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: 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.” […] Romanticism in Germany (as in France and England) was a protean [ever changing] movement, and the writings of formative romantics were contradicted by those of late romantics, some of whom broke with the early romantics’ idealism for various forms of conservatism. 2
The Romantics, instead of questioning the class basis of society, which was becoming more and more sharply delineated, reached back to the simpler life, religiosity and culture of the Middle Ages. The idea of chivalrous heroes, the mystic and supernatural, untouched nature and the security of spiritual beliefs formed the basis of a new culture of individuals and heroes battling against crass modernity. Romantic composers put much more emphasis on showing their innermost thoughts and feelings about love, hate and death through powerful expressions of emotion. Romantic music developed “the use of new or previously not so common musical structures like the song cycle, nocturne, concert etude, arabesque and rhapsody, alongside the traditional classical genres.”