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0:09
Alright, we have now reached the year 1750. We're moving into the Classical Period which runs from 750 to about 1820. It's the period of time of Mozart and Haydn; people that you would recognize. So let's get a little overview of what the Classical Period was like outside of the music world. This is a period of time that we call Classical because the focus, sort of generally, was on what was really classical from that period of time and that would have been ancient Greece
0:42
and Rome. So, we're looking at art architecture theater lots of things from that period of time and sort of reinterpreting those for what, at the time, would have been modern styles. So, remember we've just come out of the Baroque Period which was very emotional, very over-decorated architecturally speaking, sort of a busy period musically speaking; all that polyphonic texture and lots of notes. So, we're swinging back the other way and what we're really going to focus on now
1:15
is order and symmetry and balance. Those are the real hallmarks of classical style. Think about all those ancient Greek and Roman buildings, lots of marble very stylized you know; if it's got columns, they're all exactly the same, don't see gold anywhere, everything is white and clean and beautiful. That's sort of the idea that classical thinking was following. As I said, we keep swinging back and forth, we have a little pendulum that goes back and forth.
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The Baroque Period is very emotional. So the Classical Period is much more rational and reasoned. In fact, we call this the Age of Enlightenment, or the age of reason. There are very important names in this period of time that have to do with that. A lot of them are our Founding Fathers. So we have Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, both who are very much interested in the idea of enlightenment; bringing people to knowledge, that's basically what enlightenment means. Voltaire,
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a French writer, very much interested in... about how people thought and what was important. I had the good fortune a couple weeks ago of seeing a production of his most famous work which is called "Candide," which is a whole play about a man named Candide who is taught that the whole secret to life is being optimistic, and if you're optimistic then everything works out just great, and all these terrible things happen, you know. He's
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shipwrecked and sent all over the place and people get hurt and die and he just keeps going, "Yeah, but if I'm optimistic it'll all turn out!" Well and you know at the end he decides that optimism is not really the solution and becomes a farmer so. But you know Voltaire was tackling a concern that people had. What is gonna make us happy? That whole idea about the pursuit of happiness, doesn't it sound familiar? That's Thomas Jefferson in a nutshell. Pursuit of happiness is right
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there in our official government documents. So, it's not that they thought everybody had to be happy, and obviously that's never going to happen. Nobody's ever... we can't make everybody happy. But the idea was, how can we become more happy? What will make us happier? How do we pursue that idea of happiness? So, a lot of things that are happening in this period of time are really kind of focused on that. How can we make things better for ourselves?
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Now remember when we talked about the Baroque Period we already talked about the scientific method. Experiment observation... experimentation interpretation. So in the Classical Period we take what we're learning from that. We have a lot of knowledge now. We've learned a lot of things. How can we apply that to make our lives better? So it's not just science for the sake of it. Let's make it be useful! That seems like it sort of makes sense to me. Why not? But that's really a fairly new
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idea at the time. In France, this is the period of time that the first encyclopedia was developed. You remember encyclopedias? They came before Wikipedia! So, the whole idea of gathering all the knowledge we had in the world and putting it in one place, that comes from the Classical Period. It took them 30 years to put it together. Think about how much information we've had on the Internet which has probably only been around about 30 years now and just massive amounts of information. But
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this was a big deal at this particular period of time. So the French brought us the encyclopedia. So, we're using reason now. That's a really important part. But, in previous periods, if we were talking about reason and science we were really looking at mathematical approaches to things. How can we prove things mathematically? But when we get into the Classical Period, it's more of an experiential approach to reasoning. What have we experienced? What is that teaching us?
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Doesn't have to be mathematical! So, that's a little change which seems sort of contradictory from the idea of moving from emotion to reason. It sounds almost like you're going the other direction, but that's an important step. So as I said, the pursuit of happiness was a very important concept and remember that the Baroque Period was a very religious kind of time. Emotion and religion often go together. So, in this period of time, we're seeing that swing back again to more
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emphasis on how we can make our lives here better rather than worry about how great our life will be in the afterlife; not that we've thrown it out but that we're trying to make our everyday life equally good. This is also a period of time of a lot of revolution. So, remember we're in the 1700's here. We've got the American Revolution. We've got the French Revolution. We have lots of Latin American countries which have been all invaded by European conquerors over the last several hundred years
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who are now saying, "Hey, we want our countries back." So, there's a lot of that sort of thing going on. And you move over to Europe, the British are still running around the world taking things over. Now the British Empire is growing. They have moved into Australia where of course they send all their prisoners and... the ones they didn't send to Georgia in America they sent to Australia. They've also taken over South Africa from the Dutch, so they've opened up that seaway for themselves.
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So the British are moving all over the place, and then the Americas were sort of throwing people out, and then the French are trying to figure out how to make their own country work a little better. The other big revolution from the period is the Industrial Revolution. Now we have major industrial growth in this period of time, and one of the important effects of that is that we move from being a very agricultural society in previous periods
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to being a more industrialized society. So this is where we sort of start to see the beginning of the whole idea of the first and second and third world kind of approaches to things. We have the industrialized world, you have the agricultural world. This is all the way back in the 1700's. So as we get industrialized we have more business, more industry. We also see growth of a middle-class. Up to this point you pretty much have the rich people, kings, queens, other royal types of people,
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you have the church hierarchy, and then you have everybody who works for them. And there's really not much in the middle. Once we start to have this industrial approach, we have a middle-class, and that's important for art and music in particular as we will see as we move on later. So what are some of the important inventions of this period of time? This is one of the... there's sort of a spiraling thing we've got going here.
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They made a lot of improvements to the equipment that they used to spin wool. So we're spinning wool more efficiently which means that we can now have more textile factories. Even in America, especially in the south in this period of time textiles are a very big business and that continues all the way up through the Civil War. To feed all these mills that are now making lots of fabric we have to get cotton more quickly. So, we have Eli Whitney who invented the cotton gin,
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which made it possible get the seeds out of the cotton more quickly, which means we can get to the mill more quickly, which means we could get the fabric out more quickly. So that all sort of spiraled together. This is also the time period that the steam engine was invented which leads to the development of the railroad which we will see, particularly in the next period of time, is very significant because that's a way for us to now transport all those things
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that we are building with our lovely new industry. This is not an industrial thing; this is an important event from the period of time. This is... during this period of time, they were able to excavate the ancient city of Pompeii which had been buried by the volcano, Vesuvius, in the year 79. So in 1748, nearly seventeen- hundred years later, they dug out Pompeii which was an entire city that was completely covered by lava and ash, and it all happened so quickly
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that almost everything that was undernearth was preserved. So when they dug it out, they actually found entire houses. They found people who were frozen in places they ran from the... from the volcano. But a lot of the artwork and decoration that was underneath is still preserved. They just needed to wipe off all the dirt and ash and they had all these beautiful things here. So this was a big, big event. This was the hot
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tourist attraction of the time. Look, here's a seventeen hundred year old city we can go visit and look at all this cool stuff and it probably didn't hurt that a lot of it was kind of racy in terms of what people were used to seeing in the 1700's because in 79, people were a little bit more liberal about things than they became later. So people went there to see... to see the things that were in Pompeii, many of which are now moved and put in museums so they're safer but
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you could just go and see it right where it was. But architects were also very much interested in this. So we see, in architecture from the time where they have taken motifs from what they found in all those ancient Pompeiian homes and moved them into modern buildings in 1700. Versailles has lots of Pompeiian themes in it. It was a very popular thing to do. Interior decorators also liked to use, you know, there were lots of spiffy
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design things that they liked to do and interior decorators are always borrowing from the past so that was a thing that they could do. We're going to take a look at one of the most famous houses from Pompeii. It's called the Villa of the Mysteries, and, you know, a villa is just a big house and there were lots of those and this is part of a big room that they called the initiation chamber. If you know anything about ancient Greek and Roman history you know that there are a lot of ceremonies for
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bringing boys into manhood, that sort of thing. So there are all these secret rituals that they would do to bring them into adulthood and apparently, they... this particular room was sort of a lesson on... on that process. So there are lots of wonderful art works on the wall, like a picture of Dionysius who was the Roman god of lust or something I think, who was popular. I mean, today we would think, "Oh, you put that on the wall of your house?" but
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there he is. So, you can look through this and see lots of different paintings and you might think about where you might have seen these kinds of ideas put into place in other design work. The use of gold leaf we saw in the Baroque period but they didn't know about Pompeii at that time. The using of drapery we'll see in paintings later, that that's sort of how we illustrated royalty and such or high-ranking people would be put... drapes and columns and things.
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It all comes right out of this idea of the things that Pompeii had. So you can take a look at that at your leisure. I'll give you that link. So, in architecture we've not only got these influences from Pompeii but we also have, as we said, all those influences from ancient Greece and Rome. So we have all those wonderful things like the Coliseum and the Acropolis and every temple you can think of from there. So, if you walk around any major city in America
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and in many cities in Europe, you will see the same sort of designs. You will see columns. You will see a lot of marble and if you walk around Washington, DC it is is a classical paradise. Everything looks sort of ancient Greek and Roman; clean, balanced, symmetrical. Symetrical is really important. If you've got a square building, a lot of times it will even be in a quadrangle so that it is a wholly square building. If it's got
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a dome in the middle, then it's going to have balanced sides, so there will be wings on either side that are balanced just like the White House, the US Capitol, most capitol buildings in the whole country. So that's a really classical idea. Think about Thomas Jefferson's house. He studied the works of Palladio who was an architect from way back and took his ideas and put them into Monticello. So, we see that all over the place in architecture, so that's a really
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clean, clear way to look at the classical ideal. It's much easier to see in the architecture than in anything else. It's also a really nice illustration of ABA form which is a very balanced form, which we will also see when we look at the music of the period. So let's look now at some of the artistic elements from the Classical Period. Let's think about the visual arts. As I said, there were a lot of revolutions going on during this period of time and artists were often sort of the
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PR people for revolution. But we didn't have TV, radio... we had newspapers. But the big thing, if you want to promote your political agenda would be to have an artist do a nice work for you. So, in France which was undergoing the French Revolution at the time, and Napoleon is a big character at the time, one of the most famous artists of that particular movement is Jacques-Louis David, who did a couple of paintings that we're going to look at here. The first is called, "Death of Marat,"
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who was a revolutionary and was murdered by someone who didn't agree with with what he was doing and so he wrote a lot of papers, he was sort of a political writer I guess we would say today. So the painting that we have of him is right at the time of his death. He had a skin disease so he had to spend a lot time in like a medicated bath, so he spent a lot of time in the bath tub. Nice life if you can get it, right? So he's in his bathtub
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and the murderer comes in and kills him in the bathtub. Well they immediately called David in to sketch this because he was the, you know he was the political painter for the movement and they wanted to make sure that they got this shot, and when they didn't have camera, so that they could use this to keep their revolution going, you know, it's like any... you know the photograph of the person in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square. It's powerful so they knew the power of that and they
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used that. So, if we look at this painting we can see that we have poor Marat dead in his bathtub but he's got a document in his hand. If we could read the French then we could probably tell that that's saying something important and it's not grizzly, you know it's not like blood, it's not a CSI bloodbath scene but its powerful and it sends a message to that audience about the importance of this revolution. Now Napoleon liked David's work a lot and had him
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paint him numerous times. There's a really wonderful painting of him with the sort of classic got his hand in the coat painting everybody thinks about Napoleon with lots of the relics of his power about him, you know, a map of the world and various documents and things. The one that we're going to look at here is a painting of Napoleon going off to battle. So he is on a horse. Big, powerful, "Hey, I'm the guy!" kind of painting. He actually did like five or six of this particular kind
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of painting so they could be all over the world. You know they didn't have duplicating machines or printers so you would just do lots of them and they would get there and they would all be a little bit different from each other. But it was a way of keeping that revolutionary idea going. You know, here's our leader, he's on a big white horse, he's looking very powerful. Follow this man; it's sending a message to us. So that's what's happening in France.
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Let's see what's happing in America, where we're also going through revolution. Of of the most famous American painters from the time is John Singleton Copley whose name might seem familiar to you because his name is all over the city of Boston. He was obviously an American painter. He was from Boston. He, I was trying to think, was largely self-taught. He went to... studied abroad later but he mostly sort of got himself going. The first painting that we're looking at is of Paul Revere,
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you know the ultimate American Revolutionary War let's do it kinda guy. So you might think if we were going to follow David's model where we have Napoleon on his big horse, you know why not have Paul Revere galloping through town yelling, "The British are coming," or doing whatever he was doing? No, he chooses to put it in a more relaxed kind of portrait style and as we look at portraits of people in these time periods, you know usually they're dressed in their best clothes
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and they're looking very proper and they're... they're just like a formal painting kinda thing. Copley decided to make this a little more informal so we've got Paul Revere in his shirt sleeves. He's not even wearing a jacket. He's just got on a shirt and a vest and he's holding a piece of silverwork because he was after all a silversmith. So it's like he's thinking about this teapot in his hand. He's looking very pensive about it but he still has a sense of authority. You know this is not a man
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who's just sort of a... "yeah, I've got this bowl in my hand." Paul Revere was a very influential man in his time. He was very well off. The silversmithing business was good and obviously he's one of the heroes of our Revolution. Let's contrast that to another painting by Copley which is the one that actually made him a lot of money. Just kind of a bonus - if you're an artist you get to make a lot of money. This painting's called Watson and the Shark. This is kind of a
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revolutionary painting for the time period not in the sense of the revolutions we've been talking about but because it's a bit ahead of its time in terms of the subject matter. You know the paintings we've been looking at so far you know if you get a you know we've got Napolean on his horse he's out there but it's a very noble kind of thing. It's not... it doesn't really tell us a story. This painting tells us a story and it is a dramatic story.
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So as you look at this painting, this is from a true event. Watson is the poor man in the water and this happened in Havana Harbor so this is in Cuba and he had fallen into the water and a shark bit off his leg. So we have this huge shark in the painting and I doubt that Copley ever actually saw a shark so he probably had to do a little studying to get any sense of that and if you see the painting live, it's a pretty good size.
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It's a big shark and if, knowing what we know about sharks now, you think, well, you know, yeah, it's a shark but... really? You know it's sort of like you and I would draw a shark perhaps. But it's a very dramatic story. We've got the shark here, and he's got his mouth open and the guy's already missing his leg and there's blood in the water and they're all his friends in the boat above him who are trying to either drag him out of the water or
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to stab the shark. So its an action-packed kind of story. Way ahead of its time. We really don't see that kind of painting until the next period of time when we get into the Romantic Period where this kind of thing is very common. Let's get some drama going. That's what we like. So those are some of the things that are going on in the visual arts. Mostly things that are sort of promoting the political agenda of the day but also some storytelling. So, let's talk a little bit about
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musicians in the period of time, we're not going to talk about the music itself, we'll do that later, but musicians themselves. So if you're a musician in the Classical Period, what did you do for a living? Most of the time you worked for somebody else. We call that the patronage system. So you would have a patron who employed you. You might work for a church, you know, you might work for the archbishop and do church music. You might work at a court
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where you you were in charge of the court orchestra. You wrote music for that orchestra. You conducted that orchestra. You led the choir if they had one. If there was a special event you had to prepare everything musical for that. So those were kind of the big things that people, musicians did for employment. Some composers did very well in that system. Haydn thrived and he just had it going
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with that. He worked for the same court for a very long time. Mozart, another big name from this period of time really didn't like that system at all. He didn't like working for somebody else. He had to do it sometimes but he just didn't like doing it, and as we see in the next period of time that sort of model goes away. But for now if you're a composer, for the most part, you're gonna work for somebody else or any kind of musician, work for somebody else and basically be like
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a glorified servant. Now, this is a period of time, remember we have the middle class rising, So we now start to see public concert halls. Up until this point if you wanted to hear what we would think of as artsy kind of music, you needed to know somebody who had somebody working for them. So you would go to the court or you would go to a church kind of thing to hear musicians perform. You couldn't just buy a ticket and go. In the Classical Period we start to see that happening. We see public
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opera houses opening. We see some public concert halls. Not so much concerts because we didn't really have the piano yet that could play and really fill that up, so it would be orchestral music. But you could go to a concert and hear music. And if you came to America and you wanted to go to such an event it would be a very different kind of experience. In America, remember we're still a very young country at the time. We have a few big... biggish cities and those cities have
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musical groups because we have musicians and in fact many of the big cities actually had what we called musical societies. In Charleston (SC), they had the Saint Cecilia Society. Saint Cecilia is the patron saint of music. Boston has the... I think it's called the Bach and Haydn Society which still exists. So they would have these groups that promoted art music. Mostly they're promoting European composers. We're getting our stuff from them. It's coming this direction. We haven't
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quite developed enough sense of ourselves that we can say, "Hey we have our own composers that are worth listening to," so we're listening to composers from other countries, primarily Europe. So if you went to an event where they were going to be playing this kind of music it would really be more like what we think of today is a variety show. So you might hear an orchestral work. You might hear a soprano sing something from Mozart's latest opera. You might have a piano something played.
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You might have a flute solo. You might have any number of different things. So it wouldn't be like today when you go to a concert and you mostly get like all... it's an orchestra concert, or it is a vocal concert or whatever. It was more of a 'everything you could get.' You know, we're pre-TV here. We're going to give them everything they want in one show. So, a big kind of show. Now our Founding Fathers not only were very much interested in education and enlightenment and that, they were also
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in many cases musicians themselves. Thomas Jefferson played the violin George Washington played the flute. Benjamin Franklin played the guitar. He also invented a musical instrument. He invented an instrument called the glass harmonica and basically what it was is a bunch of glass, I mean basically like glasses you would drink out of, and he would put water in them, and you put different levels of water, and you run your finger around the rim of it,
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and you get different pitches. This was a legitimate musical instrument. Mozart actually wrote a piece for glass harmonica. It's a very interesting sound cause it's sort of like "eeeeee..." It's very high pitched cause it's... if you've ever run your finger around a piece of crystal you know what that sound is like. If you saw the movie Miss Congeniality with Sandra Bullock, that was her talent. She had a glass harmonica. I think I was in New Orleans one time and
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there was a guy on the street who had his glass harmonica out on the street. So, it is a legitimate instrument and Benjamin Franklin invented it. You know, we think about him inventing lots of things but that's not first on your hit parade. There's a really interesting website about the glass harmonica that talks about you know that the weird sounds can make you go crazy and stuff like that. So it's got kind of an interesting
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read just to see what they thought about it. So the last point I want to make about musicians in this period of time is about women. You know, in the Baroque Period if you went to the opera or even to the theater, Shakespeare, all the roles are played by men. Even in the female roles. So you would have men playing women's roles. When we get into the Classical Period, that changes. Women now sing their own parts in the opera.
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You're still not going to see women in the orchestra. You're not going to see many women as solo performers. There are not any famous piano players for example that we know about. But they could be in the opera because singing was a lady-like sort of thing. That was something that was acceptable for women to do. And as we'll see as we look at opera in more detail later, sometimes women even sang men's roles in the opera!
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So that's kind of a radical thing. So, thinking about the Classical Period; focus, balance, symmetry, lots of revolution going on, and all the arts sort of tie into that. So now we'll move on and talk about the music of that period.
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