Neo-Classicism

Neo-Classicism, a term most often referring to a stylistic trend in composition between the two world wars that emphasized the restraint and formal clarity of Classical models. At the time it was seen as one of two ways of reacting against the “excesses” of late Romanticism—the twelve-tone system of Schoenberg being the other. Both were austere where Romanticism was lush, restrained where Romanticism was expansive, and emphasized formal clarity where Romanticism had been formally relaxed. Neo-Classical music tended to be harmonically more conservative than the atonal twelve-tone method however, using dissonance as an expressive tool within a basically tonal framework. Baroque music provided the model for Neo-Classical works as much as Classical procedures: for instance, one of the first works of Igor Stravinsky in the new style, the ballet Pulcinella (1920), was based on music by Pergolesi and his contemporaries, while his Concerto for Piano and Wind instruments (1924) echoed the florid melodic style of the Baroque, as well as the integration of solo and accompaniment found in the concerto grosso, rather than the virtuoso solo display of the Classical concerto. Stravinsky continued in this idiom until the 1950s, longer than most others. After then he began turning to serial techniques. Other composers of Neo-Classical works include Prokofiev in the Classical Symphony (premiered 1918, although it is untypical of Prokofiev), Satie in his Sonatine Bureaucratique (1917) and Hindemith in his opera Cardillac (1926).