G. Rybintseva

Functional Harmony of Classicism and Social Development Concepts in the 18th – first half of the 19th Century

Musical classicism made a cadence progression the leading harmonic means of organizing musical material, from small sections to musical form as a whole. The basis of cadence progression is the spatial and semantic opposition of the main harmonic functions - tonic subdominant and dominant that corresponds to the dialectical principle of unity of opposing principles formulated by G. Hegel in the considered period of history. The harmonic progression corresponding to the cadence formula (T – S – T, T – D – T, T – S – D – T) allows to create a sense of circularity or spiralness of the sound process. This suggests that, in addition to the “musical-technological” functions, the cadence also performs an ideological function, since it allows creating sound analogs of the concepts of social development that were formed at this stage in the history. Among such concepts is Jambattista Vico`s theory of the historical cycle and the concept of the spiral history of George Hegel. The possibility of finding correspondences between the teachings of Hegel and the music of classicism (in particular, L. Beethoven) is confirmed by the principles that form the basis of the structure of the cadre turnover. These principles fully comply with the laws of Hegelian dialectics, explaining the causes, mechanism and direction of any, including musical, development.

Key words

social development, historicism, dialectics, circulation, functional harmony, cadence progression.

• Read full article