Neoclassicism (music)

Neoclassical music redirects here. For so-called neoclassical genres in popular music, see Neoclassical (disambiguation) Music.
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 dened 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 rst 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 specically from the Baroque is sometimes termed neo-Baroque music.
Neoclassicism had two distinct national lines of development, French (proceeding partly from the inuence 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.

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).
Sergei Prokoev's Symphony No. 1 (1917) is sometimes cited as a precursor of neoclassicism (Whittall 1980).
Prokoev himself thought that his composition was a passing phase whereas Stravinskys neoclassicism was by the
1920s becoming the basic line of his music (Prokoev 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 nal version in 1917 (Ross 2010, 207).
Igor Stravinskys rst 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, 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 opera-oratorio Oedipus
Rex and the ballets Apollo and Orpheus, in which the neoclassicism took on an explicitly classical Grecian aura.
Stravinskys neoclassicism culminated in his opera The Rakes Progress, with a libretto by W. H. Auden (Walsh 2001,
8). Stravinskian neoclassicism was a decisive inuence 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), Poulencs Suite Franaise, Ottorino Respighi's
Antiche arie e danze and Gli uccelli (Simms 1986, 462), and Richard Strausss 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
1

1 PEOPLE AND WORKS

Igor Stravinsky

acknowledged Stravinskys 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 inected style, best exemplied by Mathis der Maler. Roman

3
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 Stravinskys music. Boulanger taught and inuenced 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 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 rst 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 rst embraced neoclassicism in the puppet-theatre piece El retablo de maese Pedro (191923), an adaptation from Cervantess
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). Casellas colleague Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco wrote neoclassically-inected
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 Mozarts 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 diered 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 a fugal or toccata-like movement
and employing neoclassical devices such as ostinato gures 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 prolic Camargo Guarnieri, who had contact with but did not study under Nadia Boulanger when he visited Paris
in the 1920s. Neoclassical traits gure in Guarnieris music starting with the second movement of the Piano Sonatina
of 1928, and are particularly notable in his ve piano concertos (Bhague 2001a; Bhague 2001b; Bhague 2001c).
The Chilean composer Domingo Santa Cruz Wilson was so strongly inuenced 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).

OTHER NEOCLASSICAL COMPOSERS

Even the atonal school, represented by Arnold Schoenberg, showed the inuence of neoclassical ideas. The forms
of Schoenbergs 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 eort 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 oer 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). Schoenbergs 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 Bachs Musical Oering is not regarded as neoclassical because of
its concentration on the fragmentation of instrumental colours (Simms 1986, 462).

Other neoclassical composers

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

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

See also
Neoromanticism
Neotonality

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Further reading
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
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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