Trends in art

[vinceconaway]

I'm a musician with some art-intensive hobbies (museums, sight-seeing, and having epic friends), and I've noticed that art often moves in waves of simplicity vs complexity*. To take the most obvious example:

60s music and the folk revival were simple

Progressive rock and disco got complex and excessive in performance

Punk was a rebellion back to simplicity

Hair bands revived complexity and grandeur

Grunge was another reversion to simplicity.

As a medievalist and architecture buff, I've noticed the same pattern in building styles.

Romanesque was simple, Gothic excessive, Renaissance reverted to simple, Baroque revived excess, and Neo-classical more simplicity.

As I'm learning and rehearsing a variety of early music I'm enjoying the pattern once again between ars antiqua, ars nova (and subtilior), early renaissance (simplified rhythm), renaissance polyphony, and baroque.

I've seen similar patterns in fashion and painting, and find the whole thing fascinating.

*this is a deep simplification, of course

Comments

[silvrwillow.livejournal.com]

Yes, but that's a very interesting observation! Now, being a music teacher myself, I know that art & music go hand-in-hand and the prevailing styles/formats of one are also reflected in the other. However, looking back through the history & being reminded of this ebb & flow of the tides from one end of the spectrum to the opposite, is indeed fascinating.

[vconaway.livejournal.com]

It is certainly a simplification, but an interesting one to note.

[marrus.livejournal.com]

Is it because the art rebounds against itself, as in the case of music, or because the ebb & flow of the city coffers, as in the case of architecture? ;)

[vconaway.livejournal.com]

That's a good question, and I'm not sure. Art generally tends to move in cycles, and apparently one of the axes involves simplicity/complexity. Judging from the writings of Renaissance music theorists, at least, there is a significant amount of conscious decision making in the process, of art rebounding against itself. Given the little I know about art history, I would say this applies there as well; impressionists against romanticists, and later the pre- Raphaelite brotherhood against them all.

"Classical" music progresses this way, too

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

though at each stage, what is "simple" has its own complexities deeper than its predecessors, and harmonically, rock is like this too.

As things get complex and more rules get bent/broken/replaced by ever more rules to help manage the size of things, there is often a rebellion that starts over.

The fugues of the late Baroque (Bach) were simplified into the Sonata Form structure by his son. The progression of that went in and through Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and well into the Romantic era and the "great split" of Berlioz/Wagner (emphasis on harmony) vs Schumann/Brahams (emphasis on structure), unified into a single vision of the late Romantic by Bruckner, Strauss, and Mahler.

Yet within this there were *3* cases of starting over and going back to a simplicity - Chopin, Satie, and Debussy. Yet if you were to listen harmonically to these three, what they do is still far more complex than anything Bach could have done...it just was a simplification of harmonic structure to get away from the complexities of managing a work on the scale of Mahler or (pre-atonal) Schoenberg who were both the cutting edge of the Romantic movement. Each would become an influence in Stravinsky's peak of his Russian period (1910 to 1920).

In 1923, it happened again - Schoenberg introduced the 12-tone system to help direct his atonal directions (Webern would take it to even simpler levels - constructing raw gems of works at their essence), while Stravinsky and Prokofiev would restore basic structures through neo-classical as a way to contain their polyphonic harmonic tendencies).

Each would progress into the 40s and 50s (Boulez and Stockhausen on one side, Shostakovich, Copland, and Hindemith on the other), until finally yet another break was needed to re-simplify things - and in came Minimalism (Reich and Riley, followed by Adams), and new experiments in culturally native pentatonic scales (Takemitsu and Rautavaara). What made these simple schools more complex than their predecessors was their acceptance of the element of chance into the music, influenced by Cage.

We're probably still 30-40 years from another great revolution in orchestral presentation again back to simplicity. The current threads haven't been fully developed yet, in my opinion, mostly because they are increasingly being cross-fertilized...just as Stravinsky's late period had done starting with Agon.