{"id":994,"date":"2016-09-26T13:21:17","date_gmt":"2016-09-26T17:21:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/?p=994"},"modified":"2016-09-26T13:21:17","modified_gmt":"2016-09-26T17:21:17","slug":"boundaries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/2016\/09\/boundaries.html","title":{"rendered":"Boundaries"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"barbed-wire-1052651_1280\"<\/a>A recent discussion with my friend Robert Carl has me pondering the ways we think of epochs in art.\u00a0 As many are quick to point out, there aren\u2019t hard-and-fast beginning dates for various periods \u2013 Classical, Romantic, Modern \u2013 these are trends that gather steam over time.\u00a0 Armchair musicologists like to play the game of spotting antecedents — compositions that anticipate features that would later become commonplace \u2013 sometimes according them a status of prophecy, as though the composer were tuned to a more advanced mode of thinking.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t find that way of looking at history convincing, but there is another issue I\u2019m wondering about now, an issue that I don\u2019t think gets much attention, and that\u2019s the question of how epochs end.\u00a0 \u00a0Traditionally, we say a period begins around a given time, and there is a tacit assumption that the previous period comes to an end around that same time, or soon thereafter. \u00a0Helps make the timeline charts a little neater, I suppose. \u00a0So, Modernism began in the 1910s, and the assumption is that the Romantic period was toast at that point.\u00a0 We do our best to ignore the many outstanding Romantic works written after 1920 \u2013 Rachmaninoff, anyone?\u00a0 — as if a tide had turned which made a bad Modernist piece somehow better than a good non-Modern one (unless, of course, one can make the case that the non-Modern one somehow anticipates what came after Modernism).<\/p>\n

An even more amusing example is in the 18th<\/sup> century.\u00a0 Supposedly the Rococo period comes after the Baroque, but somehow the most Rococo of composers, Couperin, died in 1733, and many of Handel\u2019s and Bach\u2019s quintessentially Baroque works date from the 1740s.<\/p>\n

Maybe we aren\u2019t thinking of these epochs in the right way.\u00a0 Maybe we lose more than we gain by assuming they have to end when a new epoch begins.\u00a0 If we imagine the possibility that musical styles emerge and morph continuously, then interesting lines become apparent: \u00a0Renaissance-to-present, Impressionist-to-present, etc.\u00a0 I\u2019m not sure what we gain by insisting that every new idea should impose a double bar on the idea that came before.<\/p>\n

So Modernism is alive and well, cohabitating with Post-modernism, though neither is in ascendance currently.\u00a0 Cohabitating with everything else we know about, actually: certainly many types of music that stand outside the Western history arc are making waves in our ears and minds as much as ever.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A recent discussion with my friend Robert Carl has me pondering the ways we think of epochs in art.\u00a0 As many are quick to point out, there aren\u2019t hard-and-fast beginning dates for various periods \u2013 Classical, Romantic, Modern \u2013 these are trends that gather steam over time.\u00a0 Armchair musicologists like to play the game of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":995,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-994","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=994"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/994\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":996,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/994\/revisions\/996"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}