Neo-classical Metal - Definition

Definition

Neo-classical metal takes its name from a broad conception of classical music. In this it is a concept distinct from how neoclassicism is understood within the classical music tradition. Neoclassical music usually refers to the movement in musical modernism in which composers gained influence from the Classical period. This period roughly spans the years from 1750 to 1810 with the best known composers of strictly classical music including Mozart and Haydn and also Beethoven during the early part of his career before he laid the musical foundations of the Romantic movement in music. The Classical period was a time in which rigidly structured musical forms such as the sonata, symphony and string quartet were developed. Musical neoclassicism developed roughly a century after the end of the Classical period and peaked during the years in between the two World Wars. It was a reaction against late 19th and early 20th-century Romanticism as embodied in the works of composers such as Richard Wagner and Gustav Mahler who had stretched both musical language and musical form to produce massive works where the limits of tonality were broken. Neoclassical composers include both Igor Stravinsky and Paul Hindemith.

On the other hand, neo-classical metal music does not restrict itself to a return to classical aesthetic ideals, such as equilibrium and formalism. Its influences include both the Romantic musical period and the Baroque period of the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth centuries. The music of late Baroque composers such as Vivaldi, Handel and Bach was often highly ornate. Neo-classical metal musicians such as Yngwie J. Malmsteen and Joshua Perahia are inspired by this aspect of Baroque music and also by later composers such as the violinist Niccolò Paganini in using runs and other decorative and showy techniques in their performances. Neo-classical metal music thus looks to classical music as broadly understood by the general public and not to the more specialist technical definition used within classical circles.