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Neo-classicism.
A movement of style in the works of certain 20th-century composers, who, particularly
during the period between the two world wars, revived the balanced forms and clearly
perceptible thematic processes of earlier styles to replace what were, to them, the
increasingly exaggerated gestures and formlessness of late Romanticism. The history and
evolution of the term in all its aspects have been traced by Messing. Since a neoclassicist is more likely to employ some kind of extended tonality, modality or even
atonality than to reproduce the hierarchically structured tonal system of true (Viennese)
Classicism, the prefix ‘neo-’ often carries the implication of parody, or distortion, of
truly Classical traits. The advent of postmodern sensibilities since the 1970s has made it
possible to see neo-classicism not as regressive or nostalgic but as expressing a distinctly
contemporary multiplicity of awareness. It is therefore difficult and even artificial to
regardneo-classicism and postmodernism as separate except in historical sequence, with
the former the preferred term for the period from World War I to the 1950s.
In architecture, painting and sculpture, the movement most widely designated ‘neoclassical’ coincided in part with the Viennese Classical period in music, during the later
18th and early 19th centuries, though the term has also been applied to the work done in
the 1920s by such painters as Matisse and Picasso. In Germany, during the same decade,
the term ‘neue Sachlichkeit’ (new objectivity) was employed to denote the work of
artists of all kinds who appeared to reject the more expressionistic tone of the immediate
past and to exploit the postwar need for economy of means and incisiveness of
expression to positive ends.
As a generic term for specific stylistic principles, ‘neo-classical’ is notably imprecise and
has never been understood to refer solely to a revival of the techniques and forms of
Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Insofar as the movement had a slogan, it was ‘back to
Bach’; yet it was less significant for its revival of traditional procedures than for the
strength of its reaction against the more extreme indulgences of the recent past. It was the
result of anti-Romanticism or anti-expressionism, yet the aim was not to eliminate all
expressiveness but to refine and control it: as Keller said of Stravinsky’s Symphony of
Psalms (1930), it is ‘expressive through the very suppression of expressionism’. This
suppression is what is most likely to add a degree of astringency to a neo-classical work,
and such a work is most likely to seem unsuccessful when it dilutes rather than
idiosyncratically concentrates that essence: for example, many of Hindemith’s later
compositions by contrast with his Kammermusik series (completed in 1927).
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The term was first applied to Stravinsky in 1923 and has special relevance to his music
fromPulcinella (1919–20) to The Rake’s Progress (1947–51), even though such
compositions as Prokofiev’s Symphony no.1 (the ‘Classical’, 1916–17), and
Satie’s Sonatine bureaucratique(1917), with its use of a piece by Clementi, had already
shown the wit, economy and allusion to, or quotation of, pre-Romantic composers that
are the most commonly accepted hallmarks of neo-classicism. Evans, among others, saw
the essence of Stravinsky’s originality in terms of a ‘general historical awareness’, which
extends beyond the traditionally labelled Classical composers to Tchaikovsky and
Webern and hence beyond tonality itself. By contrast, Taruskin equated neoclassicism with ‘its collateral descendant, the “historical performance” movement’, as ‘a
tendentious journey back to where we had never been’.
The characterization of virtually the whole of the significant compositional achievement
of the period from 1918 to 1945 (with Varèse perhaps the only major exception) as neoclassical is common among more recent writers who believe that before 1945 there was a
general failure (which not even the later Webern wholly escaped) to profit from the
profound innovations of the expressionist years. The Stravinsky–Craft conversations
equate neo-classicism with the ‘period of formulation’ following the period of
exploration which culminated in 1912 and identify three neo-classical ‘schools’, those of
Stravinsky himself, Hindemith and Schoenberg, including in the last those 12-note works
which, even if classified as atonal, relate to the Baroque and Classical periods in their
texture and formal outlines: for example, the dance movements of the Piano Suite op.25
(1921–3) and the sonata-form first movement of the Wind Quintet op.26 (1923–4).
Boulez has asserted that ‘Stravinsky’s and Schoenberg’s paths to neo-classicism differ
basically only in one being diatonic and the other chromatic. … Both composers adopt
dead forms, and because they are so obsessed with them they allow them to transform
their musical ideas until these too are dead’.
Schoenberg’s 12-note works may make considerable use of ‘dead’ forms and textures;
but they also embody, in a remarkable synthesis, a continuation of the forceful
expression and complex motivic coherence of his most characteristic expressionist
works, the Five Orchestral Pieces op.16 (1909) and Pierrot lunaire (1912). During the
1920s, in particular, Schoenberg saw himself as a direct opponent of Stravinsky and gave
caustic expression to his hostility in the short cantata of 1925, Der neue
Klassizismus op.28 no.3. This broadside was directed against ‘all who seek their personal
salvation along a middle way – the pseudo-tonalists – those who pretend they are trying
“to-go-back-to”’. Schoenberg evidently felt able to distinguish between what was, to
him, the distorting mimicry of tradition by such as ‘der kleine Modernsky’ and his own
organic continuation of tradition: the former was mere parody, the latter positive
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transformation. But to regard both as neo-classical, and to propose the sub-categories
‘tonal neo-classicism’ and ‘atonal neo-classicism’, is to risk appearing to extend the term
to embrace all composers who seem at a given point to have a greater concern with
continuing a renovated tradition than with radical innovation. So all-inclusive a
definition solves many problems, such as the need to decide whether there is a sense in
which, while Prokofiev’s ‘Classical’ Symphony is neo-classical, his Fifth and Sixth
Symphonies are not. But with many composers, from Berg and Bartók to Lutosławski,
Elliott Carter and Davies, it is notably unrewarding to attempt to separate what is
innovatory (and a continuation of expressionism) from what is more obviously
‘traditional’. And there is always the probability that composers who seem radically
expressionistic today will seem neo-classical tomorrow.
These difficulties of definition are reflected in the problems that neo-classical music
presents to the analyst. Attempts have been made to use various foreground–background
techniques to separate elements belonging directly to a historical model from modern
modifications: Austin has offered a hypothetical Classical version of the Gavotte from
Prokofiev’s ‘Classical’ Symphony; Cone has contrasted the first movement of
Stravinsky’s Symphony in C (1938–40) with Classical models; Van den Toorn and
Taruskin have focussed on Stravinsky’s use of octatonic scales. Yet the dangers of
unproductive over-simplification are probably greater than for any other style or period,
and the most valuable approach so far has been that of such analysts as Salzer, whose
often very substantial modifications of Schenkerian principles can at least indicate the
extent to which certain works may properly be defined as ‘tonal’ at all. The term ‘neoclassical’ is unlikely to become a useful analytical concept but will doubtless survive as a
conveniently adaptable literary formula.
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Bibliography
F. Busoni: ‘Junge Klassizistät’, Von der Einheit der Musik (Berlin, 1922), 275–9 (enlarged 2/1956 by J. Hermann
as Wesen und Einheit der Musik), 34–9; (Eng. trans., 1957/R as The Essence of Music), 19–23)
I. Stravinsky: Chroniques de ma vie (Paris, 1935–6, 2/1962; Eng. trans., 1936/R as An Autobiography)
F. Salzer: Structural Hearing: Tonal Coherence in Music (New York, 1952, 2/1962)
I. Stravinsky and R. Craft: Memories and Commentaries (London, 1960/R)
E.T. Cone: ‘The Uses of Convention: Stravinsky and his Models’, MQ, xlviii (1962), 287–99; repr. inStravinsky: a
New Appraisal of his Work, ed. P.H. Lang (New York, 1963), 21–33
M. Cosman and H. Keller: Stravinsky at Rehearsal (London, 1962)
T.W. Adorno: ‘Stravinsky: ein dialektisches Bild’, Quasi una fantasia (Frankfurt, 1963; Eng. trans., 1992), 145–75
W.W. Austin: Music in the 20th Century (New York, 1966)
P. Evans: ‘Music of the European Mainstream, 1940–1960’, NOHM, x (1974), 387–502
P. Boulez: Par volonté et par hasard: entretiens avec Célestin Deliège (Paris, 1975; Eng. trans., 1976)
S. Messing: Neoclassicism in Music: from the Genesis of the Concept through the Schoenberg/Stravinsky
Polemic (Ann Arbor, 1988)
R. Taruskin: ‘Back to Whom? Neoclassicism as Ideology’, 19CM, xvi (1992–3), 286–302
P.C. Van den Toorn: ‘Neoclassicism Revised’, Music, Politics and the Academy (Berkeley, 1995), 143–78
M.M. Hyde: ‘Neoclassic and Anachronistic Impulses in Twentieth-Century Music’, Music Theory
Spectrum,xviii (1996), 200–35
P.C. Van den Toorn: ‘Neoclassicism and its Definitions’, Music Theory in Concept and Practice,
ed. J.M.Baker, D.W. Beach and J.W. Bernard (Rochester, NY, 1997), 131–56
Arnold Whittall
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