# Can Schoenberg be considered a neoclassicist?



## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

I have read in several places that Schoenberg when developing his atonal style and technique was looking back to previous musical styles and genres. Examples: Suite op. 25, String Quartet no. 3 op. 30. 

In the String Quartet, Schoenberg used his newfound serialist technique applied to 12 notes of the chromatic scale. The themes however are based on rhythm rather than pitch and are varied using age old techniques that could typically be found in the Classical period and in this example he does use old Classical forms as models for the work. In the Suite for Piano, Schoenberg again uses old forms and applies pre-existing structures and an abundance of counterpoint that hadn't been prevalent for a couple of hundred years to his new ideas of arranging pitches. From these two examples, Schoenberg can in a way be seen as a neoclassicist in regards to form and counterpoint rather than pitch and melody/harmony. 

What do you think?


----------



## Andreas (Apr 27, 2012)

Schoenberg's counterpoint, to me, seems to look back to baroque and late romanticism rather than to the lean, transparent style of the classical era. Schoenberg's textures are similarly dense as Bach's or Wagner's or Brahms'.

However, structure-wise, he often uses the traditional classical forms such as the sonata allegro form. Which I find is a great help for the listeners, because it provides them with points of orientation. If one is familiar with the traditional forms, one can follow Schoenberg's works much easier, especially since ofter structuring devices such as easy-to-grasp melodies and clear-cut harmonies are absent in his twelve-tone works.

Schoenberg also uses romantic innovations, such as the merging of individual movements into one large, tone-poemy structure.

So he incorporated everything from the baroque to his own day. So the term neoclassicist seems too limiting to me. But he was very much a classicist in the sense that he preferred strong forms and frameworks which provided clear structures his otherwise highly romantic and expressive diction.


----------



## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

This thought is merely technical, and pedantic....

Neoclassicism is really defined by that style first introduced by Stravinsky with his Pulcinella. Another journalist neologism, or tag, it turns out that the remaining Stravinsky works, as well as much of the other repertoire in that stylistic vein, Martinu, Hindemith in his earliest phase, Milhaud, later Frank Martin, Alfredo Casella, and others, are truly mostly and more accurately neoBaroque. The Baroque forms being the vessel within which these composers set their new take on harmony.

From there we get concerti grossi, partitas, suites, etc. Later, in the same vocabulary, some symphonies sounding much more as based on the 'classical' model, like Stravinsky's Symphony in C, for example.

Schoenberg, remember, wrote the paper, "Brahms, the modernist." and Brahms himself was a conservative Romantic with a strong underlying aesthetic of classicism, Beethoven style more than Mozart.

I would agree that many traits are there. No matter how dense, much of that first and second Vienese duodecaphonic fare is contrapuntal, about clarity, not obfuscation, nor instrumental thickness of texture via doublings, or eight note two-handed chords on a piano (Brahms).

The one instrument / one line, no doubling chamber writing of Schoenberg's pithy and gnarly Kammersymphonie Op. 9 has some of those qualities, but with all Schoenberg I hear still the overriding late Germanic Romantic impulses, regardless of the finer texture, the 'less fat' quality. It is more 'Expressionist' than quietly restrained or at a more distant remove.

Berg is not thought of at all as neoclassical, yet he reveled in all those forms popular in the Baroque, the dance movements, the Bach-like ricecar, passacaglia, and used them all fluidly and in a masterly way, while being rather neoclassical in his chamber concerto for piano, violin and instruments, and clearly and passionately arch-romantic in his fiddle concerto.

Webern knew all music and form inside out, his being the most distilled, very clear, crystalline, of these three composers, but is also never mentioned as a neoclassicist, though his works are very imbued with the classicist aesthetic.

Technically, then, "No." Musically, a lot of traits are very present and in the fore, but the aesthetic and intent are rather different.


----------



## Eschbeg (Jul 25, 2012)

PetrB said:


> Neoclassicism is really defined by that style first introduced by Stravinsky with his Pulcinella.


So far as music historians have been able to uncover, the first Stravinsky piece to be labeled "neoclassical" was the Symphonies of Wind Instruments. Boris de Schloezer, the music critic who did so (in 1923), described the piece as neoclassical because it (he alleged) contained none of the emotional baggage of Romantic works and represented a purified, stripped-down approach to music. It was this, rather than the revival of classical forms or the referencing of the past, that defined neoclassicism as the term was used in the 1920s. It was only later that the term took on the meaning that it holds for us now, which is why we now tend to think of Symphonies of Wind Instruments as belonging to Stravinsky's Russian period, and why _Pulcinella_ (possibly the most insignificant work in Stravinsky's output, from Stravinsky's own point of view) now seems to us like the real neoclassical milestone.


----------



## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

He certainly didn't think so:


----------

