# Neoclassical



## Tom Gilroy (May 20, 2006)

Anybody have an interest in neoclassical music? If so, discuss.


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## SchubertObsessive (Aug 15, 2006)

Neoclassical is important at this time. It's like a bridge between two worlds, which is funny because it saved me from being totally disillusioned with music altogether: for me, mainstream belonged to the dull (and still does), and Classical music was long-winded. Then I became acquainted with different types of neoclassical music which had (more or less) the accessibility and modern relevance of one, with the potential for honesty and beauty of the other.

Projects of note:

Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, King Crimson, Sol Invictus, Klaus Schulze, Dead Can Dance, Lustmord, Demilich, Summoning, Graveland, Immortal, Burzum


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## Saturnus (Nov 7, 2006)

I thought neoclassical music was Poulenc, Stravinsky, Honegger, Delius...


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## SchubertObsessive (Aug 15, 2006)

But then this thread would not have been submitted to the non-classical music forum. Neoclassical in a modern sense describes music that shares something of the ideals and shape of Classical music, but in a technologically updated form, as well as having a sense of urgency in the modern era (compact songs). I think this definition excludes The Beatles but embraces Dead Can Dance.


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## Breogan (Sep 24, 2007)

I like the genre (or is it sub-genre?), but I haven't found any neo-classical bands that I'm really into. I do like Yngwie Malmsteen and Michael Angelo Batio's work, though.


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## Mr Salek (Apr 11, 2006)

Saturnus is partly right, those composers did indeed use classical ideas in their music, rendering it neoclassical but that was by no means their primary focus. I think what SchubertObsessive is trying to get at are the living composers that focus mainly on producing neoclasical music.

It's always been something that interests me, but I've never delved into it. I've only heard Prokofiev's Classical Symphony and a quartet by a chap named Hamburg that was quite nice, and a very good example of neoclassicism.


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## DeadlyKomplexx (Nov 16, 2007)

Dead Can Dance are really amazing with it.I recently got into them for sampling material,but their music is just great.They use all these rare instruments that no one else really uses and everything,and it's all so dark and spiritual,just perfect..


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## BuddhaBandit (Dec 31, 2007)

I'm a big Tangerine Dream fan... and some of Brian Eno's work which I like verges on neoclassicalcism.


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## Gustav (Aug 29, 2005)

I often get it mixed up too, is Prokofiev's Classical Symphony "neo-classical"? or Schoeberg's "Tonal" compositions? Aren't they also pretty "neo-classical"?


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## chantiandeanie (Feb 12, 2008)

I'm not exactly sure what Neo-classical is, I thought it was a specific genre of music/guitar style but I have gathered from the variety of bands Schubert posted and his description of it that it is more of a feeling thing. As thus these are some bands/artists I enjoy and would class as neoclassical.

I like a lot of black metal i.e. darkthrone, immortal, emperor and to a lesser extent Burzum. I also like metallica, whom I say, take quite a lot from classical music (I'm not talking about S&M). As well, I like some heavier stuff such as Nile and Necrophagist who are both strongly influenced by classical styles. Also a lot of the more modern electronic music i.e. Venetian Snares and Aphex Twin is becoming more and more influenced by classical styles.

These are just a few of the many I like but they pretty much cover the styles of music I enjoy and would classify under this title.


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## Yagan Kiely (Feb 6, 2008)

> Schoeberg's "Tonal" compositions?


No, that is not. They are his early compositions and are just romantic music.

Also, tonal music isn't the benchmark of 20c composers. Half stayed tonal, or there abouts.


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## Gustav (Aug 29, 2005)

Yagan Kiely said:


> No, that is not. They are his early compositions and are just romantic .


I think you are right, I re-listened some of the stringquartets, and I'll have say that it is no different from any composers from the romantic era.


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## Raphaël-A. (Feb 20, 2008)

Neo-classical is probably one of the terms I dislike the most when describing music. Possibly because I always had a hard time finding bands that would fit the name. I find the term "neo-classical" mostly useless when it comes to music. In the way it is used today, we could create a subgenre called neo-classical for every major music genre and then throw in the bands/artists with classical influences...

I think it's rather easy to classify all the bands that were previously mentioned in other musical genre that would fit much better than "neo-classical". For example, darkthrone, burzum, immortal, emperor and graveland are clearly black metal bands and have nothing to do with neoclassicism other than the general influence that classical music had/has on metal. The same thing goes for say King Crimson and porg. rock or Lustmord and ambient.


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## Conservationist (Apr 5, 2007)

BuddhaBandit said:


> I'm a big Tangerine Dream fan... and some of Brian Eno's work which I like verges on neoclassicalcism.


Especially with Fripp involved!


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## Planetary Eulogy (May 28, 2008)

Raphaël-A. said:


> I think it's rather easy to classify all the bands that were previously mentioned in other musical genre that would fit much better than "neo-classical". For example, darkthrone, burzum, immortal, emperor and graveland are clearly black metal bands and have nothing to do with neoclassicism other than the general influence that classical music had/has on metal. The same thing goes for say King Crimson and porg. rock or Lustmord and ambient.


"Neoclassicism" refers to a particular spiritual and intellectual direction, rather than a discrete genre (like pretty much all artistic "isms" (for instance, "Romanticism" encompassed many genres: from poetry, to horror fiction to opera). It should be fairly obvious to anyone whose intellect rises above that of the lower primates that we're not talking about mutually exclusive categories.

Obviously, Burzum and Venom are both 'black metal,' and Kraftwerk isn't. Equally obviously, Kraftwerk and Burzum share a basic philosophical and compositional stance that isn't found in Venom --> neoclassical.

Duh.


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## PostMinimalist (May 14, 2008)

I think the term 'progressive rock' is used when describing bands like T.D. and King Crimson and even bands who openly use classical influences like ELP. Neo-classical is a term used to describe a return to pre-romantic forms and styles by composers in the 20th C. Like Stravinsky's Pulcinella suite or Prokofiev's Classical symphony (as Saturnus rightly points out). There are several new terms which cover a lot of new 'classical' music such as post-classical and post-minimalist, spectral, 'the New complexity' and many others. It is an uphill struggle to stay in touch with all these new trends but delving in might bring some unexpected rewards!
Fergus


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## Conservationist (Apr 5, 2007)

"Neoclassical" in the current time makes sense in the same way "neo-medieval" does: modern music evoking a former time, and which time that is changes as time goes on.


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## PostMinimalist (May 14, 2008)

Yes maybe, but one cant go around requisitioning words and phrases randomly just because one thinks they might describe something. Usage has a lot to do with what words mean, like the word 'gay'. When the author of the lyrics for the Flinstones wrote at the end of the theme song: "We'll have a gay, old time!", I don't think he was thinking in terms of sexual preferences. It will be along time before the phrase 'Neo-classical music' can be wrenched from the hands of Stravinsky and Prokofiev fans. But who knows? Usage may determine that too. If I take this far enough I might start calling Jazz music 'Hip-hop-baroque-plainsong-cookery-book-doo-da music' and get upset if the guy at the record store doesn't understand me. A shared language is what makes us able to communicate with each other.


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## Planetary Eulogy (May 28, 2008)

post-minimalist said:


> Yes maybe, but one cant go around requisitioning words and phrases randomly just because one thinks they might describe something. Usage has a lot to do with what words mean, like the word 'gay'. When the author of the lyrics for the Flinstones wrote at the end of the theme song: "We'll have a gay, old time!", I don't think he was thinking in terms of sexual preferences. It will be along time before the phrase 'Neo-classical music' can be wrenched from the hands of Stravinsky and Prokofiev fans. But who knows? Usage may determine that too. If I take this far enough I might start calling Jazz music 'Hip-hop-baroque-plainsong-cookery-book-doo-da music' and get upset if the guy at the record store doesn't understand me. A shared language is what makes us able to communicate with each other.


What a ludicrous objection! The term 'neoclassical' was appropriated by Prokofiev and Stravinsky in the first place: it's not as if it were invented first to describe their music, or anyone's music, for that matter.

Language is flux. Learn to deal.


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## Conservationist (Apr 5, 2007)

post-minimalist said:


> When the author of the lyrics for the Flinstones wrote at the end of the theme song: "We'll have a gay, old time!", I don't think he was thinking in terms of sexual preferences. It will be along time before the phrase 'Neo-classical music' can be wrenched from the hands of Stravinsky and Prokofiev fans.


It took fifteen years for "gay" to go from "innocent happiness" to "homosexual."

That's a hilarious comparison though. I still want to have a gay old time.


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## PostMinimalist (May 14, 2008)

@ Planetary Eulogy
I'm merely stating that popular usage is the key to how we describe things and thus communicate. Is that so hard to understand? The current popular usage of the phrase neo-classical refers to Strav. + Prok. I didn't say they invented the phrase or that it was invented solely for them!
And it was not an objection but an observation which I made! As you say yourself: language is flux. That does not mean that it has no current standards. Flux means 'flow' which indicates a gradual and fluid change from one state to another not some random or arbitrary spontaneous switch from one state to another unrelated one. the 'gay' case being a very good example. Fifteen years of common usage by millions of people (flux) has altered the way we read the word 'gay'. It will be interesting to see if 'neo-classical' undergoes a similar transformation. 
As I said there are terms we can use to describe rock music which has influences from classical music without plundering already existing terminology.


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## Planetary Eulogy (May 28, 2008)

That argument holds no water, since the vast majority of references to 'neoclassical' in actual conversation refer to architecture or pop derived music, not to modernist academic music. The use of the term is particularly silly in light of the fact that the most important works of the most often cited 'neo-classical' composers predate their 'neo-classical' periods, and that the 'classicism' of those later works was a classicism of form only, with very little classical idiom at the compositional level, and none at the spiritual level (which is far more important than mere sound). It was a silly label at the time, and it remains a silly - and largely unused - label today.


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## PostMinimalist (May 14, 2008)

@Planetary Eulogy
Here is what wiki has to say about this 
neo-classical music
as for Darkwave; it's just Darkwave!
Interseting that you don't have a problem with the term Baroque in music or romantic or renaissance for that matter... 
Why can't a term apply to architecture *and* music?

Recognize any of these 'neo-classical composers?

Yasushi Akutagawa
Béla Bartók
Leonard Bernstein
Nadia Boulanger
Benjamin Britten
Ottorino Respighi
Ferruccio Busoni
Aaron Copland
David Diamond
George Enescu
Manuel de Falla
Irving Fine
Paul Hindemith
Arthur Honegger
Bohuslav Martinů
Darius Milhaud
Francis Poulenc
Sergei Prokofiev
Maurice Ravel
Erik Satie
Dmitri Shostakovich
Early Igor Stravinsky
Carl Vine

Nice list, eh?

That's copied from the wiki article.

I respectfully challenge the claim that one of the most common conversational occurrences of the phrase neo-classical is related to pop-derived music.
Are there statistics to uphold this? 
It is not 'silly' either. As a descriptive term neo-classical is extremely succinct! 
One must understand what 'classicism' means here. It is all about form! Balance, symmetry, unity and diversity, contrast and geometry. These components alone are enough to deem any work classical (neo or otherwise).
Spirituality, if it comes at all in classical music so infused as it is with the spirit of the age of enlightenment, comes from within these structural guidelines. Read Charles Rosen's 'The Classical Style'. 
I don't understand what you mean when you talk of compositional level, since the whole process is composition.
'Neo-classical' is a label which is in wide use to day in architecture and music and has specific meanings. Ask any architect who has studies twentieth century mediterranean buildings or any music or art historian.
F


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## Planetary Eulogy (May 28, 2008)

> Why can't a term apply to architecture and music?


Then why can't a band obviously influenced by the underlying ideals of ambient _and_ classical music be neo-classical? The basic problem with the 'neo-classical' tag for some of the music of the 1920s and 1930s isn't that the term more often refers to the visual arts and architecture (in particular), nor even that 'neo-classicism' in the other arts is equivalent, not to musical neo-classicism, but to the _actual_ Classicism of Mozart and Hayden. The biggest problem is the fundamental inaccuracy of the term 'neo-classical': music is clearly Modernist in its spirit, content, and basic aesthetic, and linked to Classical music only by being shoehorned into Classical forms of arrangement. Whatever else may be the case, Kraftwerk is a hell of a lot closer in spirit to Classical music than mid-period Stravinsky will ever be.


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## Planetary Eulogy (May 28, 2008)

> One must understand what 'classicism' means here. It is all about form! Balance, symmetry, unity and diversity, contrast and geometry.


That's what they mean if you're talking about actual Classical music, yes. In neo-classical music, it really refers for the most part to using Classical forms like the sonata to make Modernist music. It doesn't actually _sound_ like Classical music, and it sure as hell doesn't _think_ like Classical music. It's like writing a poem about basing an eightball and raping some chick in sonnet form and calling it "neo-Elizabethan".

In any event, pop-derived neo-classicism is part of a living tradition, while the neo-classicism of Stravinsky has been dead longer than he has. Why give priority to dead music?


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## Mayerl (May 5, 2008)

"Why give priority to dead music?"

Why??? Because not everyone is a follower of the pretentious crap that this thread is about, that's why!!!


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## purple99 (Apr 8, 2008)

Mayerl said:


> "Why give priority to dead music?"
> 
> Why??? Because not everyone is a follower of the pretentious crap that this thread is about, that's why!!!


Thank you. That made me laugh. All that's happened is the pop music crew are trying to nick an expression from the old fogies. Some EMI executive with difficult glasses and a stupid haircut while in a "brainstorming session" has said: "Hey guys why don't we call this stuff "Neoclassical" you know to give the music press something to twitter about?" If people want to change their language usage to dance to his tune that's their problem.


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## Mayerl (May 5, 2008)

You're welcome, Purple99.
I think when it comes to stuff like this the only analogy to fall back on is that of "The Kings New Clothes", a favorite of mine especially in all things relating to the Arts.


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## purple99 (Apr 8, 2008)

Add Humpty Dumpty to your analogy and the picture's complete:

`When _I _use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'

`The question is,' said Alice, `whether you _can _make words mean so many different things.'


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## Conservationist (Apr 5, 2007)

Neoclassical transcends genres.

It's a way of thinking and composing.

Pay too much attention to dictionary definitions, especially from the subliterate (wikis), and your brain will fall out.


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## Conservationist (Apr 5, 2007)

purple99 said:


> Some EMI executive with difficult glasses and a stupid haircut while in a "brainstorming session" has said: "Hey guys why don't we call this stuff "Neoclassical" you know to give the music press something to twitter about?" If people want to change their language usage to dance to his tune that's their problem.


Yeah, that's _definitely_ what happened when anus.com started using the term. No doubt. Absolutely. You must be right.

Some of the pretense here reminds me of jazz fans, who are the single biggest group of overrated idiots I've ever encountered. You don't want to be like _that_, do you?


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## purple99 (Apr 8, 2008)

Conservationist said:


> Yeah, that's _definitely_ what happened when anus.com started using the term. No doubt. Absolutely. You must be right.
> 
> Some of the pretense here reminds me of jazz fans, who are the single biggest group of overrated idiots I've ever encountered. You don't want to be like _that_, do you?


From anus.com's neoclassical section:



> Autechre create beauty in gently concatenating melodic fragments suspended in the pure clarity of emptiness found in digital space


Oh Lordy.



> In both taboo-breaking ideological developments and boundary-expanding musicality, Graveland has nurtured, cajoled and threatened black metal into finding new frontiers and transcending them.


Golly.



> an organic flow of sonic narrative which evokes a plaintive emotion of isolation and the fervent yet terrified warmth of a living creature looking beyond its mortality.


I shall now leave this gently concatenating yet taboo-breaking thread, Conservationist old bean, feeling the plaintive emotion of isolation and the fervent yet terrified warmth of a living creature looking beyond its mortality. Yes siree.

 x 10,000


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## Conservationist (Apr 5, 2007)

Weren't you the guy who claimed an EMI exec came up with the term neoclassical?

That explains the ad hom and backpedalling, at least.


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## purple99 (Apr 8, 2008)

Conservationist said:


> Weren't you the guy who claimed an EMI exec came up with the term neoclassical?


What are you twittering about? Scroll up the thread and you'll find my exact words.



Conservationist said:


> That explains the ad hom and backpedalling, at least.


It's not 'ad hom' or 'backpedaling' (single 'L' btw) to giggle at the website you cited, containing the most pretentious, pseudo-intellectual, embarrassing, 24 carat 'I'm an artist therefore have a license to talk utter tripe' twaddle I've read for a long time.

"gently concatenating melodic fragments suspended in the pure clarity of emptiness found in digital space"

PASS THE SICK BAG!


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## Conservationist (Apr 5, 2007)

I see what you posted above:

You stated that the term neoclassical as applied to some metal and ambient bands was the result of an EMI executive using it for marketing purposes.

You got proven wrong, and ever since then, you've been kind of a jerk. I understand being embarrassed about getting it wrong, but aren't you taking it a bit far?


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## purple99 (Apr 8, 2008)

Conservationist said:


> You got proven wrong


Where? When? By whom?



Conservationist said:


> and ever since then, you've been kind of a jerk. I understand being embarrassed about getting it wrong, but aren't you taking it a bit far?


If 'being a jerk' and 'taking it a bit far' consists of laughing at pseudo intellectual bilge masquerading as art commentary, I plead guilty.

Did I mention that your posts are like an organic flow of sonic narrative which evoke a plaintive emotion of isolation and the fervent yet terrified warmth of a living creature looking beyond its mortality?

lozl


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