THE GENRE PROJECT - January 9 - Serenade
Genre of the Day - Serenade
Album of the Day - Antonin Dvorák: Serenades as performed by Sir Neville Marriner’s Academy of St. Martin in the Fields (1982)
Today’s genre is one that I had not ever realized was a genre of its own rather than a simple song-type classification. It’s fascinating when you can see the throughline by which the foundational types of music we’ve been enjoying for hundreds of years continue into types of songs we recognize and revere to this day. To serenade a lover is still seen as one of the most romantic things, unless you’re an aspiring DJ trying to play your shitty, Logic Pro music to someone on a second date.
That being said, a serenade technically refers to a tradition in western classical music that has mutated and persisted through the eras—in its earliest form, a musical piece to honor someone (which is where the term stems from), then a dramatic song performed by a duo specifically outdoors, then as we see it today as developed in the Classical and Romantic periods multi-movement, romantic, light orchestral pieces. While the definition I read says that they tend to avoid overly dramatic musical moments, I felt this was not totally true in the album I listened to.
Today’s album was the straightforward enough Dvorák: Serenades - no reading in between the lines there for whether it really ‘fits’ the genre. The album consists of two opuses, which I found to be wildly different—the first, Opus 22, has some of the most beautiful, sweeping melodies I’ve been blessed to hear in classical music and it simply sweeps the listener off one’s feet, as one would hope a masterful serenade could do. Opus 44, the second work, is also quite beautiful but feels much more dramatic and even menacing and dark at times, which strikes me as out of genre conventions but I suppose the paradigms of what constitutes lighter versus darker fare are different in classical music than what I might be used to.
Nonetheless, even though I feel there’s less to say about today’s genre compared to some of the other albums I’ve heard—which might just be caused by my brain fry from the first day of three classes of the semester for me—this music is wonderfully emotive with an emphasis on beautiful, gleaming melodies that one can’t find in every genre. When looking for music to accompany a beautiful summer evening, one shouldn’t look any further than a serenade to soothe the soul.