Lisa Pasch "Human Nature Through Musical and Art Eras"

As any other art, music has had its share of changes of style and texture. The people of Ancient Greece who studied music had very specific ideas as to what music should be used for and music theory rules that couldn’t be broken in any instance. As time moves on, we see that Western music takes on aspects of these ideas and translates them in different ways and different genres of music grow as communication between countries grows. In the Middle Ages, musical notation and the development of music for the Church grew tremendously, only to be overshadowed by secular music in the Renaissance period. Music was purely vocal in nature until the late Renaissance when instrumental music began to take on a life of its own. As time moves forward, we see composers develop a theory or musical idea, follow it for a time, expand on it until it’s completely different than from what it started as, and then go back to a more conservative point of view. For example, in the Classical period, there were certain international styles of music with particular rules and forms they followed. As composers began to develop these ideas and expand the performance needs (more instruments, more voices, more movements of a piece, etc) we see the turn into the Romantic era, classified by large performance venues, huge orchestras, and just all together extremely programmatic music. As the period moves on, things continue on this path until suddenly, a few new composers went back to the ideas of the classical period with its simplicity. The movement of neo-classicism, or “back to the classics” brought about these ideas again into the scene, just with a new twist. No one was trying to recreate Mozart or Handel, but minimalism became a huge part of what we now call 20th Century music. The idea that we start conservative, expand into experimentation, then back to conservative styles is not uncommon in other art styles and even politics. Human nature and behavior can be seen clearly in many aspects of our lives, and art is a great way to learn and explore how cultures have developed through time and even predict how we are going to grow and change in the future.