Realism Was a Revolution in Music, Not Just in Literature
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Summary
What This Article Is About
Conductor Joel Sandelson argues that 18th-century music underwent revolutionary transformations parallel to the development of literary realism, challenging conventional associations of “classical” music with timeless abstraction. Comparing Purcell’s baroque counterpoint (1680) to Haydn’s symphonic narrative (1774), he identifies three crucial innovations: greater textural variety through mixing distinct musical characters (like opera buffa’s heterogeneous voices mirroring Bakhtin’s novelistic “heteroglossia”), large-scale structural repetition enabling goal-directed storytelling, and a powerful tonal harmonic system creating senses of proximity, distance, and spatial depth over extended time periods analogous to perspectival painting’s vanishing point.
Drawing on Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth’s theory that realist art projects neutral, communal senses of time and space through invisible narrators and Karol Berger’s analysis of music shifting from Bach’s “eternal Now” to Mozart’s sequential narrative, Sandelson demonstrates how 18th-century composers developed techniques creating temporal doubleness through reprises, harmonic journeys staging departure and homecoming, and relational rather than absolute key structures. These musical conventions became as fundamental and invisible as literary realism’s devices, both expressing Enlightenment impulses to rationalize experience through homogeneous, quantifiable frameworks—what Erwin Panofsky described as reducing divine perspectives to human consciousness, replacing God with listeners as music’s ideal vantage point.
Key Points
Main Takeaways
From Tapestry to Narrative
Baroque music like Purcell’s felt additive and two-dimensional like embroidered tapestries, while Classical music like Haydn’s developed directional phrases, differentiated sections, and forward-straining narrative arcs resembling linear storytelling.
Musical Heteroglossia
Opera buffa’s comic style introduced contrasting character types, textures, and topics jostling together—mirroring Bakhtin’s concept of the novel’s riotous mixture of voices that undermines singular authority.
Structural Reprise as Temporal Index
Large-scale repetition became virtually universal by the 18th century, creating inherent doubleness—simultaneously past and present—that indexes time elapsed and distance traveled, parallel to realist narration’s temporal techniques.
Bach to Mozart’s Temporal Shift
Music transformed from Bach’s cyclical “eternal Now” evoking divine timelessness to Mozart’s goal-directed, sequentially significant flow where specific ordering creates narrative meaning and audience anticipation of calculated effects.
Tonality as Spatial Perspective
The simplification to major/minor modes enabled tonal harmony’s gravitational forces to operate grandly—modulation between keys creating quasi-objective spatial depth analogous to Renaissance painting’s linear perspective and vanishing points.
Relational Structure Replaces Absolute
Keys became structurally homogeneous like realist characters—lacking unique modal flavors, their significance arising from relationships and journeys between them rather than inherent attributes, mirroring Enlightenment mechanical philosophy’s inert, measurable matter.
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Article Analysis
Breaking Down the Elements
Main Idea
Parallel Cultural Revolutions
The development of 18th-century “classical” music constituted a realist revolution parallel to and contemporaneous with literary realism, sharing fundamental preoccupations with creating communal senses of time and space through invisible structuring principles. Just as realist novels employed techniques like invisible narration, linear chronology, and accumulation of insignificant details to project shared reality, composers developed textural variety, large-scale repetition, and tonal modulation to create musical experiences with narrative directionality, temporal depth, and spatial perspective. Both artistic transformations expressed Enlightenment rationalization—replacing divine or allegorical frameworks with homogeneous, quantifiable systems (clock time, geometric space, uniform tonality) that positioned human consciousness rather than transcendent authority as the organizing vantage point, fundamentally secularizing cultural experience.
Purpose
Interdisciplinary Aesthetic Theory
Sandelson aims to challenge conventional understandings of “classical” music as abstract and timeless by demonstrating its participation in broader cultural-historical transformations toward realist representation. His purpose extends beyond musicological analysis to interdisciplinary synthesis—showing how literary theory (Ermarth, Bakhtin, Auerbach), art history (Panofsky on perspective), and philosophy (empiricism, mechanical worldview) illuminate musical developments that standard music history treats in isolation. By revealing structural homologies between musical and literary techniques—reprise as temporal doubleness, modulation as spatial depth, key relationships as relational rather than absolute—he reclaims classical music from associations with elite abstraction, positioning it as participating in modernity’s democratic, rationalized cultural production alongside novels and perspectival painting.
Structure
Comparative Analysis → Theoretical Framework → Historical Sweep
The essay opens with direct musical comparison (Purcell versus Haydn) establishing experiential difference before theoretical explanation, grounding abstract argument in audible transformation. It then introduces literary realism as analytical framework, moving through increasingly sophisticated parallels: surface heteroglossia in opera buffa/novels, Ermarth’s theory of communal time-space projection, reprise as temporal technique analogous to present-tense narration of past events, and finally harmonic modulation as spatial depth comparable to linear perspective. The structure repeatedly oscillates between musical and literary examples, with each iteration adding conceptual layers—from texture to form to harmony, from Bakhtin to Ermarth to Panofsky. It concludes with historical qualification (Bach as transitional, conventions enduring into 19th century) that acknowledges gradual transformation while maintaining the revolutionary framing, ending by repositioning “Classical” music from timeless abstraction to worldly significance.
Tone
Erudite, Pedagogical & Subtly Polemical
The tone balances specialist expertise with accessible explanation, employing the conductor’s pedagogical voice that guides listeners through complex musical examples while maintaining scholarly authority through theoretical citations. There’s subtle polemic in challenging the “unfortunate label” of “Classical” as giving music “serene, abstract” qualities, advocating instead for hearing it as “endlessly contemporary and loaded with worldly significance.” The writing employs evocative metaphors (baroque music as “embroidered tapestry,” classical as “tour of rococo palace”) that make abstract concepts experientially vivid while never condescending. Rhetorical questions (“where does the piece as a whole take us?” “What changed?”) create dialogic engagement, while periodic direct address (“Compare these two pieces,” “Now try”) positions readers as active participants in discovery rather than passive recipients of expertise, befitting an essay arguing for music’s democratic rather than elite character.
Key Terms
Vocabulary from the Article
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Tough Words
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Bakhtin’s term for the coexistence of multiple distinct voices, languages, or social perspectives within a text, each with competing claims to authority and truth.
“For the literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, writing in the 1930s, the quintessential feature of the modern novel was ‘heteroglossia’: a riotous mixture of voices, characters and styles.”
Mid-18th century musical style characterized by elegant simplicity, clear melodic lines, and lighter texture than baroque counterpoint; transitional style between baroque and classical periods.
“This dazzling variety was imported from the opera house into instrumental music by mid-century galant composers like Giovanni Battista Sammartini and Johann Stamitz.”
A recurring instrumental passage in baroque music that returns in various keys, alternating with contrasting episodes; literally means “little return” in Italian.
“Vivaldi’s concerto movements, for instance, alternate between an orchestral ritornello (‘return’) in various related keys, and more exploratory episodes for the soloist.”
Relating to the study of conscious experience and perception as it appears to awareness, focusing on how phenomena are experienced rather than their objective existence.
“Those local cadences in the Lully are stretched out over longer spans of time in the Corelli, spans that are padded out and given a phenomenological depth by the whirling, repetitive figurations for the soloists.”
Characterized by needless repetition of an idea in different words or using redundant expressions; saying the same thing multiple times without adding new information.
“By contrast, fast-forward a century and a half to Beethoven’s famously long and tautologous endings: they sound like absolutely necessary outcomes of what precedes them.”
Of uniform structure or composition throughout; composed of parts that are all the same kind, making the whole consistent and undifferentiated.
“This all-knowing voice creates the illusion of a shared, quantifiable reality, allowing writers to unify huge volumes of detail through naturalistic vectors of space and time… an ‘energy source everywhere in the work’ that serves to ‘homogenise the medium.'”
Reading Comprehension
Test Your Understanding
5 questions covering different RC question types
1According to the essay, Aristotle believed that realistic art should directly copy the mass of incidental details around us rather than deal with universals.
2What does Sandelson identify as the fundamental innovation that allowed musical structures to afford a sense of narrative in the 18th century?
3Select the sentence that best explains how 18th-century tonality created something analogous to spatial depth in painting.
4Evaluate these statements about the essay’s comparison between musical and literary techniques.
Karol Berger argues that music shifted from Bach’s static “eternal Now” evoking divine timelessness to a dynamic, goal-directed temporal flow by Mozart’s era.
According to Sandelson, baroque music’s lack of forceful endings resulted from having too much internal tension that couldn’t be resolved within the modal system.
Roland Barthes’s observation about Flaubert’s barometer illustrates how realist narrative relies on accumulating insignificant details whose only purpose is evoking reality’s texture.
Select True or False for all three statements, then click “Check Answers”
5What can be inferred about Sandelson’s view of the relationship between musical conventions and Enlightenment philosophy?
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
The Purcell-Haydn comparison spans nearly a century (1680-1774) during which the crucial innovations occurred, providing bookends that make the transformation audible rather than abstract. Purcell represents late baroque aesthetic at its sophisticated peak—elaborate counterpoint with ‘great beauty and sophistication’ but feeling ‘additive rather than cumulative’ with sections like ‘beads’ strung together. Haydn exemplifies fully developed classical style with ‘strongly differentiated beginning, middle and end’ and phrases that are ‘clearly directional, carefully proportioned, and distinct.’ This side-by-side contrast makes experientially vivid what might otherwise remain theoretical, allowing readers to hear how music moves from two-dimensional ’embroidered tapestry’ to three-dimensional narrative ‘tour of a rococo palace.’ The comparison grounds the essay’s theoretical claims in phenomenological difference.
By “inherent doubleness,” Sandelson means that a musical reprise exists simultaneously in two temporal registers: the literal present moment of its sounding and the remembered past of its earlier appearance. When a theme returns, listeners experience both the music as it currently unfolds and their memory of its previous occurrence, with the intervening material creating a sense of journey or elapsed time. This parallels realist novels’ “temporal doubleness”—present-tense narration of past events arranged in clear sequence—which Sandelson connects to Lockean philosophy where ‘relationship between memory and present awareness becomes an increasingly important determiner of personal identity.’ The reprise ‘functions as an index of time elapsed and distance travelled,’ transforming music from static object into narrative experience where listeners track transformation through temporal consciousness.
Tristram Shandy illustrates the anxiety surrounding newly-emerged narrative conventions—the text’s self-consciousness about linear storytelling reveals these techniques were novel enough to generate uncertainty. Sterne satirizes both extremes: pure detail accumulation that ‘stalls the narrative’s forward motion’ and ‘pure forward motion without pausing to take in anything,’ drawing literal plot lines to mock the absurdity of perfectly linear narrative. Sandelson uses this to show that ‘music and literature seem to discover the possibility of integrated, linear storytelling at almost the same time’ and that ‘there were anxieties over it, as one can have only over something in its precarious infancy.’ This demonstrates these weren’t timeless techniques but historical innovations requiring conscious negotiation, supporting his argument that musical and literary realism developed together as cultural responses to similar epistemological shifts.
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This article is classified as Advanced level. It requires significant musical literacy to engage with the comparative listening exercises and technical terminology (counterpoint, ritornello, modulation, tonality), assumes familiarity with literary theory (Bakhtin, Ermarth, Auerbach), and demands ability to track complex structural arguments across multiple domains—music history, literary criticism, art history, philosophy. The interdisciplinary synthesis itself requires sophisticated cognitive work: readers must understand phenomena in each domain individually while grasping the structural homologies Sandelson proposes. The essay employs specialized vocabulary (heteroglossia, phenomenological, isomorphisms, recursion) without extensive definition, expecting readers to either know terms or infer meaning from context. The argument’s cumulative structure means earlier sections establish frameworks essential for later claims, requiring sustained attention and conceptual integration across the full 3,800 words—making this appropriate for advanced readers comfortable with theoretical abstraction and interdisciplinary analysis.
Sandelson argues that unlike older modes which had ‘unique characteristics or flavours,’ modern keys ‘all have the same internal structure’—any major or minor scale is structurally identical. Their significance arises from ‘how you get from one to another’ rather than inherent attributes, making harmonic structure ‘fundamentally relational, not absolute.’ This parallels his observation about realist characters: premodern characters were ‘bundles of allegorical attributes’ with names announcing identity (Christian, Hypocrisy, Goodwill), but in later novels ‘when we meet a new character, they could be just about anyone’—we discover who they are ‘by accompanying them on a journey of experience through time and space.’ Both musical keys and realist characters lack predetermined essential qualities, acquiring meaning through relationships, contexts, and trajectories, reflecting Enlightenment philosophy’s conception of ‘matter as inert extension, devoid of meaning and spirit’ that requires rational measurement to become meaningful.
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