BBC Music, Volume 32, Number 2: Ballet Treasures

Neoclassicism in music is a 20th‑century movement that revived forms, genres, and aesthetics from the Baroque and Classical eras, but reframed them with modern harmony, rhythm, and orchestration. It emphasizes clarity, balance, objectivity, and contrapuntal craft, often rejecting late‑Romantic excess while retaining a tonal or modal center enriched by dissonance, bitonality, and crisp rhythmic drive. Typical hallmarks include neobaroque dance suites, neoclassical sonatas and concerti, chamber‑oriented scoring, clean textures, and a dry, anti‑rhetorical performance style.

Impressionism in music is a late-19th- and early-20th-century style that prioritizes color, atmosphere, and suggestion over overt drama and functional harmonic progressions. Originating in France, it parallels the visual arts movement in its fascination with light, timbre, and fleeting impressions. Musically, the style favors modal, pentatonic, and whole‑tone materials; parallel (planed) chords; unresolved dissonances; and ambiguous tonal centers. Rhythms are flexible and often blur a sense of strong meter, while textures shimmer through delicate orchestration, pedal tones, and arpeggiated figures. Rather than strict sonata designs, impressionist works tend to be episodic, evocative, and programmatic, conjuring landscapes, water, night, and dreamlike states.

Classical music is the notated art-music tradition of Europe and its global descendants, characterized by durable forms, carefully codified harmony and counterpoint, and a literate score-based practice. The term “classical” can refer broadly to the entire Western art-music lineage from the Medieval era to today, not just the Classical period (c. 1750s–1820s). It privileges long-form structures (such as symphonies, sonatas, concertos, masses, and operas), functional or modal harmony, thematic development, and timbral nuance across ensembles ranging from solo instruments to full orchestras and choirs. Across centuries, the style evolved from chant and modal polyphony to tonal harmony, and later to post-tonal idioms, while maintaining a shared emphasis on written notation, performance practice, and craft.