![]() ![]() This means that one is morally bound to serve the impersonal aims of history, an idea that has been one of the most powerful motivating forces and one of the most demanding criteria of value in the history of music. For T&G ( 2013), through this Hegelian approach, “many people have believed that the history of music has a purpose and that the primary obligation of musicians is not to meet the needs of their immediate audience, but, rather, to help fulfill that purpose-namely, the furthering of the evolutionary progress of the art. 5 Brendel casts his narrative in terms of successive emancipations of composers and the art of music (emancipation from the sacred, emancipation from words, etc.). ![]() Source: Assembled by the author on the basis of general music information and dictionaries (e.g., Taruskin and Gibbs 2013)Īs claimed by Gatherer ( 1997), “a dialectical approach to music evolution would seek to identify the internal stylistic tensions and contradictions (in terms of thesis and antithesis) which give rise to new musical forms (synthesis).” Franz Brendel (1811–68), a doctor of philosophy, is the first self-consciously Hegelian historian of music and, according to Taruskin and Gibbs ( 2013), henceforth T&G ( 2013), his great achievement was to write the nineteenth century’s most widely disseminated history of music. According to music historians (some of) their works have contributed to a transition from one style/period to another. Along the diagonal line we find ‘transitional’ composers and/or ‘innovators. ![]() Composers located along vertical lines have pursued and developed further the style of their periods with some degree of intra-period cross-imitation. Note At the bottom of vertical lines we find ‘earlier’ composers (e.g., Frescobaldi for early Baroque) at the top we find ‘later’ composers (e.g., JS Bach for of High/Late Baroque). Partial outline of Western classical music and composers. Along the diagonal line are some ‘transitional’ and/or ‘innovative’ composers whose works (or at least some of them) have been assessed by musicologists to contribute to a transition from one period to another. Others composers (not necessarily shown), may gravitate around them, extending the volume of music production in an essentially imitative style. ![]() 3 Along vertical lines are composers who have developed and perfected (or pushed to the limit) the musical style of their period. Figure 1 conveys this development and proposes a (narrow) historical time line for music periods (e.g., Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic and Modern/twentieth century) and some composers belonging to these periods. This overall development is not due to simple creative genius alone, but to the influence of past masters and genres, as constrained or facilitated by the cultural conditions of time and place. Western classical music evolved gradually, branching out over time and throwing off many new styles. This leads to a second objective of the paper, which is to propose a statistical framework that could identify transitional figures, innovators and followers in the development of Western classical music. Uncovering what makes two composers similar, in a systematic way, has important economic implications for (1) the music information retrieval business (2) a deeper insight into musical product definition and choice offered to music consumers and purchasers and (3) for our understanding of innovation in the creative industry. Even if no audio file is used in the analysis, ‘sounding alike’ is used in this paper as a proxy (or shortcut) with the specific meaning that the music of two composers is similar in ecological/musical characteristics and/or personal musical influences (as defined below). 2 This paper addresses the subjective issue, using well-established similarity indices (e.g., the centralised cosine similarity measure) based on measurable criteria. 1 That two composers, or their music, ‘sound alike’ or ‘sound different’ is inherently a subjective statement, made by a listener, which depends on many factors, including the degree of familiarity to classical music per se. First, the paper contributes to the music information retrieval literature by establishing similarities between classical music composers. ![]()
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