Remy Van Kesteren

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.

Classical harp refers to the Western art‑music repertoire and performance practice for the concert harp, especially the single‑ and double‑action pedal harp used from the late Baroque and Classical eras through Romanticism to the present. It foregrounds idiomatic arpeggiation, glissandi, harmonics, and refined pedaling that enable chromatic harmony and orchestral color. The genre spans solo works, concertos, chamber music, and orchestral writing, and is closely associated with the Parisian harp schools of the 19th–20th centuries, whose pedagogy shaped modern technique and repertoire.