PREFACEAny attempt to work out a theory of neoclassicism in music, or even to give coherent content to the term, confronts a long history of careless or tendentious usage. Alone among the other arts -architecture, painting, literature -music has been unable to distinguish between genuine neoclassical works and those that wear a ruffle here or perform a dance step there as witty gestures or momentary satires in an allusive pantomime. This article works toward a theory of neoclassicism inductively, through four extended analyses meant to illustrate four distinct impulses or strategies by which early twentieth-century composers have created modern works that engage or reconstruct the past without sacrificing their own integrity in the history of styles. Because my aims are broadly synthetic, I have chosen pieces that have been much analyzed by others, and I draw on several published analyses to demonstrate how representative analyses can be organized into a broader and less technical understanding of neoclassicism.I wish to express my gratitude to David Lewin for thoughtful comments on an earlier draft of this article.The theoretical confusion surrounding neoclassicism in music mandates an introduction placing some of the various impulses that can be termed "neoclassical" in a general context of historicism in the arts. After a brief review of the confused usages of "neoclassicism" in music, I propose several categories helpful in talking about the uses of the past in twentieth-century music. I identify two general modes of returning to the classics -antiquarianism and accommodation -and argue that the latter is the more important in understanding twentieth-century music. I then describe two common modes of accommodation: allegory and what, for want of a better term, I call metamorphic anachronism. Allegorical interpretations have characterized several important recent discussions of neoclassicism in twentieth-century music, including those by Burkholder and Straus. Metamorphic anachronism, the less direct but more important access to the past, involves various kinds of imitation. Any imitation involves anachronism when two different period-styles confront each other, but not all uses of anachronism are neoclassic (as, for example, in parodies). I then identify four general types of imitation (reverential, eclectic, heuristic, and dialectical), each a mode of metamorphic anachronism, and each illustrated with an analysis meant less to be the last word, however temporary, on its subject, than to suggest a mode of attention and argument that others may want to explore.
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