Neoclassicism (music)
Neoclassicism in music was a twentieth-century trend, particularly current in the interwar period, 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.
American Composer Edward T. Cone describes the ballet "[Stravinsky] confronts the evoked historical manner at every point with his own version of contemporary language; the result is a complete reinterpretation and transformation of the earlier style".
[7] Stravinskian neoclassicism was a decisive influence on the French composers Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, Arthur Honegger and Germaine Tailleferre, as well as on Bohuslav Martinů, who revived the Baroque concerto grosso form in his works.
[8] 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 Française, Ottorino Respighi's Ancient Airs and Dances and Gli uccelli,[9] and Richard Strauss's Dance Suite from Keyboard Pieces by François Couperin and the related Divertimento after Keyboard Pieces by Couperin, Op.
[11] 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.
[12] 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".
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.
He had similarly incorporated quotations from seventeenth-century music when he first embraced neoclassicism in the puppet-theatre piece El retablo de maese Pedro (1919–23), an adaptation from Cervantes's Don Quixote.
Later neoclassical compositions by Falla include the 1924 chamber cantata Psyché and incidental music for Pedro Calderón de la Barca's, El gran teatro del mundo, written in 1927.
[16] 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 naixença del rei en Jaume, and the ballet Ariel.
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.
[27][28] Brazilian composers of the generation after Villa-Lobos more particularly associated with neoclassicism include Radamés 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.
After his early style of 'Late Romanticism' (exemplified by his string sextet Verklärte Nacht) had been supplanted by his Atonal period, and immediately before he embraced twelve-tone serialism, the forms of Schoenberg's works after 1920, beginning with opp.
