CHAPTER 20

The examples adduced in Part Three demonstrate that historicism in one form or another has had a profound and continuous influence in architecture, the visual arts, and literature for the past three centuries. Part Four will show, by way of contrast, that although composers from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries have continuously embraced the historicist aesthetic, they have been significantly handicapped in a way that never affected architects, artists, and writers. The implications of this handicap—and the opportunities it is actually likely to present during the twenty-first century—will be explored in Part Five.

Eighteenth-century neoclassicism was essentially an inflorescence of the same antiquarian passion for the civilizations of Greece and Rome that had given rise to the Renaissance, stimulated this time by the spectacular unearthing of Herculaneum and Pompeii (1738 and 1748), and secularized by Enlightenment rationalism. This Classical revival, too, was given concrete form by direct assimilation and reinterpretation of actual buildings, artefacts, and literary works that survived from ancient times. To stand before the paintings of David in the Louvre or the architecture of Thomas Jefferson in Charlottesville, to read Pope's translation of The Iliad or watch a performance of Addison's Cato, is to take part in a living tradition that directly links the modern world to the earliest periods of Western civilization. What is "Classical" in these works is clearly discernible, and can be validated by comparison with the so-called "originals."

But to listen to a performance of Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice or Mozart's La clemenza di Tito, regardless of one's musical expertise, is not to connect with any vital Classical music tradition. There is none—at least none that even highly trained ears can distinguish in Western art music as a whole. In fact, no more than a fragmentary handful of musical works from the ancient Western world has ever been recovered, hardly enough on which to base any musical renaissance or Classical revival comparable to those which took place in the other arts.

Some blame the Church fathers for having destroyed ancient music, either because they deemed it unworthy of preservation or feared the effects its alleged supernatural powers might have on the minds and behavior of the faithful. Any such antagonism towards Classical music that might have existed earlier in the Church's history, however, had ostensibly vanished by the High Renaissance:

Perhaps Greek and Roman music disappeared largely as a consequence of other factors about which we have no knowledge. Whatever the case may be, Gluck and Mozart were essentially on their own when it came to evoking the ancient world through the medium of musical sound. Since they had in effect no aural experience of Classical music that might have informed their own work, it is actually incorrect and misleading to speak of them as "neoclassical" composers at all, regardless of contemporary stylistic developments in the other arts. True, the texts provided by their librettists were classically inspired, and so, too, were the sets and costumes used in the production of eighteenth-century operas on Classical subjects. But not so the music itself in any discernible way, even though the adjective neoclassical has become inseparably attached to it. Worse still, all art music today tends to be erroneously labeled "classical," further compounding the confusion.

Even Jacopo Peri and his sixteenth-century contemporaries, whose pioneering exploration of the Classical past led to the creation of the earliest operas, were no closer to the audible realities of Greek and Roman music. They could do no more than suggest what the music of the ancient Western world might have sounded like. This they accomplished on the basis of what little they could piece together from extant theoretical treatises, pictorial representations, and other indirect evidence. But for all their efforts to rediscover and imitate the legendary marvels of ancient music, they ultimately realized that educated guesswork would have to supply what actual listening experience could not:

By "imitation," of course, Peri was seeking to emulate through appropriate musical means the ideas and affections suggested by newly composed dramatic poetry based on Classical models. Absent any body of bona fide Classical music, however, which might have pointed the way, he felt he would have to depart from the mathematically based rules of traditional polyphony to achieve something approaching the magically expressive intensity attributed to the art of the ancients.

This opened the door to a veritable revolution in music as significant in its own way as the actual revival of classical forms and styles in the other arts, for in order to realize fully their antiquarian aesthetic ideals, composers had no choice but to invent, even if it meant overturning the prevailing conventions of the day. Although the musical "past" thus recovered was essentially a product of imaginative speculation, it is clear that historicism was the primary catalyst for the revolutionary stylistic changes that led, among other things, to the creation of opera.

This inventiveness was hardly confined to singing. Nicola Vicentino, author of L'antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica (Ancient Music Adapted to Modern Practice, 1555), went so far as trying to revive the lost chromatic and enharmonic genera of Greek music theory by contriving strange new keyboards—the arcicembalo and the arciorgano. Each of these was equipped with six manuals whose octaves, subdivided into thirty-one keys, enabled players to perform music composed in half-steps and microtones. In this manner he hoped, like Peri and his other contemporaries, to produce something at least approximating the effeti meravigliosi ascribed to the music and musicians of ancient myth and legend.

For the most part, however, this subversion of prevailing practices of musical composition centered on the relative importance of the text versus the music to which it was set. Advocates of the new ancient music, that is to say, somewhat paradoxically, of musica moderna, believed that the words themselves should have pride of place. Claudio Monteverdi, invoking the authority of Plato's Republic, liked to think of this approach as the seconda prattica, (also known as stile moderno or stylus luxurians) in which words are "the mistress of the harmony and not the servant."³ Some antiquarian theorists, however, like Girolamo Mei and Vincenzo Galilei (Dialogo della musica antica e della moderna, 1581), were so adamant about the primacy of the word that polyphony itself, whose "diverse and contrary parts" might render the text unintelligible, was rejected out of hand.⁴

Adversaries of musica moderna, that is to say, proponents of the so-called prima prattica (also knows as ars perfecta, stile antico, and stylus gravis) argued that harmony based on the mathematical laws of nature—not mere words—should be the basis of musical composition. They typically cited the liturgical works of such composers as Josquin Desprez and Adrian Willaert as the very embodiment of their musical ideals, and held secular monodies and madrigals up to ridicule for their audacious dissonances, aberrant embellishments, and other "imperfections."

The absence of any unambiguous ancient authority whose theoretical pronouncements could be validated by a substantial body of actual Classical music did not simply divide musicians of the Renaissance into opposing camps but also set music itself apart from the other arts. Since no true revival of Classical music was possible, composers had one of two choices: to continue composing musica perfecta based on established modal harmony and the musical legacy of the Catholic Church, or to break with that tradition and pursue a radically different, largely secular course back to the glories of ancient music, guided by theoretical speculation and practical experimentation. Of course, there was also a middle way between the two which accommodated the careers of a great many composers of the period, but in the end none of these choices led to an actual "rebirth" of Classical music or even to a clear understanding of Classical music theory.

There was no musical Renaissance. There was no revival of ancient music in the eighteenth century justifying the term neoclassicism. Although composers were generally aware of the ideologies and art of the Classical world, the music they wrote was essentially the product of their own creative genius. Unlike architecture, the visual arts, and literature, music ineluctably took a parallel but distinctly different course.

Deprived of a strong Classical tradition of their own, but inspired by the new spirit of humanism that permeated virtually every aspect of the arts and society, composers from the sixteenth century on came to depend less and less on the musical traditions of the medieval Catholic Church and set about establishing new traditions of their own. This does not mean, however, that they would never again take a lively interest in reviving the musical forms and styles of the past. On the contrary, it is possible to trace the beginnings of an authentic musical renaissance to certain works by Mozart, Beethoven, Spohr, Mendelssohn, and Brahms (among others) who were powerfully drawn to the baroque period and composed new works in styles directly influenced by the polyphony of Bach and Handel (see chaps. 21–24). For that matter, Bach himself actively borrowed from the sixteenth-century German chorale repertory.

Historicism has been a constant in the history of Western music, despite the apparently irreversible loss of its Classical patrimony. Even during the heyday of twentieth-century modernism when past-bashing became stylish and conspicuous innovation was the virtual sine qua non for any artist hoping to win critical approval, historicism and eclecticism never ceased to inform emerging architectural, artistic, literary, and musical trends.

By 1900 composers had begun revisiting not only Western music history but also the traditional musics of Asia, Africa, Oceania, and other parts of a world that had begun to grow smaller with each succeeding generation. Even as the works of seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century European composers were collected, edited, and published, these still largely unknown non-Western repertories became increasingly accessible and were eagerly seized upon by those intent on expanding the musical frontiers of the Western world. This process of familiarization and assimilation was greatly accelerated by the rapid growth of the relatively new professions of musicology and ethnomusicology; the collateral expansion of higher education in music; the establishment of professional orchestras and performing ensembles; and advances in publishing and recording technology which brought previously unknown sound worlds into the sphere of the familiar.