The Sturm und Drang in Music

Summary

The use of the term Sturm und Drang in the historiography of music raises several questions. The most fundamental of these must be whether it is legitimate to adopt for music the established designation of a movement customarily regarded as purely literary. If such usage is prima facie acknowledged as acceptable, a theoretical basis for it remains to be worked out. Two axes might serve to focus the discussion in a preliminary way: the synchronic and the diachronic.

A synchronic approach examines musical phenomena during the period of the literary Sturm und Drang. Since the term is normally specific to German literature, the music to be considered will be that contained within the German cultural context, that is, written by German composers and, if vocal, using German-language texts. Stylistic aspects of this music will be analyzed to determine whether features comparable to those found in contemporary literature are present. Such features might include rapid changes in diction that produce violent contrasts, or marked emotional content. More generally, it will be asked to what extent the new forms are clearly a departure from the styles and conventions that have gone before.

This kind of typological analysis allows comparison between the literature and the music of a given period and contributes to a contextual profile of cultural change, where each of the arts is considered as a facet of a larger whole. But it stops short of explaining why certain stylistic features appear in music at that moment, and what aspects of contemporary music practice were necessary for their introduction.