Continuing our discussion of American Neo-Romanticism:
American composers in the early and middle periods of the 20th century produced some of the strongest and most impressive concert music in the history of the United States. While many different styles existed simultaneously, sometimes in the same composer, most American classical1 music of the time can be placed into one of two general categories:
- the traditionalists exhibited various forms of Late Romanticism, Neo-Romanticism, Impressionism and Expressionistic Neo-Romanticism, among others. (More will be said later about the differences between these “isms.”) European models for the traditionalists were composers such as Richard Strauss, Puccini, Rachmaninoff, Sibelius, Mahler, and even Debussy and Ravel, 2 among many others. Prominent American traditionalists included Edward McDowell, Amy Beach, Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, Morton Gould, Howard Hanson, Paul Creston, Ernest Bloch, Samuel Barber, and William Grant Still, and others.
- the modernists, essentially anti-traditionalists, were heavily influenced initially by contemporaneous avant-garde European movements, such as Impressionism and Expressionism3 (extreme Romanticism), but later defined themselves by moving away from these into the twelve-tone system, atonality, serialism, and various other adventurous and experimental non-traditional directions.The later modernists almost completely repudiated conventional and traditional musical styles and practices.
The big European modernist models were, originally, Debussy,4 and later, Schoenberg and Stravinsky. American modernists included Charles Ives, Roger Sessions, Wallingford Riegger, Henry Cowell, Milton Babbitt, Carl Ruggles, Edgard Varèse, and Elliot Carter, among others. Stravinsky in particular, as did others, would later move towards Neo-Classicism5, a more conservative style that displayed some of the older traditional values, such as attention to regularity of structure, clarity and emotional control, while rejecting much of the radical, often extreme emotionalism of the Romantic tradition.
Many of the composers of this time actually produced works that were difficult to classify. Their music exhibited elements of both traditionalism and modernism, often in some kind of combination. Many started out as traditionists of some sort and gradually moved through a series of transformations into other forms of musical expression. Many became eclectics, taking what they liked from the various traditions, past and present, and integrating them into something fresh and exciting. (Neo-Romanticism post #3 will be posted in about a week.)
1 The word classical is used here generically to refer to all concert music and is not to be confused with the Classical period (±1730-1825). 2 Debussy retained many earlier stylistic practices but was not as concerned with form and control as Ravel was. Although Ravel is usually classed as an impressionist, his music is perhaps more accurately described as neo-classic impressionism, or even neo-baroque impressionism. 3 Generally this blog will use the convention of capitalizing and italicizing musical styles or periods that end in ism (Neo-Romanticism), and use lower case when referring to an individual (neo-romantic) or an individual’s style (modernist). However, when direct quotes are used the conventions of the quoted author are retained. 4 The impressionists can be viewed as a bridge between Romanticism and Modernism, exhibiting characteristics of both Modernism and Traditionalism. 5 Neo-Classicism contains elements of both Modernism and Traditionalism and will be further clarified later in this blog.
