Briefly to the principal repertoire

The primary repertoire for this blog is European and European-influenced music from roughly 1890 to 1925. 

By around 1890 the world of creative musicianship in European and European-influenced countries changed in very significant ways, not only with post-Wagnerism, but also, and perhaps more importantly, with the roots of an expanded tonal practice in Debussy, the rush to a radical chromaticism that reached its apex in the years just before WWI, the great flourishing of orchestral and other ensemble timbres, the rise—and reflection in publication—of music with characteristically syncopated rhythms, the incorporation of music into early cinema performance, and the early years of recording.

I believe we have reached a point in time where there is an educational—some are calling it moral—imperative to focus on music that is less than 200 years old and to give substantial attention to music in America (and some say well beyond America). The decisive turn away from older practices occurred 130 years ago, in the 1890s, with the dramatic expansion of timbral effects in Francophone countries (I include Russia here), of dense chromaticism in Germanophone countries, and of specific effects in nationalist movements. By the first decade of the 20th century, American composers had become prominent on the national and international stage, and the quintessential social dances of the 19th century—the waltz, polka, and galop—were either reinterpreted or abandoned for the tango, foxtrot, and one-step (rag).

An extraordinary variety of styles and compositional methods emerged in this quarter century, to which musics we have become accustomed since. As a reminder and as a simple example, here are a few compositions published in the year 1913: 

Marion Bauer, Up the Ocklawaha: Tone Picture for Violin, op. 6; Claude Debussy, Jeux; Rudolf Friml, High Jinks (musical); Victor Herbert, Sweethearts (operetta); Scott Joplin, (with Scott Hayden), Kismet Rag; Manuel Ponce, Doce canciones mexicanas; Max Reger, 4 Tondichtungen für grosses orchester (nach Arnold Böcklin); Erik Satie, Chapitres tournés en tous sens; Arnold Schoenberg, Sechs kleine Klavierstücke, op. 19; Aleksandr Scriabin, Piano Sonata no.10, op.70; Germaine Tailleferre, Berceuse for violin and piano; J. S. Zamecnik, Sam Fox Moving Picture Music, volume 1; and violin sonatas by John Alden Carpenter, Leland Cossart, Ernö Dohnányi, Erich Korngold, Daniel Gregory Mason, and Julius Weissman. 

Just as important for the first century of audio recording, here are some piano rolls published in 1913: 

Eugen d’Albert plays his music and works by Bach, Couperin, Korngold, Liszt, Rubenstein, and Sinding; Harry L. Alford plays Bach, Kunst der Fuge; Mike Bernard plays John Lindsay’s Aisha: An Indian Intermezzo; A. Brown plays Victor Herbert's "Won't You Be My Valentine?"; Debussy plays his Children’s Corner; Rudolph Ganz plays his music and pieces by Brahms, Chaminade, Glazounov, Godard, Grieg, Korngold, Saint-Saëns, Schumann-Raff, and Wagner; B. Goodall, selections from Sullivan's The Mikado; Enrique Granados, nine rolls of his music; B. Sarrazin plays Irving Berlin's "When You're In Town" (march); Ernest Van Dyck plays Silvio Hein's "The Maurice" (tango); Fanny Weiland plays Hugo Kaun's "Waldesgespräch," op. 78, and MacDowell's Virtuoso Studies, op. 46.

Pedagogy has shied away from the era for the obvious reason of complexity, but traditional practice and extensions and reinterpretations cover most of the ground, albeit at a cost if we insist on them in terms of some kind of absolute priority: earlier practices based heavily on 18th-century Italian pedagogical and performance-practice models have become myths of universal values, even supposed universal models of music cognition. Those myths are deeply embedded in Schenkerian analysis, the original form of prolongational analysis, too. The repertoire of this era teaches us to be more flexible for the sake of the best practical understanding.