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 neo-classicist 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 regard neo-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 ‘neo-classical’ 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).
The term was first applied to Stravinsky in 1923 and has special relevance to his music from Pulcinella (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 neo-classicism 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 neo-classical 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 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 ‘neo-classical’ is unlikely to become a useful analytical concept but will doubtless survive as a conveniently adaptable literary formula.
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. in Stravinsky: 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