not that we should be encouraging labels...

[acroyear]

dammit i did it again and posted what should have gone to classical_music into my main blog...crapity crap crap crap...but generally, what musical genre within the classical forms is most often used to classify the 20th century English composers (Holst, V-W, Elgar, Britten, Tippett, Walton, etc...)?

They seem neo-classical and/or neo-romantic to me, given that they tend to stick to late-romantic tonality (with occasional exceptions), form, expressiveness, and certainly their "nationality" (ala Dvorak & Tchaikovsky; contrast to the atonality of the Shoenburg school and the "objectivity" of the Stravinsky and Prokofiev approach post-1920).  But I was just curious as to how musicologists tend to label (given that they do even when they shouldn't) them.  Certainly Holst and Elgar are still in the time-frame of late Romantic, but both lived on past the standard "end" of that era (1910), continuing to compose well into the 20th century...

And to whomever told me to dig a little deeper into Vaughn-Williams's 8th, thanks again.  It's fantastic.

Comments

[jmthane.livejournal.com]

I think they're all considered "modern".

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

no, there are deeper classifications in 20th century music, and "modern" doesn't mean anything because we're no longer in the 20th century. it's like calling something "alternative" rock because eventually that "alternative" became the mainstream, so it's a useless label.

the 20th century labels I know of are
"late romantic" - 1900-1911 (Mahler's death) and/or 1900-1920 (end of Stravinsky's "Russian" period)
"2nd Viennese School" - Shoenberg and students (including Berg) who codified atonality and the tone row system, which led to
"avant-guard" - Cage and his followers
"neo-classical" - Stravinsky's middle period, followed closely by Prokofiev and Rachmaninov, among others.
"neo-romantic" - Restoring expressive emotion and programmatic attitudes - Shostakovich, Copland, Hanson.

and...

from neo-romantic, through Copland and Vaughn-Williams, does a new sense of neo-romantic nationalism (a later reproduction of the attitudes of Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, Ives, and Bruckner) come into play? Certainly their attitudes informed the film-music composers to follow (Williams, Goldsmith) as well as Bernstein's desires to express his Jewish heritage in his own compositions, even when writing "Christian" works like the Mass (though that owes more to his Americanness than his Jewishness - like his idol Mahler, Bernstein was divided even in terms of his nationality).

so it's much more complex than just going "modern", as well as "modern" being a lousy way to label music now 50-80 years old. we were taught it as "modern" in 1980 because it was still fresh to most ears. It's been 25 years since then and things need to have changed.

Marginally off topic

[sestree.livejournal.com]

Where is this other blog you speak of? I'd love to be able to read it.

I always felt the late neoclassical sort of mirrored the Russian Nationalism but I didn't focus in that area. Can there be such a thing as neo neo classicism? Is there nothing new?

Anyway, interesting to read. Thanks for the wonderful break in my boring tawdry day.

Re: Marginally off topic

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

classical_music is the main classical music forum.

There is such a thing as "neo-classical". Stravinsky started it in 1920 and Prokofiev was the first to follow with his extremely traditional Symphony #1, "The Classical Symphony".

As the romantic movement progressed, increasing levels of dissonance and expressiveness were hitting what Bernstein would later call a "crisis" for 20th century music. From Beethoven through Berlioz, through Wagner's Tristan chord to Satie's impressionism and influence on Ravel and Debussy, to finally Mahler's magnitude, things were as big and expressive and dissonant as they could get *while* still retaining the rules of tonality stretching all the way back to Bach. 2 1/2 centuries of music all driven by the same basic rules, themselves derived from the natural overtones of sound itself.

So it had to crack, and crack it did, in two directions.

Schoenberg in his Op 21 String Quartets completely eliminated tonality altogether. Later, feeling that it required SOME compositional form and structure to hold on to, created the 12-tone or tone-row technique which his followers including Berg continued to develop in.

On the other hand, Stravinsky held to tonality but magnified it by emphasizing bitonalty (two keys going on at once, like a piano part where the left hand is in G and yet the melody right hand is in D, playing C# instead of C natural) and polyrhythmic sections in his russian ballets. Feeling again that he'd gotten as big as he could, he stripped the magnitude down and created "neo-classicism", where the FORM of music was a restoration of classical form, but the content still had all the polytonality and polyrhythms in the ballets, stripped down to their essense rather than being of overwhelming power.

Shostakovitch's 9th symphony is a wonderous neo-classical work. perfect sonata form with all the orchestral texture of Haydn in the opening movement yet a rhythm that "skips" beats and a melody that goes off in its own keys regardless of what the accompaniment does.

so hence my question - where do these other composers of the 20th century that don't directly fit into those two schools fit? is neo-romantic derived from neo-classical or is there still an unbroken chain of romanticism that never really left. I'm starting to see the latter more and more as I explore the 20th century.

[i-kissandra.livejournal.com]

What ever happened to that discussion about whether or not a particular progression was "right"? That was interesting, but a bit frustrating because the main guy didn't seem at all interested in truly hearing anything but answers that validated that certain progressions are supposedly "wrong" or don't sound "right"... Anyway, just thought it was cool.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

he kinda let it drop and is right now studying the effects of sound on visual perception (two clicks of sound with only one blip on the screen - people tend to see the screen blip twice).

doing my own studying (from a Bernstein lecture series from 1975), I could see how the experiment was missing the point. dissonance is actually much more complicated than he was trying to present, and in actuality the "tempered" 12-tone chromatic scale is itself a violation of natural tonality.

the overtones from a "low C" are

C -> C -> G -> C -> E -> G -> ?? -> C -> D -> ...

where ?? is actually neither A nor B flat, but the quarter-tone in between. just by first hearing tempered tonal music, we're already training our ears and our perceptions to accept a violation of the "natural" order of sound.

The chinese, on the other hand, held onto that quarter-tone in creating their penta-scale. Their music, therefore, is actually more "natural" sounding than ours but is alien to anybody who's been exposed to any piece that hits the major 6th or minor 7th in its progression.

"In tuning an instrument, we tune ourselves." -- Robert Fripp