Title: Romanticism and Music | Dissident Voice
Headings: Romanticism and Music
Romanticism and Music
The Conversion of Music into a "Mass Narcotic" on a Global Scale
Introduction
Classical Music – ‘structures should be well-founded’
Romantic Music – ‘more explicitly expressive and programmatic’
Hanns Eisler – ‘One cannot always write optimistic songs’
Woody Guthrie – ‘This Machine Kills Fascists’
Nueva Canción – ‘oppositional in every respect’
Jazz, Pop and Rock – ‘part of the entertainment industry’
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – ‘Classicism is health, romanticism is sickness’
Conclusion

Content: He writes: The promised eternal peace was turned into an endless war of conquest. The society based upon reason had fared no better. The antagonism between rich and poor, instead of dissolving into general prosperity, had become intensified by the removal of the guild and other privileges, which had to some extent bridged it over, and by the removal of the charitable institutions of the Church. The development of industry upon a capitalistic basis made poverty and misery of the working masses conditions of existence of society. How is it then that it is the Romantics that are more associated with the revolutionary ideas of the time? Why were they seen by critics and historians as reactionary or politically irrelevant? According to Max Blechman in Revolutionary Romanticism: The early romantics were revolutionaries: not because they believed in a political insurrection in their homeland […] but because through public expression they hoped to redefine the meaning of progress and revolutionize the values of modern civilisation.” […]