Tolkien, Biedermeier music, the beautiful, and those awkward and misshapen

[Balapoel]

Not sure if this fits here, but for me, it gave much food for thought. This is a quote from Tolkien's "On Fairy Stories" the section on recovery, escape, and consolation. As I read it, I was reminded of the forces arguing that the there was nothing new to be found in tonal music (and romantic music specifically) [the so-called 'crisis of tonality'].  These lines made me think explicitly of relationships of composers writing in romantic styles in the 19th century (our purview here) and those that increasingly moved away from these models in the early 20th century.

My sentiments echo Tolkien's, and I find my love of much unsung romantic compositions to be expressed and partially encompassed by his words.

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It is easy for the student to feel that with all his labour he is collecting only a few leaves, many of them now torn or decayed, from the countless foliage of the Tree of Tales, with which the Forest of Days is carpeted. It seems vain to add to the litter. Who can design a new leaf? The patterns from bud to unfolding, and the colours from spring to autumn were all discovered by men long ago. But that is not true. The seed of the tree can be replanted in almost any soil... Spring is, of course, not really less beautiful because we have seen or heard of other like events: like events, never from world's beginning to world's end the same event. Each leaf, of oak and ash and thorn, is a unique embodiment of the pattern, and for some this very year may be the embodiment, the first ever seen and recognized, though oaks have put forth leaves for countless generations of men.

We do not, or need not, despair of drawing because all lines must be either curved or straight, nor of painting because there are only three "primary" colours. We may indeed be older now, in so far as we are heirs in enjoyment or in practice of many generations of ancestors in the arts. In this inheritance of wealth there may be a danger of boredom or of anxiety to be original, and that may lead to a distaste for fine drawing, delicate pattern, and "pretty" colours, or else to mere manipulation and over-elaboration of old material, clever and heartless. But the true road of escape from such weariness is not to be found in the wilfully awkward, clumsy, or misshapen, not in making all things dark or unremittingly violent; nor in the mixing of colours on through subtlety to drabness, and the fantastical complication of shapes to the point of silliness and on towards delirium. Before we reach such states we need recovery. We should look at green again, and be startled anew (but not blinded) by blue and yellow and red.
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