ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author refers to the history of music in the twentieth century as “a complex mosaic made up of many stylistic tiles.” He also mentions that different stylistic “tiles,” or trends, have coexisted, and that composers have often switched between tiles in the mosaic. Neoclassicism is a very broad term that the readers use to refer to the deliberate incorporation into music of stylistic and technical elements proper of music from the past that are imitated and used as models (as “classics”) to generate textures, forms, genres, and so on. While Stravinsky’s Agnus Dei can be seen as establishing a dialogue with period of the past from which it borrows apparent elements of style, a twentieth-century composition using totally current twentieth-century aesthetics. Finally, shorter progression is also marked in an inner voice in the right hand. The main melodic force in the second phrase, on the other hand, is the chromatic step progression in the tenor voice.
