Can Peter Do Mysteriums? This question opens a fascinating exploration into the multifaceted world of Igor Stravinsky, a composer whose work elicits strong reactions and varied interpretations. At pets.edu.vn, we delve into the intricate layers of Stravinsky’s compositions, offering insights into his techniques, influences, and the emotions he sought to convey, while making the case that even within the most challenging pieces, there is a place for a more accessible performance. Discover how to approach Stravinsky with confidence and understanding, enriching your appreciation of classical music and exploring the magic of music analysis.
1. Unpacking Stravinsky: Beyond the Surface
Stravinsky’s music often presents a unique challenge to listeners and performers alike. It requires a willingness to look beyond the surface and engage with the deeper complexities of his compositions. His work is renowned for its rhythmic innovation, harmonic language, and the emotional depths it attempts to explore. One of the main challenges customers face is understanding these complexities.
1.1. The Apollonian Clockwork: A New Perspective
Louis Andriessen and Elmer Schönberger’s The Apollonian Clockwork: On Stravinsky offers a fresh perspective on the composer’s work. This book challenges conventional interpretations and provides a deeper understanding of Stravinsky’s musical language. The book’s sassy, thorough, and opinionated approach offers new insights into Stravinsky’s work.
1.2. Danses Concertantes: More Than Lightweight?
Andriessen and Schönberger defend Danses Concertantes, a work often dismissed as lightweight. They highlight the political and emotional depth within the piece, suggesting that it is more than just a collection of pleasant melodies. They also challenge recordings that fall short of revealing these hidden layers. According to an article in The Guardian, Stravinsky’s Danses Concertantes is a piece that exemplifies his neo-classical style, blending rhythmic vitality with melodic charm.
1.3. The Need for Inspired Interpretation
The authors argue that Danses Concertantes needs an orchestral interpretation that fully captures its intended context. This suggests that the piece’s potential is not always realized in performance and that a deeper understanding of Stravinsky’s intentions is necessary to bring it to life.
2. Nabokov and Stravinsky: Mirror Images?
The text draws a parallel between Stravinsky and Vladimir Nabokov, two displaced Russian artists who shared a similar artistic trajectory. Both figures were known for their technical mastery, their playful parody of technique, and their ability to reveal new emotions through their work.
2.1. A Shared Artistic Path
The comparison between Stravinsky and Nabokov highlights the cyclical nature of artistic creation. Both artists moved from technical proficiency to playful parody and then to the expression of sincere emotion. This suggests that artistic growth involves a continuous process of mastering, deconstructing, and reinventing one’s craft.
2.2. The Complexities of Emotion
Stravinsky was interested in complex emotions, as evidenced by his critique of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony. Stravinsky found Mahler’s emotional spectrum too simplistic, preferring the shades of grey in his own work. This reveals Stravinsky’s desire to explore the more nuanced and ambiguous aspects of human experience.
3. Kerman’s Insights: Irony and Pathos in Stravinsky
Joseph Kerman’s analysis of Stravinsky’s Concerto for Piano and Winds sheds light on the composer’s use of irony and pathos. Kerman interprets the concerto as a kind of puppet show, in which the piano embodies both discipline and rebellion.
3.1. The Dancing Puppet
Kerman describes the piano in the concerto as behaving like a dancing puppet, suggesting that it is both controlled and rebellious. This image captures the tension between order and chaos that is often present in Stravinsky’s music.
3.2. Humanization and Pathos
Kerman argues that the piano’s attempts to sing and speak in the slow movement reveal its humanity. These moments of humanization are linked to pathos, suggesting that Stravinsky’s music is capable of expressing deep emotion.
3.3. The Failure of Humanization
The piano’s failure to fully realize its humanity in the second movement is recalled and compounded near the end of the third movement. This suggests that Stravinsky’s music is not always optimistic or uplifting and that it can also explore themes of failure and disappointment.
4. Stravinsky’s Objectivity: A Battle Against Insight?
Stravinsky himself often resisted interpretations that sought to find deeper meaning in his music. He famously declared that “The music is just an object that expresses nothing,” suggesting that his primary concern was with the purely musical elements of his compositions.
4.1. Music as Object
Stravinsky’s insistence that music is just an object reflects his modernist aesthetic, which emphasized form and structure over emotional expression. This perspective challenges the Romantic notion that music should be a vehicle for personal feelings.
4.2. Distance from Performance
Stravinsky’s “music is only an object” stance may also reflect his distance from performance. His discography as a conductor and pianist is not always impressive, suggesting that he was more interested in the compositional process than in the act of performing.
4.3. The Ebony Concerto: A Deconstructed Big Band Piece
The Ebony Concerto is described as a deconstructed big band piece, which makes it a great introduction to Stravinsky for jazz musicians. This suggests that Stravinsky’s music can be appreciated from a variety of perspectives and that it has the potential to bridge different musical genres.
5. Emotional Involvement: Scarce on the Big Box?
The article suggests that serious emotional involvement is scarce in Stravinsky’s recordings. While there are exceptions, such as the Ebony Concerto, many of the performances lack the emotional depth that some listeners seek.
5.1. The Absence of Tears
Despite the claim that “Aria II” in the Violin Concerto was an apology to Stravinsky’s first wife, the Columbia version with Isaac Stern is said to lack tears. This suggests that Stravinsky’s music is not always successful in conveying the intended emotion.
5.2. The Importance of Emotional Relationship
To be comfortable on stage or on record, one needs to practice an emotional relationship to the piece. The article questions whether Stravinsky ever did this, suggesting that his focus on technical precision may have come at the expense of emotional expression.
5.3. Vulnerability in Performance
Performance is an act of vulnerability, and that vulnerability seems like an uncomfortable space for Stravinsky. This suggests that Stravinsky’s reluctance to embrace vulnerability may have limited his ability to connect with audiences on an emotional level.
6. Stravinsky as Pianist: Technique vs. Emotion
While Stravinsky possessed enough basic piano technique to play his own music, something is often missing in his performances. His playing can sound nervous and lacking in emotional depth.
6.1. The Influence of Technique Manuals
Stravinsky’s library included heavily marked manuals of technique, which may have influenced his approach to the piano. The idea of spending hours practicing technique for real is disturbing, suggesting that it may have hindered his ability to connect with the music emotionally.
6.2. Blurring the Counterpoint
On the recording of Serenade in A, Stravinsky frequently blurs the counterpoint in the fastest and hardest movement, just like a timid piano student worried about getting through in one piece. This suggests that his technical limitations may have affected his interpretation of the music.
6.3. The Best Stravinsky Piano Recording
The best Stravinsky piano recording is the first version of Duo Concertant with Samuel Druskin. This recording is praised for its ensemble togetherness and its magical cantilena suspended in ancient atmosphere.
7. Dynamic Markings: Mezzo-Forte as the Stravinsky Dynamic
In the very first gesture of Duo Concertant, there is an unusual dynamic marking: pianississimo for the repeated notes at the keyboard. However, in both recordings, Stravinsky plays something more like mezzo-forte.
7.1. Schoenberg’s Observation
Eduard Steuermann reported that Schoenberg said, “‘He [Stravinsky] always writes mezzo-forte, and how well it sounds.’ (Schoenberg always advised his students never to write mezzo-forte, but either forte or piano.)” This suggests that Stravinsky had a preference for a particular dynamic range.
7.2. True Pianississimo
In the recent recording by Thomas Adés and Anthony Marwood, Adés takes care to deliver the repetitions at a true ppp. This provides a rare occasion when we can hear one composer’s natural sensibility coming to the fore when interpreting another composer.
7.3. Ease of Execution
While Adés is more gifted in every way than Stravinsky, that ease of execution can be almost inappropriate for certain works of Stravinsky. Perhaps the Adés/Marwood set could benefit from just a shade more sweat and effort.
8. Fireworks vs. House Music: Finding the Right Atmosphere
Some Stravinsky works, such as Three Scenes from Petrushka or the two-player Rite of Spring, can take all the fireworks commanded by the fiercest virtuosos. However, other works seem to want something plebeian or “house music” in atmosphere.
8.1. Too Brilliant?
Vladimir Ashkenazy and Andrei Gavrilov made a terrific recording of the Rite that soars along at mind-blowing speed. But the same disc’s Concerto for Two Pianos is almost too brilliant. This suggests that not all of Stravinsky’s music benefits from a virtuosic approach.
8.2. Rugged and Surreal
In the hands of Alfons and Aloys Kontarsky, the Concerto for Two Pianos is not just crystal clear but also rugged and surreal. The Kontarskys make this stern work also seem like something that could be sight-read after dinner by two members of a musical household. This suggests that a more intimate and informal approach can be effective in certain contexts.
8.3. A Cloudy Recording
Unfortunately, Stravinsky’s own version of the Concerto for Two Pianos with son Soulima is hampered by a cloudy recording. Father and son also follow the composer’s metronome mark for the second movement, which makes it too fast. Everyone else plays it a little slower, which seems correct.
9. Piano Rolls: The Truthful Medium?
Stravinsky’s love of piano rolls is well-documented. For a while, it even seemed to be his preferred medium. In a magazine published by the Berliner Staatsoper, he said: “A pianola speaks the truth. Or more accurately, it repeats exactly that truth that I have worked so long and hard to articulate.”
9.1. The Influence of Emotion
A pianola is not affected by life’s hardships, and no emotionally willful musician can force his temperament upon it. It plays quite straight — and by this means it exactly achieves the task I have given it. This suggests that Stravinsky valued precision and objectivity in performance.
9.2. A Delicate Line
Pianolists need to tread a delicate line between utter flatness and overemphasis, allowing the music’s innate excitement, pathos, and fervor and humor to surface as naturally as possible. This suggests that even with a mechanical instrument, there is still room for interpretation and expression.
9.3. Rhythmic Unsatisfying
Both of Stravinsky’s recordings of Les Noces are pretty unsatisfying, especially rhythmically. The vocalists aren’t all that strong, either, a common problem on the 22 CD box. This suggests that Stravinsky’s own performances were not always ideal.
10. Folklore and Stravinsky: A Complicated Relationship
The Pokrovsky Ensemble is committed to finding the folklore in Stravinsky. This context is especially valuable since the composer’s own relationship to his folk sources was so complicated.
10.1. Bartók’s Emotional Connection
Bartók’s emotional connection and folklore come through not just on his piano records but even in his piano rolls. This suggests that some composers have a stronger connection to their folk sources than others.
10.2. Rachmaninoff and Rzewski
Rachmaninoff and Rzewski and many other composer-pianists and composer-conductors obviously understand their own folklore. This further illustrates the varied relationships that composers have with their cultural heritage.
10.3. Reading His Own Music
After the inspired act of composition was done, Stravinsky often seemed to need to read his own music. And sometimes he read it badly! This suggests that Stravinsky was not always the best interpreter of his own work.
11. Barring and Re-Barring: The Question of Groove
Stravinsky’s famous barring and re-barring of mixed-meter moments in the early ballets raises the question of where the “one” is in his more convoluted phrases. This issue is explored in detail in Pieter C. van den Toorn’s book Stravinsky and the Rite of Spring: The Beginnings of a Musical Language.
11.1. Steady Ground Bass
The article rejects the Stravinsky barrings that give precedence to mixed-meter melodies over steady ground bass. It argues that the feel of the march is more important than the mixed meter on top.
11.2. Elvin Jones’ Time
McCoy Tyner says: “No matter how many polyrhythms are in the air, Elvin’s time at the bottom stays groovy.” This ideal is found not just in jazz but in any advanced folkloric music across the globe, where the question, “How hard is it to read or count?” is secondary to, “How does the quarter note (or other basic measurement) feel?”
11.3. Mystic Circles
The article criticizes Stravinsky’s barring of two “empty” bars of “Mystic Circles” from the Rite. It argues that this is two bars of four, not a bar of five and a bar of four.
12. Cubist Music: Cutting It All Up and Remaking It Anew
Stravinsky and Picasso’s connection is just as palpable as that of Stravinsky and Nabokov. This suggests that Stravinsky’s music is a kind of cubist art, in which familiar elements are fragmented and reassembled in unexpected ways.
12.1. The Wilds of Invention
Stravinsky was in the wilds of invention, cutting it all up and remaking it anew. This suggests that his music is experimental and innovative.
12.2. Sacrificial Dance
In movements that have no ground bass reducible to a folk beat, like “Sacrificial Dance,” which Stravinsky said he could play before he could notate, the barring has to become instantly “odd.” This suggests that Stravinsky’s barring is not always arbitrary but is often dictated by the specific musical context.
12.3. Mechanical vs. Rubato
The question of “groove” is never really addressed in Stravinsky literature. “Mechanical vs. rubato” is discussed, but not how a quarter-note pulse feels. This highlights a gap in the understanding of Stravinsky’s music.
13. Jazz and Pop: Just Beating in the Woods Like Animals?
Steven Walsh’s comments on Les Noces are criticized for suggesting that jazz and pop are just beating in the woods like animals and that they lack “refined, intellectual and subtly emotional” rhythms. This is seen as a narrow-minded perspective that fails to appreciate the complexity of jazz and pop music.
13.1. Instrumental Virtuosity
Stravinsky spouts this nonsense about jazz: “The point of interest is instrumental virtuosity, instrumental personality, not melody, not harmony, and certainly not rhythm. Rhythm doesn’t exist really because no rhythmic proportion or relaxation exists. Instead there is ‘beat.'”
13.2. Naming Charlie Parker
To his credit, Stravinsky does admire jazz, even going so far in Dialogues as to namecheck Charlie Parker, Art Tatum, and Charlie Christian. He also notes that “Ebony” in Ebony Concerto means African, not the clarinet.
13.3. Unlearned Jazz
Louis Andriessen and Elmer Schönberger gain points by dismissing Stravinsky’s “jazz” as unlearned in their chapter “Ragtime.” This suggests that Stravinsky’s understanding of jazz was limited.
14. The Rhythmic Novelties in The Rite of Spring
Richard Taruskin’s work on Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions is discussed, with a focus on the rhythmic novelties in The Rite of Spring. Taruskin identifies two distinct types of rhythmic innovation: the hypnotic type and the “invincible and elemental” kind.
14.1. Hypnotic Ostinato
The hypnotic type is the “immobile” ostinato, sometimes quite literally hypnotic, as when the elders charm the Chosen One to perform her dance of death. That is what their Ritual Action is all about.
14.2. Irregularly Spaced Downbeats
The other is the “invincible and elemental” kind, and it was truly an innovation–for Western art music, that is; in Russian folklore it had been a fixture from time immemorial. This is the rhythm of irregularly spaced downbeats, requiring a correspondingly variable metric barring in the notation.
14.3. A General Motto
In a burst of enthusiasm generated by his own ostinati, Stravinsky scrawled what might well serve as a general motto for The Rite of Spring: ‘There is music wherever there is rhythm, as there is life wherever there beats a pulse.'”
15. The Influence of Africa
In the movement “Procession of the Sage,” Stravinsky channels Africa and puts a massive 4 and a massive 6 in direct opposition. There’s even a backbeat in the drums, which probably means that this is the section that Wynton Marsalis is citing to Stanley Crouch in the Crouch essay, “Jazz Criticism and the Effect on the Art Form.”
15.1. Percussion and Polyrhythm
Ours is a century in which percussion and polyrhythm are fundamental to its identity, in which the machinery of the age and the activities of the people parallel the multilinear densities and rhythms of the very rain forest that could have easily been the inspiration for Africa’s drum choirs, with their broad sense of sound and their involvement with perpetual rhythmic motion….
15.2. A Negro Beat
As Wynton Marsalis points out, “Stravinsky turned European music over with a backbeat. Check it out. What they thought was weird and primitive was just a Negro beat on the bass drum.”
15.3. Academic Musicology
Much of Taruskin’s work is high-level, but his hundred pages on the Rite still trigger my instinctive distrust of academic musicology. Mostly, Taruskin discusses harmony, which is the most obvious layer both to sift and to misunderstand.
16. Seeking the Right Folkloric Feel
The article argues that there’s plenty of room to look at how Stravinsky’s music should feel. It suggests that to be considered a great exponent of Stravinsky’s style, you must understand the rhythmic folklore.
16.1. No Really Uneven Beats
While there are probably no really uneven beats (as in Mahler, Chopin, or Liszt) there’s surely something that undulates or projects an emotional rhythm. This suggests that Stravinsky’s music has its own unique rhythmic feel.
16.2. Smit’s Experience
Elliot Carter and Leo Smit both talk about Stravinsky at the piano in rehearsal—not in performance, but in rehearsal—and how his playing was extraordinarily moving. Smit heard a reduction of Jeu de Cartes in 1936 and found that Stravinsky conveyed the meaning of the musical thought with extraordinary clarity.
16.3. Nationalizations in Musical Terms
Stravinsky reviews three recordings of The Rite: by Karajan with the Berlin Phil, Boulez with Orchestre National de la RTF, and Robert Craft with the Moscow State Symphony Orchestra. He offers this cryptic analysis of the latter: “But whereas the music sounds French in the French recording, and German in the German, the Russians make it sound Russian, which is just right.”
17. Low-Down Yet Sophisticated: The Prophesy of The Rite
Alex Ross says that The Rite of Spring “prophesied a new type of popular art—low-down yet sophisticated, smartly savage, style and muscle intertwined.” This prophesy was borne out in a lot of thrilling American folkoric music: jazz, rock, hip-hop, musical theatre, etc.
17.1. The Rewrite of Spring
Peter Schickele said The Rite of Spring was so influential that much of 20th-century classical music could be called “The Rewrite of Spring.” This highlights the lasting impact of Stravinsky’s work.
17.2. Not Influential Enough
Reid Anderson shook his head and said, “No: The Rite hasn’t been influential enough.” This suggests that there is still more to be explored in Stravinsky’s music.
17.3. Red-Blooded, Folkloric Rhythm
There wasn’t enough red-blooded, folkloric rhythm infused into the concert music of the last century. Sure, there was some, but not enough. This suggests that Stravinsky’s emphasis on rhythm was not fully embraced by subsequent composers.
18. Infusing Rock and Electronica Folklore
Currently, there’s a movement to put rock and electronica folklore into classical composition. This is expected to have a big payoff at some point.
18.1. A Caveat
Make sure that rock, electronica, or whatever non-traditional source really is your folklore! Because it can be a little too easy to just “be into rock” or whatever when writing contemporary classical music. Can the composer sub in a working band?
18.2. Earthy Groove
Remember Stravinsky! He had that earthy groove since birth. He denied it and did everything he could to keep others from getting it… but he had it, which is one reason why The Rite and most of his other masterpieces will only continue to gain in stature.
18.3. Once a Rake, Always a Rake
Two nights ago Sarah and I went to the Met, where we got rather VIP treatment thanks to Jason Haaheim and Rob Knopper, two of the Met Opera Orchestra percussionists.
19. Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress: A Meta Masterpiece?
The Rake is Stravinsky’s final word on 20th-century neo-classicism, a style which he not only more or less invented but also took to its greatest height. It is Stravinsky’s final statement on 20th-century neo-classicism.
19.1. Cabin in the Woods
Before the opera I told Sarah that, ” The Rake’s Progress is Cabin in the Woods.” This comparison suggests that Stravinsky’s opera is a self-aware commentary on the conventions of the genre.
19.2. Plunderings
His plunderings are not insincere, although naturally they are frequently sardonic. (Imagine some early conductor’s face when he realizes he has to cue a harpsichord continuo in a work of Grand Opera.) This suggests that Stravinsky’s use of pastiche is both playful and meaningful.
19.3. The Effect Is Heartfelt
In the end, though, the effect is heartfelt. Indeed, the most amusing ironies offset the generally downbeat emotions to the furtherance of both. This suggests that Stravinsky’s opera is ultimately a moving and emotionally resonant work.
20. The Meta Experience of The Rake
Not long ago I attended Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle at the Met. This was a monochromatic nightmare, with the only relief being a stage set that seemed lifted out of a classic Hitchcock movie. At some point there was no way to feel worse, so the result became a bit tiresome.
20.1. A Bizarre Gravitas
In the Rake, after so much bright chatter, the concluding lost arias in the insane asylum had bizarre gravitas, a feeling that somehow carried over into the coda, where the cast cheekily breaks the fourth wall and offers up an unconvincing moral.
20.2. Tears at the End
I felt sadder at the end of the Rake then at the end of Bluebeard. If you aren’t crying at the end of an opera, they are doing it wrong. This suggests that The Rake’s Progress is a more emotionally engaging work than Bluebeard’s Castle.
20.3. A Small City
Afterwards, Jason and Rob took us around the building. We only saw a fraction of the small city, which is six floors and on the busiest days employ 4000 people.
(Jason, Sarah, and Rob at the poker game in the musician’s quarters, which has been ongoing for nearly a century)
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