Musical Offerings, Spring 2019

Musical Offerings ⦁ 2019 ⦁ Volume 10 ⦁ Number 1 45 In this same way, Emanuel Bach is just one of many such artists in history who were ahead of their time. Although Beethoven is usually thought to be the forerunner of Romanticism in music because of the way he inspired later Romantic composers, the ideas and characteristics of Romanticism can be traced back to Emanuel Bach and his empfindsamer Stil . The research presented in this article—and similar research on other composers who were also ahead of their time—is important because it helps musicologists develop a more subtle understanding of music history. Musicologist James Webster discusses the benefits and problems with the traditional “periodization” of European music: A historical period is a construction. Periods don’t just happen; still less are they given “objectively” in the historical record. . . On the contrary, a periodization is not so much true or false, as a reading , a way of making sense of complex data. . . . In recent German historiography, finally, much has been made of the ‘contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous’ and its converse. A simple example in our field is the common notion that an artwork is ‘ahead of its time’ (which admittedly makes less sense the longer one ponders it). As a generalized methodology it encourages historians to consider events from different times and domains as belonging together (emphasis mine). 38 In other words, musicologists are beginning to realize that the traditional method of organizing music history into neat, tidy “periods” has its limitations. The method can be useful as a convenient framework for making sense of music history, but there are always exceptions to these periods. This is what Webster means when he refers to art that is ahead of its time and the idea that art from different times can belong together. Based on this, one could argue that Emanuel Bach’s empfindsamer Stil belonged in the same musical period as Beethoven, even though he preceded Beethoven chronologically by over fifty years. 38 James Webster, “Between Enlightenment and Romanticism in Music History: ‘First Viennese Modernism’ and the Delayed Nineteenth Century,” 19th-Century Music 25, no. 2-3 (2001): 110, doi : 10.1525/ncm.2001.25.2- 3.108 .