Is It Romantic?  Frank J. Oteri, Editor Frank J. Oteri Photo by
Jeffrey Herman  I’ve always had trouble with the words
"classical" and "romantic" used to describe the opposing trends
of intellectualism and emotionalism in music. Perhaps this was
because I grew up in the 1970s and before I ever learned to
appreciate so-called "classical music" (which strangely includes
music that is both "classical" and "romantic"), "classical"
meant I Claudius on Channel 13 and romantic meant a TV
commercial for a candlelit dinner accompanied by a K-Tel
soundtrack of Mantovani playing instrumental versions of popular
love ballads.  This makes it somewhat difficult to engage in a
semantic discussion about the term "neo-romantic" which has been
frequently trotted out by music critics over the last 20 years
to describe recent "classical music" which is clearly
"tonally"-oriented and more "accessible" or "listener friendly"
than music employing the formal scaffoldings of serialism or
indeterminacy. The jury is still out on whethe