Neoromanticism

[Martin Lind]

What exactly is "Neoromanticism"?

Wikipedia says:

Neoromanticism (music)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Neoromanticism in music is a trend in modern American and, to a lesser degree, European classical music that became prominent during the second half of the 20th century. Neoromantic music is identified by frequent usage of the extended tonality that flourished during the late Romantic era, as well as a frank expression of emotional sentiment equally evocative of the period.

Currently active US-based composers widely described as neoromantic include John Corigliano, David del Tredici and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, while European composers of the tradition include Nicholas Maw and James MacMillan of Great Britain. It has also been applied to the later works of Ligeti and Penderecki.

While most neoromantic music is (to a varying degree) tonal and pointedly rejective of serialism and other formalistic procedures associated with post-war modernism, other avant-garde elements (aleatoric, sound-mass composition, tone clusters, atonality, quarter-tones) are sometimes juxtaposed within the same work.

Neoromantic styles often overlap with other compositional approaches. Polystylism and musical quotation from other works are sometimes used, within the same work, often evoking nostalgia. For example, in the first movement of John Corigliano's Symphony No. 1, there is a wistful quotation in the orchestral piano of Ediot' "Tango".

John Coolidge Adams has combined post-romantic styles and orchestration of Ravel, early Stravinsky, and Sibelius, with minimalist processes and textures, and Americana-tinged diatonicism evocative of Aaron Copland.

Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara, in such works as "Cantus Arcticus" (a concerto for recorded birdsong and orchestra) and his Symphony No. 7 ("Angel of Light"), has been described as presenting a new Romanticism.

The German Wikepedia is silent on this topic by the way. There was an article but it was erased. I don't find the English Wikipedia very clear. For example I would never see John Adams as a neoromanticist, his music is tonal, Yes but neoromantic? By the way I didn't like the "Angel of light" symphony of Rautavaara, it may be neoromantic but in my ears it appears to be a kind of Kitch. Is neoromanticism Kitch?

Isn't it a kind of awakening a dead corpse to life if you want to be a neoromanticist? But what exactly is neoromanticism and which new composers are declared neoromanticists?

Regards
Martin

[karlhenning]

What exactly is "Neoromanticism"?

[snip]

The German Wikepedia is silent on this topic by the way. There was an article but it was erased.

Isn't that weird, Martin?  That would have been an interesting series of events to chronicle (maybe) . . . .

Edit :: typo

[Scriptavolant]

I've got another name for "neoromanticism"..Postmodernism. 

[MishaK]

Isn't that weird, Martin?  That would have been an interesting series of events to chronicle (maybe) . . . .

Edit :: typo

To be fair, German wikipedia on the whole has fewer entries than the English version, so there may be no conspiracy behind this omission.

[Brian]

EDIT: Apologies for length. I just thought a bit too much about all of this. If you're short on time, skip to the last line of the post.

German Wikipedia questions aside, you've brought up a very interesting point Martin, and I am happy to form and offer a few thoughts on the subject.

Isn't it a kind of awakening a dead corpse to life if you want to be a neoromanticist?

You're thinking of necromancy, not neoromancy.    But on a more serious note, there's a valid question here.

One answer is that the "neoromantics" have been, perhaps, more than slightly mislabeled. As an unreformed and unabashed romantic, I listen to James MacMillan and John Corigliano and hear something generally foreign. How can Veni, veni Emmanuel be a grandchild of the romantic era? It is interesting that the neoromantics are labeled (and criticized) as such for "extended tonality...as well as a frank expression of emotional sentiment." Tonality, after all, is the "default setting" of our species' music (and some of our languages); as the philosopher Daniel Dennett and scientist Daniel Levitin have noted, listening to tonal music is "natural", in the sense that say walking or drinking water is "natural", while listening to atonal music, or riding a bicycle, or drinking Vanilla Coke are "unnatural". You have to either be predisposed to like atonal music or cherry Coke, or learn to appreciate them over time (I'm not a big fan of either, but notice that value judgments are not involved in this distinction). Furthermore, there are a lot of emotional "buttons" we have which authors of music can push to elicit certain reactions. That's why so much syrupy pop music sounds exactly the same, and why war movies seem to all have the same darn soundtrack. Flutes can conjure up thoughts of youth or innocence or purity in nearly anyone (in fact, I seem to recall that it was explicitly connected with such in Brahms' plan for his First Symphony - can anyone confirm this?).

It seems peculiar to ask of composers that they avoid "expression of emotional sentiment", since they are or should be artists above all else. What distinguished the good old Romantics, I think, is that they were absolute masters at "pushing listeners' buttons." We don't have to think, "What do I feel? What does this mean? What is going on?" when we hear, say, the first chords of Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony. We just know, somehow (and Levitin's book This Is Your Brain on Music contains some fascinating insight into why this is the case). The contemporary composers who uphold this tradition of heart-on-sleeve romanticism are at work outside of the conservatory. A hundred years ago John Williams might have made a violin concerto out of "Schindler's List"; a great example of "neoromanticism" in my mind, meanwhile, remains the Chairman's Waltz from Memoirs of a Geisha - not to be confused with Adams' Chairman Dances! One of my music major friends here at college (music history, specifically) is excited about, of all things, video game music, and in some rare cases he's really been able to impress me ("Guess who wrote this piano piece." "A student of Rachmaninov?" "A Japanese guy last year for X fantasy game.").

As I said, I'm an ardent and unapologetic romantic, and I have a hard time giving Corigliano et. al. credit for the type of romantic genius that is exhibited by, say, Jean Sibelius or Johann Kalliwoda. I also have a hard time giving the same credit to the composers of Hollywood film scores, like Williams, and to composers like Jennifer Higdon who seem to me to embody the art of writing cheese. Higdon's "blue cathedral" joins the soundtracks of dozens of movies in the category of over-the-top talentless sentimentality and, to alter Wikipedia's phrase, excessively or disingenuously "frank expression of emotional sentiment." [Incidentally, my favorite movie score of 2007 was "Ratatouille" - go ahead and laugh!]

In any case, all this presupposes that there are only two ways of writing music nowadays, and that all the other ways are, well, "dead corpses". We can either produce atonal "new" stuff, or kitsch. It's true that there IS a lot of atonal stuff, and there is a lot of kitsch (these categories are not mutually exclusive!), but surely other music can be written. And it is. A large school of modern composers borrow inspiration not from the romantics, but from the baroque and renaissance eras. (Are Respighi's Ancient Airs and Dances an example of digging up the dead?) Some compose with the influences of centuries-old eastern folk styles in mind. For some reason these composers are not so much "reviving corpses" as "looking to the past for inspiration". Are we musically bankrupt and forced to look backwards, or are we merely finding that our musical past contains keys to our movement into the future? I hope it's the second option.

And in either case the line still needs to be drawn between "neoromanticism" and downright "necromancy". One could argue, for instance, that the neoromantics apply what we learned about music in the twentieth century to the styles of the romantic era, or vice versa. In this view neoromanticism is not exhuming the remains of Rachmaninov so much as it is borrowing one or two of his bones for the creation of an altogether new beast - for better or worse. One could also argue that the neoromantics are writing cheesy, kitschy music because it sells. Well, it doesn't sell me, but that's beside the point; this argument is downright reactionary in its "atonal protectionism"; ie its promotion of atonality at the expense of both unoriginal and original thought. There are, as Schonberg said and Sibelius proved, still so many beautiful things to be said in C major. The problem is that, as this criticism rightfully points out, there currently aren't many beautiful things being said in C major or any other old-fashioned key. A lot of it is formulaic, boring, or bad. The challenge facing the romantic revival movement, which also faced the composers who drew their inspiration from the renaissance and baroque eras, is to write music which deserves the label - to take the lessons of the romantics and use them well.

Or as the literary agent Eric Simonoff told me about the craft of novel-writing:

"It's simple. All you have to do is write a masterpiece."

[Martin Lind]

Hi Brian,

your text is tremendously interesting. I would wish that my English would be better. Am I allowed to cite this text in a German forum? I started a thread in www.hifi-forum.de, which is a German site ( only partly interested in classical musi) regarding neoromanitcism. I will do that. Thank you very much.

Regards
Martin

[Brian]

Thanks Martin! And if you let me know where your English could not understand, I will happily help. (I talk too much. )

Am I allowed to cite this text in a German forum?

Sure, though since I am a student and not at all an expert, they may be able to tear apart all my arguments. Same is true for other members of this website.  

[Grazioso]

It is interesting that the neoromantics are labeled (and criticized) as such for "extended tonality...as well as a frank expression of emotional sentiment."

To criticize a composer for "extended tonality...as well as a frank expression of emotional sentiment" seems like perverse cultural decadence. If someone has to force himself to write or listen to music that artificially ignores or subverts tonality, resulting in what would be considered conventionally "ugly" and/or impenetrable, perhaps he's trying to broaden his expression or aesthetic sensibility, but perhaps he's just woefully jaded and unable to find pleasure or solace in its more "natural" forms.

[Sydney Grew]

EDIT: Apologies for length. I just thought a bit too much about all of this.

No need to apologise - the longer the better as far as we are concerned, and your message contains much food for thought.

But there is something bogus or forced about this word "romantic" we have always found. It is often used as a term of blanket disapprobation of everything done between 1800 and 1908. But actually it is a term not validly applicable to music at all. Beethoven did not think of himself as a "romantic" composer. Schumann did not think of himself as a "romantic" composer. Brahms did not think of himself as a "romantic" composer. Nor even did Liszt and Wagner. This whole category of "romanticism" is deeply distasteful to the thinking person. We - music critics that is - would be much better off if we dropped it entirely.

[longears]

But Telemann regarded himself as "a baroque composer?"

Pomposity allied with wit can be amusing at least...but without is just a bore.

[PerfectWagnerite]

In short: Neoromanticism = music that nobody wants to listen to. Let's face it, why listen to Neoromanticism when their is 19th century Romanticism which is way more interesting.

[Scriptavolant]

To criticize a composer for "extended tonality...as well as a frank expression of emotional sentiment" seems like perverse cultural decadence. If someone has to force himself to write or listen to music that artificially ignores or subverts tonality, resulting in what would be considered conventionally "ugly" and/or impenetrable, perhaps he's trying to broaden his expression or aesthetic sensibility, but perhaps he's just woefully jaded and unable to find pleasure or solace in its more "natural" forms.

To criticize a composer with the accuse that he's writing music that artificially ignores or subverts tonality, resulting in what delicate ears judge conventionally ugly and/or impenetrable seems like the opening of a perverse cultural kindergarten in which the only simulacra are the emphatic accent on emotion, sentimentality and sugar, which often - not always - lead to boring and trite musical cliché.
Usually the misunderstanding originates from the fact that some people who like 19th Century music tend to conclude that the only reasonable thing to do is to keep on writing music like that in secula seculorum, an issue which every sincere composer usually rejects for he's concerned to find new ways of expression rather than a slavish reproduction of codified forms.

[Josquin des Prez]

an issue which every sincere composer usually rejects for he's concerned to find new ways of expression

And there i was thinking every sincere composer was concerned in writing great music. Finding new ways of expression is the most tired cliché of all!

[Scriptavolant]

And there i was thinking every sincere composer was concerned in writing great music. Finding new ways of expression is the most tired cliché of all!

[Writing great music] is consistent with [finding new ways or - if you like it more - a personal style] but not consistent with [copying and pasting the Masters].

My experience with a lot of postmodern/neoromantic stuff is that the aim to narcotize the listener with "emotion" was so hypertrophic to systematically exclude the chance to write sincere and sober music. Of course the narcotized would disagree..

[longears]

My experience with a lot of self-consciously "modern" stuff is that the aim to bulldoze the listener with the composer's "cleverness" in finding new ways of expression is so hypertrophic to systematically exclude the chance to write sincere and sober music. Of course the bulldozed would disagree....

[karlhenning]

Fine post, Brian . . . will retort reply at greater length hereafter.

And there i was thinking every sincere composer was concerned in writing great music. Finding new ways of expression is the most tired cliché of all!

False dichotomy, this isn't an either/or pair.  Great composers, in fact, do both:  write great music, and write music whose greatness is in part a result of not just copying what has been expressed before.

[Kullervo]

The difference between Neoromantic music and Romantic music? Quartal harmony. 

[Josquin des Prez]

[Writing great music] is consistent with [finding new ways].

But finding new ways isn't consistent with writing great music.

[finding new ways or - if you like it more - a personal style]

False dichotomy. Those are not mutually inclusive.

[karlhenning]

Tonality, after all, is the "default setting" of our species' music (and some of our languages); as the philosopher Daniel Dennett and scientist Daniel Levitin have noted, listening to tonal music is "natural", in the sense that say walking or drinking water is "natural", while listening to atonal music, or riding a bicycle, or drinking Vanilla Coke are "unnatural". You have to either be predisposed to like atonal music or cherry Coke, or learn to appreciate them over time (I'm not a big fan of either, but notice that value judgments are not involved in this distinction).

Very interesting paragraph.  So much is going on in it, and not necessarily to an end, that I am not sure how to 'answer' it, but these are my initial thoughts:

1.  I appreciate the go at neutrality in the description of "atonality" as 'unnatural'.

2.  Seemingly implicit, is a broader notion of tonality than (as is often presumed in musical discussion) Western Common Practice.  So one difficulty in addressing the remarks is, Where have Dennett and Levitin drawn The Line?

3.  There is a lot of non-tonal sound, in nature, which we tend to accept as "musical."  So regardless of the diplomacy in specifying that "unnatural" is here a neutral term, I wonder if it shoots wide of the mark.

4.  Even tonal art music, in many places and communities, is an acquired taste;  so there are instances of tonality which are probably "unnatural" in ways not dissimilar to "atonality."

5.  Let's say again, that there are cultures with flourishing musical cultures involving primarily percussion.  So if we try to freight all the questions of musical value on any tonal/"atonal" axis, we're already compromising the result.

It seems peculiar to ask of composers that they avoid "expression of emotional sentiment", since they are or should be artists above all else. What distinguished the good old Romantics, I think, is that they were absolute masters at "pushing listeners' buttons." We don't have to think, "What do I feel? What does this mean? What is going on?" when we hear, say, the first chords of Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony. We just know, somehow (and Levitin's book This Is Your Brain on Music contains some fascinating insight into why this is the case). The contemporary composers who uphold this tradition of heart-on-sleeve romanticism are at work outside of the conservatory.

I think you've got hold of somewhat a wrong angle (at least, insofar as I understand (a) who is meant by neoromantics and (b) the criticism they sustain).

First, I think it is helpful to consider the musical movement which they seek to invoke by the term neoromanticism:  viz., Neoclassicism.  It seems a ready parallel, right?  In the 20s and 30s many composers who were reacting against what were at the time considered the stifling excesses of Late Romanticism (or, Post-Romanticism) sought inspiration from the clarity and energy of the classics.

Yet here we already see significant distinctions between Neoclassicism, and "neoromanticism" (which at times I will still cast in quotes, because I think we're still trying to get at what it is, and if it be actually a chose-en-soi).  Composers such as Stravinsky and Hindemith took inspiration from the classics;  they weren't wringing their hands and trying to turn the clock back to the 18th century.  (a) Their music all the same carried itself as "modern," as of its time (not as reconstituted Bach, or Mozart, e.g.);  (b) Their neoclassical music still bore their own musical fingerprints (Stravinsky's neoclassical works sound every bit "like Stravinsky" as do L'oiseau de feu or Petrushka, e.g.);  (c) They would have been artistically scandalized at the thought that "the musical way forward" was any kind of wilful cultural amnesia, and that a composer's honorable trade consisted in, oh I don't know, pretending he had a time-capsule and could sit at the feet of some 19th-century Master.

Consider Prokofiev's Classical Symphony (or Schoenberg's Cello Concerto after Monn).  Prokofiev's idea was not "to write like Haydn," but how might Papa write if he had the sonic pallette which composers at the beginning of the 20th century?

As I see it, the flaw in (or unwitting dishonesty of) "neoromanticism" is in forgetting that the original Romantics were bold adventurers, not in any wistful kind of retreat.

In any case, all this presupposes that there are only two ways of writing music nowadays, and that all the other ways are, well, "dead corpses". We can either produce atonal "new" stuff, or kitsch. It's true that there IS a lot of atonal stuff, and there is a lot of kitsch (these categories are not mutually exclusive!), but surely other music can be written. And it is. A large school of modern composers borrow inspiration not from the romantics, but from the baroque and renaissance eras. (Are Respighi's Ancient Airs and Dances an example of digging up the dead?) Some compose with the influences of centuries-old eastern folk styles in mind. For some reason these composers are not so much "reviving corpses" as "looking to the past for inspiration". Are we musically bankrupt and forced to look backwards, or are we merely finding that our musical past contains keys to our movement into the future? I hope it's the second option.

All (or, a very large degree of) music throughout the centuries has built upon the past;  I'll say again:  in my view, great art is at least as much a matter of continuum as of upheaval.  You rightly point out that issues of writing well do not rest along "party lines" here.

The difference between Neoromantic music and Romantic music? Quartal harmony. 

I like that.

But finding news ways isn't consistent with writing great music.

That remark is unadulterated, reactionary piffle.

[Josquin des Prez]

That remark is unadulterated, reactionary piffle.

I guess it depends on the definition of "finding new ways".