, with the current one always being ‘modern’ in its time, the previous always ‘classical’ in relation to it, with the new never completely breaking from its predecessors. All buildings need foundations, there is ‘nothing (entirely) new under the sun’, as per Harold’s excellent comment below. Seems to me though that the very best in all cultural fields tends to be in the vanguard of one of these periods of change (helping indeed to define such periods), with more or less worthwhile imitations providing the grist for the ‘Mannerist’ periods to follow.
I mean, even with punk rock (itself a bit fuzzy, eg how much of the ‘New Wave’ fits into that tent?) has there been in the 45 years since Never Mind the Bollocks anything to approach its eternal urgency and rage? It hasn’t dated at all in comparison to most of its contemporaries. And what gives it its longevity is not the ‘something of stillness and calm’ that (per Harold’s comment) Winkelmann says characterises classical beauty, but its polar opposite: ie, ‘something dangerous… something not unlike the edge of madness or at least of a nightmare’; an expression of anger and contempt, which no less than beauty has ongoing relevance for all of us. Jack Aubrey had trouble seeing ‘beauty’ in the great chaconne but its restless disquiet moved him, as it still does any first time listener today. For me, all great art has this power to cause human feeling without the prior guidance of thought.
We humans do love to classify, but it doesn’t pay to get too schematic about these things – as you say, ‘easy definitions’ tend to obscure evidence of important contradictions to the cleavages those definitions make. Don’t know much about Haydn but I do know that the young Beethoven was bowled over by the D Minor Mozart Piano Concerto (No 20), its stormy overture in particular impressing him, no doubt its influence finding its way into his compositions. And Mozart would surely have known the Bach chaconne (also in D Minor) ; perhaps its singular interiority, its meditative and deeply personal nature informed his work too, in ways even he wasn’t aware of.
I have listened to quite a lot of CPE Bach’s music and some of it is very fine indeed. He never wrote anything like the D Minor Chaconne, but he is in good and certainly very numerous company there.
That which is “classical” is that which defines the class or category of that kind of thing. So of course one could have classicism in anything from cola beverages to temple buildings. Subsequent developments in the field are seen in relation to the classic type–imitations, repudiations, revivals.
The classical is innovative, dynamic, exhilarating–when the class is being established. e.g. Classic rock and roll music was an exciting development for people during the 20-30 years when it flourished.
There is a kind of perfection in the classic which makes it forever admirable. But it’s “perfect,” done well and thoroughly and forever. Classics are inspiring, but also limiting, or even intimidating.
Myself, I’ve been a classicist in the conservative sense, in most things, from lyric poetry to hard bop. Not being possessed by any creative genius or incubus, I don’t feel limited, intimidated, or resentful of classic works. I can just enjoy the free ride.
However, I do recall during long months of travel in the Levant, wondering at for how long people could keep doing Corinthian columns. “Six hundred goddamned years, and nobody wanted to try something else?”. So I guess that somewhere in me there might lurk that proverbial Modern Occidental, restless, seething, seeking whether to mark or mar in a desperate bid for personal significance.
Thanks Roland. This is the sense used by many “Main Street Autodidacts.” That classic is either the best in class (to be imitated by learners) of that classic is something or category in a class by itself. One waggish free spirit has innovated the pseudo-compliment of telling his sibling that his hair style was “classic.”
My first thought on reading this was: Hegelian dialectics in my classical music? It’s more likely than you think. (via KnowYourMeme)
I just learned that Beethoven was a revolutionary. As for Greek classicism and the notion of revolution, it was Heraclitus who said “change is the only constant in life.”
Only in later symphonies. I defy anyone to define his first few as anything but Classical “big C”. Plus there’s the odd/even theory. 7th has interesting hints, 8th was return to “normalcy”, 9th really was revolutionary and moved into Romantic.
There are those who regard Beethoven as the opposite of the original Star Trek movies – Beethoven’s even numbered ones were generally less good/experimental than his odd numbered ones. Indeed the fragments of number 10 found suggest a much more low key approach…. had he finished it. I don’t think this theory works as well as the ST one (I love 6th) but it is interesting theory.
In antiquity it was believed that that nothing new was ever created. Their aesthetic (called “imitatio”) was to base new works of art on imitation of older models. The Romans imitated the Greeks and the Greeks themselves had imitated Egypt. The idea of “original genius” or of art as self expression is entirely modern.
Classical imitation was never supposed to be slavish copying, however. Instead new works were supposed to resemble the old “as a son resembles its father.” The artist or poet was famously likened to a bee that took the best from many different flowers and made it into a honey all his/or her own. The artist was not supposed to represent reality, but the ideal forms behind the reality.
During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance the problem was adapting classical art to a Christian worldview and leaving the pagan or unsuitable behind. The various revival eras adopted classical motifs somewhat indiscriminately, reusing classical Roman pillars in their cathedrals and transforming pagan temples into churches.
This would change in the 18th century when Greek and Roman art began to be looked at as something to be studied in their proper historical context. The most influential writer to do this was the German Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1788), the brilliant Protestant-born son of a poor cobbler, who rose to become an archivist for the Vatican sculpture collection.
Winckelmann, now considered the “Father of Art History,” was one of the first to distinguish between the artistic styles of various periods and between Greek art and Roman copies. From his immersion in classical literary sources — as well as the written correspondence of Renaissance painters, chiefly Raphael and Michelangelo, Winckelmann identified what he saw as the true spirit of Greek art, which had reached the peak of excellence under the Democratic leadership of Pericles (after which was only imitation and decline). And he described this spirit as one of “Noble simplicity and calm grandeur.” For beauty, according to Winckelmann had always something of stillness and calm.
The ancients themselves saw it that way. Four hundred years later, Plutarch (AD 46—AD 11), wrote of Athenian of the sacred and public buildings created under Pericles:
“They were created in a short time for all time. Each one of them in its beauty, was even then and at once antique. But in the freshness of its vigor it is, even to the present day, recent and newly wrought. Such is the bloom of perpetual newness, as it were, upon these works of his, which makes them ever to look untouched by time, as though the unfaltering breath of an ageless spirit had been infused into them ”
Socrates, himself a sculptor, was supposed to have said. “The sculptor must represent in his figures the activity of the soul. (Xenophon Memorabilia) Accordingly, in the age of Pericles the faces and attitudes of statues of the gods and athletes adorning the public buildings were represented as freed from emotion and inner agitation. “Philosophy, taking possession of the soul … encourages it, gently exhorting it to collect and concentrate itself and to trust nothing except itself. …” — Plato, Phaedo. And of the philosopher Plato wrote: “his soul believes that it must gain peace from emotions and follow reason and abide always in it, beholding that which is true and not a matter of opinion.” (Phaedo)
Winckelmann’s writing was an impassioned distillation of what he had read, even more than of what he had seen, for he never visited Greece, nor saw the bronze statues on which the marble ones were based or even many of the famous marble ones described by ancient writers. Goethe wrote of Winckelmann: “One learns nothing new when reading his work, but one becomes a new man!”
Winckelmann’s influence was profound, not only on visual art, but on literature, music, education, and even politics, for he held that art could flourish best only under conditions of political freedom and democracy. He saw an emotional engagement with art as a source of moral, intellectual and spiritual growth, as he put it, “”The only way for us to become great or, if this be possible, inimitable, is to imitate the ancients”.
Wow! I want to become a new man just by reading this. Thank you sir! Amazing words.
It is so wonderful that in the dreariness that sometimes befalls daily life one can encounter, just like that, an amazing life-affirming summary about the best human impulses — in a comment on Naked Capitalism. Thank you!
I added an addendum which the moderator declined to accept, addressing the topic of the OP a little more directly. Will try again:
Winckelmann deeply influenced German culture (giving rise to what has been called “The Tyranny of Greece over Germany.”) Humboldt and the other early reformers of German education drew on Winckelmann’s conception of aesthetic education and the concept of Bildung (self-formation through art).
But his influence reached father than that, affecting also the neoclassical painting and architecture of the American & French Revolutions. (Napoleon carried a copy of Winckelmann on his campaigns).
Later there was bound to be a reaction against the limitations and mistakes of Winckelmann. His fixation on male beauty (it was understood that he was homosexual), his supposed mistake, for which he is often mocked, in exalting the Hellenistic (not Athenian) group statue of Laocoön and his sons being eaten by snakes as a model of classical restraint. Though it seems to me that Mozart could have been channeling Winckelmann when he said that in music, “the passions, whether violent or not, should never be so expressed as to reach the point of disgust; and music, even in situations of the greatest horror, should never be painful to the ear but should flatter and charm it, and thereby always remain music.”
Beethoven’s symphonies are said to have been influenced by the solemn outdoor grandiosity of French Revolutionary composers Méhul, Gossec, and Sarrette, and their new Paris Conservatory.
Anyway, as a classical music lover, I have tried to sketch out what I think is the moral & aesthetic core of the classical ideal, so alien to us now it seems, and its direct relation to revolution. Hopefully at not too much length. As a chaser I recommend Brahms choral setting of the neo-classical poet Hölderlin’s “Song of Destiny”, contrasting the peaceful world of the gods to the sufferings of earthly mortals, which I think meets the classical ideal of Calm Grandeur and Noble Restraint. There is a version on youtube with German text and English translation performed by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra under Philippe Herreweghe, which I won’t link to directly for fear of my post being rejected, but which the curious can find.