Neoclassical Music in America: Voices of Clarity and Restraint. By R. James Tobin

Abstract

As the twentieth century recedes, its history changes, and chroniclers attempting to propose continuities between what happened during its course and what has happened since are obliged to question received terminologies and categorizations, even as they strive to preserve them. With art music, the continued prominence of pre-1900 composers preserves the currency of such categories as Baroque, Classical, and Romantic; but derivatives of these—like neoclassicism—that served useful purposes between 1900 and 2000 do not necessarily retain the viability they might once have had before more recent rethinkings of broader notions of classicism and its contradicting consequence, modernism. Such preliminaries would be difficult to avoid if the text under review presented itself as a scholarly history of American neoclassicism, seeking to establish what this shares with neoclassicism in general, and how it differs from both classicism and modernism. But just as history changes, so does publishing. Rowan & Littlefield’s series, Modern Traditionalist Classical Music, of which R. James Tobin’s book is the second volume, comes across more as autobiography than musicology, with personal testimony and advocacy looming much larger than scholarly criticism and analysis. Contrast Joseph N. Straus’s Twelve-Tone Music in America (Cambridge, 2009), which briefly surveys three of Tobin’s favoured composers under the heading ‘some serial neoclassicists, tonalists, jazzers, and minimalists’. In just twelve pages Straus discusses Arthur Berger, Irvine Fine, and Louise Talma, with annotated music examples to ease the reader’s task in evaluating this unfamiliar music. Tobin has plentiful references to (often deleted) recordings but no score extracts, and as his subtitle suggests, he is much more at ease reflecting on the character of the compositions he introduces than in defining or dissecting their technical devices. As for autobiography, Tobin (b. 1937) provides an early pointer: ‘this book is dedicated to the memory of Harold Shapero [1920–13] because for half a century his Symphony for Classical Orchestra [1947] has had my highest admiration, and because it represents a central and constant touchstone of my personal musical taste’ (p. x).