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

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.