ABSTRACT
Classicism and neoclassicism have been cultivated within a variety of political systems and causes aristocratic and liberal, totalitarian and revolutionary, and reactionary and progressive. Neoclassicism implies self-consciously respectful, nostalgic, or ironic distance with respect to classicism itself. In music, neoclassicism has come to be associated with the twentieth-century rejection of Romanticism, but it is easy to espy neoclassicism in much of the classicism of the preceding centuries. In a way comparable to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Igor Stravinsky has served as the measure of musical neoclassicism. Classicism and neoclassicism may involve aesthetics of restraint and refinement, order and control, but their Apollonian fruits may have sprung from Dionysian seeds. The survey suggests that a classical ideal of style and form inspires a variety of styles and genres, including many not normally associated with classicism. Standard classicism refers to the respect for regularity and its canons are codifiable.
