Neoclassicism (Music)

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoclassicism_(music)
Neoclassicism (music)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Neoclassicism in music was a twentieth-century trend, particularly current in the period between
the two World Wars, in which composers sought to return to aesthetic precepts associated with the
broadly defined concept of "classicism", namely order, balance, clarity, economy, and emotional
restraint. As such, neoclassicism was a reaction against the unrestrained emotionalism and
perceived formlessness of late Romanticism, as well as a "call to order" after the experimental
ferment of the first two decades of the twentieth century. The neoclassical impulse found its
expression in such features as the use of pared-down performing forces, an emphasis on rhythm and
on contrapuntal texture, an updated or expanded tonal harmony, and a concentration on absolute
music as opposed to Romantic program music.
In form and thematic technique, neoclassical music often drew inspiration from music of the 18th
century, though the inspiring canon belonged as frequently to the Baroque and even earlier periods
as to the Classical periodfor this reason, music which draws inspiration specifically from the
Baroque is sometimes termed neo-Baroque music. Neoclassicism had two distinct national lines of
development, French (proceeding partly from the influence of Erik Satie and represented by Igor
Stravinsky, who was in fact Russian-born) and German (proceeding from the "New Objectivity" of
Ferruccio Busoni, who was actually Italian, and represented by Paul Hindemith). Neoclassicism
was an aesthetic trend rather than an organized movement; even many composers not usually
thought of as "neoclassicists" absorbed elements of the style.
Contents
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People and works

Other neoclassical composers
See also
Sources
Further reading
People and works

Although the term "neoclassicism" refers to a 20th-century movement, there were important
19th-century precursors. In pieces such as Franz Liszt's la Chapelle Sixtine (1862), Edvard
Grieg's Holberg Suite (1884), Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's divertissement from The Queen of Spades
(1890), George Enescu's Piano Suite in the Old Style (1897) and Max Reger's Concerto in the Old
Style (1912), composers "dressed up their music in old clothes in order to create a smiling or
pensive evocation of the past" (Albright 2004, 276).
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Sergei Prokofiev's Symphony No. 1 (1917) is sometimes cited as a

precursor of neoclassicism (Whittall 1980). Prokofiev himself thought
that his composition was a "passing phase" whereas Stravinsky's
neoclassicism was by the 1920s "becoming the basic line of his music"
(Prokofiev 1991, 273). Richard Strauss also introduced neoclassical
elements into his music, most notably in his orchestral suite Le
bourgeois gentilhomme Op. 60, written in an early version in 1911 and
its final version in 1917 (Ross 2010, 207).
Igor Stravinsky's first foray into the style began in 1919/20 when he
composed the ballet Pulcinella, using themes which he believed to be
by Giovanni Pergolesi (it later came out that many of them were not,
Igor Stravinsky
though they were by contemporaries). Later examples are the Octet for
winds, the Dumbarton Oaks Concerto, the Concerto in D, the
Symphony of Psalms, Symphony in C, and Symphony in Three Movements, as well as the operaoratorio Oedipus Rex and the ballets Apollo and Orpheus, in which the neoclassicism took on an
explicitly "classical Grecian" aura. Stravinsky's neoclassicism culminated in his opera The Rake's
Progress, with a libretto by W. H. Auden (Walsh 2001, 8). Stravinskian neoclassicism was a
decisive influence on the French composers Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, and Arthur
Honegger, as well as on Bohuslav Martin, who revived the Baroque concerto grosso form in his
works (Large 1976, 100). Pulcinella, as a subcategory of rearrangement of existing Baroque
compositions, spawned a number of similar works, including Alfredo Casella's Scarlattiana (1927),
Poulenc's Suite Franaise, Ottorino Respighi's Antiche arie e danze and Gli uccelli (Simms 1986,
462), and Richard Strauss's Tanzsuite aus Klavierstcken von Franois Couperin and the related
Divertimento nach Couperin, Op. 86 (1923 and 1943, respectively) (Heisler 2009, 112). Starting
around 1926 Bla Bartk's music shows a marked increase in neoclassical traits, and a year or two
later acknowledged Stravinsky's "revolutionary" accomplishment in creating novel music by
reviving old musical elements while at the same time naming his colleague Zoltn Kodly as
another Hungarian adherent of neoclassicism (Bnis 1988, 7374).
A German strain of neoclassicism was developed by Paul Hindemith, who produced chamber
music, orchestral works, and operas in a heavily contrapuntal, chromatically inflected style, best
exemplified by Mathis der Maler. Roman Vlad contrasts the "classicism" of Stravinsky, which
consists in the external forms and patterns of his works, with the "classicality" of Busoni, which
represents an internal disposition and attitude of the artist towards works (Samson 1977, 28).
Busoni wrote in a letter to Paul Bekker, "By 'Young Classicalism' I mean the mastery, the sifting
and the turning to account of all the gains of previous experiments and their inclusion in strong and
beautiful forms" (Busoni 1957, 20).
Neoclassicism found a welcome audience in Europe and America, as the school of Nadia
Boulanger promulgated ideas about music based on her understanding of Stravinsky's music.
Boulanger taught and influenced many notable composers, including Grayna Bacewicz, Lennox
Berkeley, Elliott Carter, Francis Chagrin, Aaron Copland, David Diamond, Irving Fine, Jean
Franaix, Roy Harris, Igor Markevitch, Darius Milhaud, Astor Piazzolla, Walter Piston, Ned
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Rorem, and Virgil Thomson.

In Spain, Manuel de Falla's neoclassical Concerto for Harpsichord, Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, Violin,
and Cello of 1926 was perceived as an expression of "universalism" (universalismo), broadly
linked to an international, modernist aesthetic (Hess 2001a, 38). In the first movement of the
concerto, Falla quotes fragments of the 15th-century villancico "De los lamos, vengo madre". He
had similarly incorporated quotations from 17th-century music when he first embraced
neoclassicism in the puppet-theatre piece El retablo de maese Pedro (191923), an adaptation from
Cervantes's Don Quixote. Later neoclassical compositions by Falla include the 1924 chamber
cantata Psych and incidental music for Pedro Caldern de la Barca's, El gran teatro del mundo,
written in 1927 (Hess 2001b). In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Roberto Gerhard composed in the
neoclassical style, including his Concertino for Strings, the Wind Quintet, the cantata L'alta
naixena del rei en Jaume, and the ballet Ariel (MacDonald 2001). Other important Spanish
neoclassical composers are found amongst the members of the Generacin de la Repblica (also
known as the Generacin del 27), including Julin Bautista, Fernando Remacha, Salvador
Bacarisse, and Jess Bal y Gay (Prez Castillo 2001; Heine 2001a; Heine 2001b; Salgado 2001a).
A neoclassical aesthetic was promoted in Italy by Alfredo Casella, who had been educated in Paris
and continued to live there until 1915, when he returned to Italy to teach and organize concerts,
introducing modernist composers such as Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg to the provincially
minded Italian public. His neoclassical compositions were perhaps less important than his
organizing activities, but especially representative examples include Scarlattiana of 1926, using
motifs from Domenico Scarlatti's keyboard sonatas, and the Concerto romano of the same year
(Waterhouse and Bernardoni 2001). Casella's colleague Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco wrote
neoclassically-inflected works which hark back to early Italian music and classical models: the
themes of his Concerto italiano in G minor of 1924 for violin and orchestra echo Vivaldi as well as
16th- and 17th-century Italian folksongs, while his highly successful Guitar Concerto No. 1 in D of
1939 consciously follows Mozart's concerto style (Westby 2001).
Portuguese representatives of neoclassicism include two members of the "Grupo de Quatro",
Armando Jos Fernandes and Jorge Croner de Vasconcellos, both of whom studied with Nadia
Boulanger (Moody 1996, 4).
In South America, neoclassicism was of particular importance in Argentina, where it differed from
its European model in that it did not seek to redress recent stylistic upheavals which had simply not
occurred in Latin America. Argentine composers associated with neoclassicism include Jacobo
Ficher, Jos Mara Castro, Luis Gianneo, and Juan Jos Castro (Hess 2013, 205206). The most
important 20th-century Argentine composer, Alberto Ginastera, turned from nationalistic to
neoclassical forms in the 1950s (e.g., Piano Sonata No. 1 and the Variaciones concertantes) before
moving on to a style dominated by atonal and serial techniques. Roberto Caamao, professor of
Gregorian chant at the Institute of Sacred Music in Buenos Aires, employed a dissonant
neoclassical style in some works and a serialist style in others (Bhague and Ruz 2001).
Although the well-known Bachianas Brasileiras of Heitor Villa-Lobos (composed between 1930
and 1947) are cast in the form of Baroque suites, usually beginning with a prelude and ending with
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a fugal or toccata-like movement and employing neoclassical devices such as ostinato figures and
long pedal notes, they were not intended so much as stylized recollections of the style of Bach as a
free adaptation of Baroque harmonic and contrapuntal procedures to music in a Brazilian style
(Bhague 2001a; Bhague 2001d). Brazilian composers of the generation after Villa-Lobos more
particularly associated with neoclassicism include Radams Gnattali (in his later works), Edino
Krieger, and the prolific Camargo Guarnieri, who had contact with but did not study under Nadia
Boulanger when he visited Paris in the 1920s. Neoclassical traits figure in Guarnieri's music
starting with the second movement of the Piano Sonatina of 1928, and are particularly notable in
his five piano concertos (Bhague 2001a; Bhague 2001b; Bhague 2001c).
The Chilean composer Domingo Santa Cruz Wilson was so strongly influenced by the German
variety of neoclassicism that he became known as the "Chilean Hindemith" (Hess 2013, 205).
In Cuba, Jos Ardvol initiated a neoclassical school, though he himself moved on to a modernistic
national style later in his career (Bhague and Moore 2001; Eli Rodrguez 2001; Hess 2013, 205).
Even the atonal school, represented by Arnold Schoenberg, showed the influence of neoclassical
ideas. The forms of Schoenberg's works after 1920, beginning with opp. 23, 24, and 25 (all
composed at the same time), have been described as "openly neoclassical", and represent an effort
to integrate the advances of 1908 to 1913 with the inheritance of the 18th and 19th centuries
(Cowell 1933, 150; Rosen 1975, 7073). Schoenberg attempted in those works to offer listeners
structural points of reference with which they could identify, beginning with the Serenade, op. 24,
and the Suite for piano, op. 25 (Keillor 2009). Schoenberg's pupil Alban Berg actually came to
neoclassicism before his teacher, in his Three Pieces for Orchestra, op. 6 (191314), and the opera
Wozzeck (Rosen 1975, 87), which uses closed forms such as suite, passacaglia, and rondo as
organizing principles within each scene. Anton Webern also achieved a sort of neoclassical style
through an intense concentration on the motif (Rosen 1975, 102). However, his 1935 orchestration
of the six-part ricercar from Bach's Musical Offering is not regarded as neoclassical because of its
concentration on the fragmentation of instrumental colours (Simms 1986, 462).
Other neoclassical composers

Arthur Berger
Ernest Bloch
Carlos Chvez (Oja 2000, 27579)
Salvador Contreras
Cecil Effinger
Lukas Foss
Pierre Gabaye
Vagn Holmboe
Stefan Kisielewski
Ia Krej
Ernst Krenek
Robert Kurka
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Gian Francesco Malipiero

Marcel Mihalovici
Goffredo Petrassi
Gabriel Piern (Hurwitz n.d.; Lewis n.d.; Sharpe 2009)
Maurice Ravel
Knudge Riisager
Albert Roussel
Harold Shapero
Alexandre Tansman
Michael Tippett
Dag Wirn
Sergei Prokofiev
See also
Neoromanticism
Neotonality
Sources
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University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-01267-0.
Bhague, Gerard (2001a). "Brazil". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians,
second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan Publishers.
Bhague, Gerard (2001b). "Guarnieri, (Mozart) Camargo". The New Grove Dictionary of
Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London:
Macmillan Publishers.
Bhague, Gerard (2001c). "Krieger, Edino". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and
Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan
Publishers.
Bhague, Gerard (2001d). "Villa-Lobos, Heitor". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and
Publishers.
Bhague, Gerard, and Robin Moore (2001). "Cuba, Republic of". The New Grove Dictionary
of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London:
Bhague, Gerard, and Irma Ruiz (2001). "Argentina (i)". The New Grove Dictionary of Music
and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan
Publishers.
Bnis, Ferenc. 1983. "Zoltn Kodly, a Hungarian Master of Neoclassicism". Studia
Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 25, nos. 14:7391.
Busoni, Ferruccio (1957). The Essence of Music, and Other Papers, translated by Rosamond
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Ley. London: Rockliff.

Cowell, Henry (1933). "Towards Neo-Primitivism". Modern Music 10, no. 3 (MarchApril):
14953. Reprinted in Essential Cowell: Selected Writings on Music by Henry Cowell
19211964, edited by Richard Carter Higgins and Bruce McPherson, preface by Kyle Gann,
299303. Kingston, New York: Documentext, 2002. ISBN 978-0-929701-63-9.
Eli Rodrguez, Victoria (2001). "Ardvol (Gimbernat), Jos". The New Grove Dictionary of
Heine, Christiane. 2001a. "Bacarisse (Chinoria), Salvador". The New Grove Dictionary of
Heine, Christiane. 2001b. "Remacha (Villar), Fernando". The New Grove Dictionary of Music
Publishers.
Heisler, Wayne (2009). The Ballet Collaborations of Richard Strauss. Rochester: University
of Rochester Press. ISBN 978-1-58046-321-8
Hess, Carol A. (2001a). Manuel de Falla and Modernism in Spain, 18981936. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-33038-9.
Hess, Carol A (2001b). "Falla (y Matheu), Manuel de". The New Grove Dictionary of Music
Publishers.
Hess, Carol A. (2013). "Copland in Argentina: Pan Americanist Politics, Folklore, and the
Crisis in Modern Music". Journal of the American Musicological Society 66, no. 1 (Spring):
191250.
Hurwitz, David (n.d.). "Pierne Timpani TEN C (http://www.classicstoday.com/review/review6166/)". ClassicsToday.com (accessed 1 July 2015).
Keillor, John (2009). "Variations for Orchestra, Op. 31 (http://www.allmusic.com
/work/c53900)". Allmusic.com website. (Accessed 4 April 2010).
Large, Brian (1976). Martinu. Teaneck NJ: Holmes & Meier. ISBN 978-0841902565.
Lewis, Uncle Dave (n.d.). Christian Ivaldi / Solistes de l'orchestre Philharmonique du
Luxembourg: Gabriel Piern: La Musique de Chambre, Vol. 2 (http://www.allmusic.com
/album/gabriel-piern-la-musique-de-chambre-vol-2-mw0001841434) AllMusic Review
(accessed 1 July 2015).
Moody, Ivan (1996). "'Mensagens': Portuguese Music in the 20th Century". Tempo, new
series, no. 198 (October): 210.
Oja, Carol J. 2000. Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s. Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-516257-8.
Prez Castillo, Beln. 2001. "Spain, I: Art Music 6: 20th Century". The New Grove
Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell.
London: Macmillan Publishers.
Prokofiev, Sergey (1991). "Short Autobiography", translated by Rose Prokofieva, revised and
corrected by David Mather. In Soviet Diary 1927 and Other Writings. London: Faber and
Faber. ISBN 0-571-16158-8.
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Rosen, Charles (1975). Arnold Schoenberg. Modern Masters. New York: Viking Press. ISBN
0-670-13316-7 (cloth) ISBN 0-670-01986-0 (pbk). UK edition, titled simply Schoenberg.
London: Boyars; Glasgow: W. Collins ISBN 0-7145-2566-9 Paperback reprint, Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1981. ISBN 0-691-02706-4.
Ross, Alex (2010). "Strauss's Place in the Twentieth Century". In The Cambridge Companion
to Richard Strauss, edited by Charles Youmans, 195212. Cambridge Companions to Music.
Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-72815-7.
Salgado, Susana (2001a). "Bautista, Julin". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and
Publishers.
Salgado, Susana (2001b). "Caamao, Roberto". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and
Publishers.
Samson, Jim (1977). Music in Transition: A Study of Tonal Expansion and Atonality,
19001920. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-02193-9.
Sharpe, Roderick L. (2009). "Gabriel Piern (b. Metz, Loraine, 16 August 1863 d. Ploujean,
Finistre, 17 July 1937): Voyage au Pays du Tendre (d'aprs la Carte du Tendre)". Konrad
von Abel & Phenomenology of Music: Repertoire & Opera Explorer: VorwortePrefaces.
Munich: Musikproduktion Jrgen Hflich.
Simms, Bryan R. 1986. "Twentieth-Century Composers Return to the Small Ensemble". In
The Orchestra: A Collection of 23 Essays on Its Origins and Transformations, edited by Joan
Peyser, 45374. New York: Charles Scribners Sons. Reprinted in paperback, Milwaukee: Hal
Leonard Corporation, 2006. ISBN 978-1-4234-1026-3.
Stravinsky, Igor (1970). Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons (from the Charles Eliot
Norton Lectures delivered in 19391940). Harvard College, 1942. English translation by
Arthur Knodell and Ingolf Dahl, preface by George Seferis. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press. ISBN 0-674-67855-9.
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Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell.
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Westby, James (2001). "Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Mario". The New Grove Dictionary of Music
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Whittall, Arnold (1980). "Neo-classicism". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and
Musicians, edited by Stanley Sadie. London: Macmillan Publishers.
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Publishers.
Further reading
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Lanza, Andrea (2008). "An Outline of Italian Instrumental Music in the 20th Century". Sonus:
A Journal of Investigations into Global Musical Possibilities 29, no. 1:121.
ISSN 0739-229X (https://www.worldcat.org/search?fq=x0:jrnl&q=n2:0739-229X)
Messing, Scott (1988). Neoclassicism in Music: From the Genesis of the Concept Through the
Schoenberg/Stravinsky Polemic. Rochester, New York: University of Rochester Press.
ISBN 978-1-878822-73-4.
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People and works

People and works