George Garnett mentioned the problematic word "neoclassicism" on the Stravinsky thread. I could see that thread getting bogged down in as discussion of what neoclassicism was/is + wasn't/isn't + thought it best to create a separate thread.

I'm not after a definition, although I'm sure at least one board member will be, but I'm interested in what people understand by the term in the context of music. Dictionaries and histories of music are often contradictory and confusing, as I'm sure many of us are aware.

What about the following, for instance ?

Stravinsky - Symphonies of wind instruments (1923)
Prokofiev - Classical Symphony (1917)
Mahler - 4th symphony (1899-1901)
Reger - Concerto in the Ancient style op 123 (1912)
Ravel - Le tombeau de Couperin (1914-7)
Busoni - ?

I'm going to stick to the Stravinsky thread for my comments about him if you don't mind, a/h, as I hear his neoclassicism as a much more specific Stravinskian phenomenon than the general movement which is suggested by your post here (although obviously they're interrelated - I'll try to deal with that when I have time to post at more length on Stravinsky).

As for the more general phenomenon: I'd say 'yes' to most of the works you mention, although Syms of Winds isn't the Stravinsky I'd think of as neoclassical and I'm completely thrown by your mention of Mahler 4, which I guess I'll have to go off and listen to again as I have absolutely no idea what you mean!

I'd certainly accept the Ravel Tombeau alongside the other pieces you mention, but I'd tend to put the 'centre of gravity' of the neoclassical movement further forward in time, in the 20s or 30s, and I'd take it to include Milhaud and Poulenc as well as the Strav of Dumbarton Oaks. I don't think any serious consideration of the phenomenon could ignore Schoenberg's early 12-tone works, even though one might have to acknowledge that at the time they looked like an opposite tendency.

I'd also be inclined to consider Walton's paring-down of textures and rhetoric after Troilus, and (at the beginning rather than end of some later composers' careers) the 1950s style of Dutilleux, a couple of 40s/50s Lutoslawski pieces, and possibly their precursor Roussel (though I don't really know his work so well ...) as part of the 'neoclassical' phenomenon.

Some 40s Tippett and Carter (and Copland?) is obviously influenced by the style too, though I'd want to be careful in subsuming that under the phenomenon as I think it would obscure where it's heading within those composers' own stylistic trajectories.

I've spent some time thinking about both Roussel and Dutilleux over the last few months and their names just go to show what a slippery world we are in as soon as we try to fix labels to pieces/ composers.

Both are symphonists although that doesn't mean anything in itself - Roussel 1 is a pictorial piece, watery impressionism if you like, No 2 is a much denser work - my favourite, mainly because it is trying very hard to do something admirable - forge a polytonal language that doesn't sound cheap (like Milhaud). Anyone know Pour une fete de printemps? It was a rejected movement from the Symphony and shows him at his very best. Nos 3 and 4 are more familiar and have a Prokofievian 'age of steel' sound to them which doesn't connect with neo-classicism in my mind, although the 3rd and 4th mts of each are lighter (more trivial?) and I can accept the label there. Use of counterpoint (in the chamber works - the two trios, the serenade and string quartet) seems to take the lead of late Ravel (and I don't think of many of his works as being neo-classical - maybe the G major concerto?) rather than Stravinsky. Clear forms - the Petite Suite, Suite in F, Sinfonietta, Piano Concerto, Cello Concertino - seem a better indicator of a neo-classical tendency. So maybe that is my checklist - formal clarity, referring back to earlier models and a somewhat 'lighter' vein of intention... Dutilleux's early works (mostly rejected by him although widely performed and recorded) certainly fall into that category, but I feel the symphonies already move away from it (well, maybe No 1 retains enough to hover on the edge of inclusion!)

Just a quick reply as it's lunchtime...

Richard Strauss's later works are often described as neoclassical (e.g. oboe concerto, concertino for string quartet and bassoon (possibly, can't remember), Horn concerto no.2) but I suppose these don't really count as they were written later than 1920 (IIRC).

It depends what you mean by parody, Pim. The term used to mean simply a re-working of something that already exists - not necessarily with ironic or destructive intent. Hence 'parody mass' to mean a Renaissance mass based on a pre-existing melody, like a Missa super 'L'Homme armé' or a Missa 'Gloria Tibi Trinitas' (the first type based on a popular song, the second based on a plainchant).

The literary scholar Linda Hutcheon has done a lot of interesting work on the term 'parody' in the last couple of decades, partly influenced by the early 20th-century Russian linguist Mikhail Bakhtin. Hutcheon defines parody as 'a productive-creative approach to tradition', which wouldn't seem an unreasonable assessment of some of the music you mention.

Maybe I should have said she *describes* it as, not *defines* it as. I didn't mean to suggest that every 'productive-creative approach to tradition' is a form of parody, just that seeing parody as 'a productive-creative approach' allows us to get past the negative connotations the term has acquired and to realise that it can be a constructive thing too.

I might extend that point to say that even if her definition could 'encompass almost all music in some way or another', it could at least be useful in focusing our attention on what the 'parody' of a Palestrina mass has in common with the 'parody' of a 1960s piece by Maxwell Davies, and how even in the more apparently destructive case something new is being said. This doesn't strike me as an especially postmodern position. I agree that much of Hutcheon's subsequent work on opera is quite closely aligned with certain 'postmodern' tendencies in the new musicology, but I see her earlier work on parody as a much more traditional linguistics-inspired approach to the theory of literature.

As for 'this process [being] more clearly in the foreground in some music/art than in other works', I think Hutcheon gives quite a careful account of how the category of parody intersects with the issue of intentionality. She recognises quite clearly that to say something is parody of something else, and that it is 'productive-creative', is a statement about authorial intentions in a way that, for instance, Bloom's theory of influence wouldn't necessarily be. (Hutcheon doesn't mention Bloom; that's my own comparison.)