history of art

It can be argued that the vanguard of development has always been reflected in the arts of a culture. It is the poets, the dreamers and artists who are the architects of the future; the ones who build the world they want to live in, the ones who dream out loud1. Music is an elaborate art form, tempered by the emotions of those who create it and as such the dreams, creations and inventions are partly the products – or at least artifacts – of the world around them. As such, the social, economic and technological changes in society reflect themselves in the arts of the time also. The common question Does art imitate life, or does life imitate art? when inspected proves rhetorical: they are parallel mirrors which reflect each other.

W.H. Auden best expressed this when he said, A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

Tracing the course of musical development through history shows how closely music (of all the art forms) in particular represents the time in which it was written. The immediacy Auden speaks of is evidenced in musics ability to associate itself with a specific point in time or event and always remind the listener of that time or place. It is impossible to analyse individual interpretation of music, however it is interesting to examine what caused musicians to write what they did, when they did. The personal interpretation or association of a work is superimposed; it is the music going on ...

history of art

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