Almost all stylistic innovations of the early 20th century aimed to close the romantic side of music history: to leave the 19th century tradition behind. To leave behind the tradition of the nineteenth century. A description of the feelings that the new generation of writers had for the music of the late Romantic period can be found in the diary of the young Sergei Prokofiev from the early 1920s. The phrase he uses is quite radical: "...before, I had been unaffected by Mahler's 7th Unnecessary Music. And meanwhile there are musicians ... who admire it. 

They kiss a stillborn baby." There is a youthful maximalism in Prokofiev's words, but they are telling: all new compositional languages - from the rigid avant-garde to the music of everyday life - have tried to break away from the romantic 19th century.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WpBjNvIT5E 

Convert to mp3

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZ3qPGC8og8

One of the most significant of these languages was neoclassicism. Oddly enough, this style did not attempt to subvert tradition, but drew inspiration from the past. Not from the recent Romantic past, however, but from a more distant epoch of Classicism (second half of the 18th century) or Baroque (17th and first half of the 18th century) or even Renaissance (16th century and earlier). The name of the style - "new classicism" - can be misleading: it means not only the linking to a past epoch (classicism), but more generally the construction of a new language on "foreign", ancient models.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaGoBP9xgQY - YT to Mp3

Composers "remembered" the harpsichord and baroque violin - the forerunners of modern string instruments - and began to write music for them. The opera libretto could be written in Latin, and the opera was nostalgically divided into numbers, as in the Italian 18th century. Baroque fugues and sarabandas were heard in the works, and the three hundred year old dust was shaken off the Renaissance madrigals. It is important to understand that this does not mean that neoclassicism made copies of ancient musical products. Like the composers who analyzed folklore, the composers of neoclassicism did not "learn" the ancient melodies themselves, but rather the way the musical plot was constructed and the regularities of the sequence of events (for example, in Baroque music).

To the attentive ear, neoclassicism sounds like a complex antiquity "recomposed" in interesting ways. It is undoubtedly twentieth-century music, but one can recognize in it, for example, the dance and motor features of ancient music, and one can recognize many features of the signature of certain composers of the past.

Examples:

Igor Stravinsky, Ottorino Respighi, Bohuslav Martinů, Paul Hindemith

Read next - Avant-Garde II