Neoclassical Music in America: Voices of Clarity and Restraint by R. James Tobin (review)

In 2007, Carol J. Oja took note of a group of composers, active in the 1940s and 1950s, who “constituted a central artery of American composition, holding positions of leadership while winning Guggenheims and other prestigious fellowships”—part of what Oja called a “second wave” of neoclassicists that featured major voices in American music such as Harold Shapero, Irving Fine, and Arthur Berger (“Time Travel with Nadia Boulanger,” Harvard Library Bulletin 18, nos. 1–2 [2007]: 52–53). Overshadowed by the powerhouses of mid-twentieth-century American composition—Milton Babbitt, John Cage, Aaron Copland, and Leonard Bernstein—and by narratives of music history that focus on serialism after World War II, these mid-century neoclassicists and their works are practically forgotten today.

In Neoclassical Music in America: Voices of Clarity and Restraint, the classical music writer R. James Tobin takes an important and determined step toward reviving interest in these figures, informed largely by Tobin’s personal perspective as a fan of neoclassicism. Part of the series Modern Traditionalist Classical Music—a title that captures the difficulty of defining strains in twentieth-century music that do not fit the mold of high modernism—this book carries with it two interconnected goals: to bring the mid-century neoclassicists from the periphery to the center in music history, and to explore the specific musical character, origins, and legacies of the neoclassicists’ musical aesthetic.

Tobin tackles the first of these goals with gusto, providing a survey of the works, lives, careers, and reception of twelve selected composers, some more familiar than others: Edward Burlingame Hill, Walter Piston, Harold Shapero, Irving Fine, Arthur Berger, Lukas Foss, Alexei Haieff, Ingolf Dahl, Louise Talma, John Lessard, Nikolai Lopatnikoff, and Aaron Rabushka. While Tobin’s book is not the first to deal with one or more of these figures, it is the first to unite them specifically under the framework of neoclassicism. And it does so for a broad readership, one less interested in analytical details and more in recommendations for little-known works to explore; projecting important future work on these figures’ music, the author “left serious harmonic analysis for others to take up for a more specialized audience, as they wish—and as is to be hoped” (p. 10). At the same time, the descriptions of music found in Neoclassical Music in America are for the most part vivid, clear, and concise.

After a brief introductory chapter, chapter 2 appropriately traces American neoclassicism to three European precursors: Igor Stravinsky, Paul Hindemith, and Nadia Boulanger. Tobin then turns, in chapters 3 and 4, to Piston and Hill, two American composers who Tobin posits helped define the aesthetic and set the stage for their successors. All this preludes the book’s most substantial and perhaps its strongest section—chapter 5, on Harold Shapero. Shapero graces the cover, and his music clearly made a personal mark on the book’s author. In fact, Tobin dedicated the book to the memory of Shapero, who died in 2013 and whose Symphony for Classical Orchestra “represents a central and constant touchstone of my personal musical taste—representing continuity with previous musical preferences and providing an aural palate-cleanser when other works lost their freshness or ability to hold my interest” (p. x). The discussion of Shapero is especially interesting for the detail it provides, in a section on critical responses to his works, about the fraught political landscape of mid-century American composition. Discussions of Fine and Berger follow, and chapter 8 throws the spotlight on Lukas Foss’s fascinating neoclassical period—a discussion that might have benefited from additional context in Foss’s later works, like the postmodernist (or perhaps post-neoclassical?) Baroque Variations (1967). Chapters on figures like Talma and Lessard, although quite brief compared to the extended discussion of Shapero, reveal a wealth of works that Tobin passionately...