Unfortunately however, they are usually not so appropriate for earlier music, in the same way that the characteristics of a baroque bow make it inappropriate for playing Romantic music. All of these characteristics were (and still are) necessary for the playing of Romantic Music and for playing in large concert halls. These changes facilitated sostenuto, legato phrasing, with more equality between downbows and upbows, as well as favouring greater volume and the use of spiccato. Not only did the bow design change radically, but also those design changes caused the bowhold to move towards the frog from its Baroque position further up the stick. Heavier and longer than the baroque bow, more “springy” (bouncy) thanks to its concave rather than convex bowstick, and with its centre of gravity displaced further away from the frog, the modern bow has quite different playing characteristics to the baroque bow. In this period, the cello (and violin/viola) bow mutated into a very different creature from its Renaissance (and earlier) beginnings. The revolution in performance practice associated with the arrival of the Romantic style was greatly facilitated by the radical changes that occurred in bow design near the end of the 18th century. We will however look in detail at the new characteristics of Romantic phrasing and aesthetics because these make completely new demands on both our left and right-hand techniques. On this page, we won’t be looking at the harmonic aspects of this revolution/evolution (the stretching of the boundaries of harmony, increasing chromaticism and greater use of dissonance) because these elements of the Romantic musical language represent a new challenge principally for our aural and reading abilities. The Romantic Style represents such a radical evolutionary step from the preceding Classical and Baroque Styles that in many ways it could be considered as their stylistic opposite. For a discussion of the History and Repertoire of the Romantic Period click on the highlighted link. In this article, we will discuss Romantic style and interpretation. So composers such as Gershwin, Bernstein and Lloyd-Webber are found in the “Popular” section rather than in this “Post-Romantic” section.The Romantic Period in music can be considered as roughly starting with Chopin, Schumann and Mendelssohn, all born around 1810. The “Old-Classical” composers are located in the “ Romantic Period” catalogue while the “Popular” music composers are found in the “ Popular” catalogue (of which in fact all the music apart from the folk and traditional is from the 20th century). Here, in this “Post-Romantic” section of the cellofun catalogue, you will find cellofun editions of music composed only by the “New Classical” composers. In their purest pedigree manifestations, these three different types of 20th-century music are very different from each other, however there are many composers and pieces which, rather than fitting exclusively into one category, cross the borders between them, mixing up the different styles in every imaginable way. “New Classical” (the music tending towards atonality, dodecaphony and cacophony of Schönberg etc), and.“Old Classical”(the still-strongly Romantic music of Saint Saens, Elgar, Rachmaninoff and Richard Strauss etc).
Music of the 20th-century could therefore be considered as falling into three very different categories:
Composers such as Saint Saens (1835-1921), Elgar (1857-1934), Rachmaninoff (1873-1943) and Richard Strauss (1864-1949) continued writing music in a very Romantic style well into the 20th century, while others were already writing with the radically different “Modern” musical languages of impressionism, atonality, serialism and jazz. But not all “classical” composers embraced Schonberg’s “emancipation of dissonance”. The flowering of “popular” music through the development of ragtime, jazz, pop, rock etc occurred at the same time as (and probably as a consequence of) the disintegration of the classical music world. And here, the “classical music” world took a totally separate path from the “ popular music” world (see the article “ Differences Between Popular and Classical Music“). In the “Classical” music department, rather than a stylistic evolution this was a revolution, tipping the musical language upside-down and questioning the most basic concepts of what constitutes music. While the transformations between the principal musical periods were normally quite gradual evolutions (see Historical Periods), the transition from the Romantic to the Post-Romantic (or Modern) period in musical history was particularly radical.
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