Duration and Structure:
- Romanticism: Romantic music is known for its free and flexible forms and structures. It often breaks away from traditional classical structures and can be quite expansive in length, with movements lasting well over 20 minutes.
- Modernism: Modern music often experiments with innovative structures and unconventional forms, such as atonality, polytonality, and irregular meters. It challenges traditional harmonic and melodic structures and tends to be more compact and concise in duration compared to Romantic music.
Compositional Style:
- Romanticism: Romantic composers sought to express their individual emotions, feelings, and subjective experiences through their music. The focus was on emotion, drama, and storytelling, often with a strong narrative thread. Themes of nature, love, heroism, and the mystical were prevalent.
- Modernism: Modern composers pursued new ideas and techniques, exploring avant-garde and experimental forms of expression. They often disregarded traditional tonality and embraced dissonance, atonality, and a wide range of unorthodox musical elements to challenge conventional aesthetics and create unique sonic landscapes.
Instrumentation and Orchestration:
- Romanticism: Romantic music expanded the use of the orchestra, with larger forces, richer textures, and a greater variety of instruments. Many Romantic composers explored new orchestral colors, using different instrumental combinations, extended instrumental techniques, and effects to produce vibrant and expressive sounds.
- Modernism: Modern music brought about radical changes in instrumentation and orchestration. Non-traditional instruments, electronic sound production, and extended playing techniques became common. Modernist composers often incorporated unconventional sounds and unconventional combinations to create novel sonic experiences.
Tonality and Harmony:
- Romanticism: Romantic music is generally tonal, centered around traditional key centers and harmonic progressions. However, it often pushed the boundaries of tonality with expanded harmony, chromaticism, and occasional moments of dissonance for dramatic effect.
- Modernism: Modern music challenges traditional tonal systems, embracing atonality, polytonality, and pandiatonicism (the use of all 12 notes without clear tonal centers). Atonal music lacks a clear tonal hierarchy and explores more complex and dissonant harmonic relationships.
Rhythm, Meter, and Tempo:
- Romanticism: Romantic music often features expressive rubato (variations in tempo) and flexible rhythms to add depth and emotion to the music. Tempo changes to create dramatic effects are also common.
- Modernism: Modern music experiments with complex rhythmic structures, unconventional meters (such as odd time signatures or polyrhythms), and sudden tempo shifts to disrupt traditional rhythmic expectations.
Influence of Technology:
- Romanticism: Technology had a limited impact on Romantic music, which was primarily composed for acoustic instruments and traditional ensembles.
- Modernism: Modernism saw the rise of electronic music, tape recorders, synthesizers, and other technological advancements, which greatly influenced the composition and performance of music. Electronic and electroacoustic music flourished during this period.
In summary, Romantic music places emphasis on emotional expressiveness, dramatic storytelling, and subjective experiences, often within a tonal and structured framework. Modern music, on the other hand, embraces innovation, experimental techniques, and a rethinking of traditional musical structures, tonality, and instrumentation, resulting in a diverse range of styles that challenged conventional musical aesthetics.