Music : Igor Stravinsky (1882 - 1971)

This non-analytical discussion of Stravinsky's music by two distinguished composers provides, in episodic fashion, new perspectives on the style, attitude, and historical presence of selected works by this giant of twentieth-century music.

The riot that erupted during the 1913 debut of Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris has long been one of the most infamous and intriguing events of modern musical history. The third in a series of works commissioned for Sergei Diaghalev's famed Ballets Russes, the piece combined disjunct tonalities, provocative rhythms, and radical choreography that threw spectators and critics into a literal fury. In the century following its premiere, The Rite of Spring has demonstrated its earth-shattering impact on music and dance as well as its immortalizing effect on Stravinsky and his career. Having gained international attention by the age of 30, what direction could Stravinsky's path forward take after the momentus events of 1913?After the Rite: Stravinsky's Path to Neoclassicism (1914-1925) traces the evolution of Stravinsky's compositional style as he searched for his own voice in the explosive musical world of the early 20th century as he responded to harsh criticisms of his work. Throughout the book, author Maureen Carr presents new transcriptions and sophisticated analyses of selected musical sketches to show the genesis of Stravinsky's musical ideas as he forayed into surrealism, classicism, and abstraction to develop his signature Neoclassical style. Exploring these annotated compositional experiments - such as the earliest evidence of Stravinsky's appropriation of the "rag idiom" and the development of his so-called "sound blocks" - After the Rite provides new insight into how Stravinsky challenged and guided the musical developments of the decade after that legendary Paris premiere. Enlightening visual metaphors, such as the contemporary paintings of Paul Klee and those of the Russian futurists, supplement discussion of the musical sketches throughout, offering a comprehensive artistic context for Carr's unprecedented and rigorous examination.A treasure trove of outstanding material for scholars, musicians, students, and general readers alike, After the Rite offers a much-needed delineation of the concept of musical neoclassicism. Maureen Carr's innovative and detailed examination of the metamorphosis of Igor Stravinsky's compositional style after The Rite of Spring is an invaluable contribution to the literature concerning this iconic 20th century composer.

"The Collaboration between Igor Stravinsky, the Russian-born composer who dominated the modernist musical world of his time, and the young American, Robert Craft, whose talents Stravinsky quickly recognized, is one of the most remarkable stories in the annals of contemporary music. Robert Craft worked alongside Stravinsky during the last twenty-three years of the composer's life, both as his co-author of a series of books and as conductor of his music, most notably the premieres of Agon (1957), The Flood (1962), Abraham and Isaac (1964), the Variations for Orchestra (1965), and Requiem Canticles (1966)." "No less importantly, as this new book reveals, Robert Craft became the instrument of Stravinsky's American acculturation.

Stravinsky's work spanned the major part of the twentieth century and engaged with nearly all its principal compositional developments. This Companion reflects the breadth of Stravinsky's achievement and influence in essays by leading international scholars on a wide range of topics. It is divided into three parts dealing with the contexts within which Stravinsky worked (Russian, modernist and compositional), with his key compositions (Russian, neoclassical and serial), and with the reception of his ideas (through performance, analysis and criticism). The volume concludes with an interview with the leading Dutch composer Louis Andriessen and a major re-evaluation of 'Stravinsky and Us' by Richard Taruskin.

As waves of composers migrated from Russia in the 20th century, they grappled with the complex struggle between their own traditions and those of their adopted homes. Russian Composers Abroad explores the self-identity of these émigrés, especially those who left from the 1970s on, and how aspects of their diasporic identities played out in their music. Elena Dubinets provides a journey through the complexities of identity formation and cultural production under globalization and migration, elucidating sociological perspectives of the post-Soviet world that have caused changes in composers' outlooks, strategies, and rankings. Russian Composers Abroad is an illuminating study of creative ideas that are often shaped by the exigencies of financing and advancement rather than just by the vision of the creators and the demands of the public.

In its scope and command of primary sources and its generosity of scholarly inquiry, Nikolai Findeizen's monumental work, published in 1928 and 1929 in Soviet Russia, places the origins and development of music in Russia within the context of Russia's cultural and social history. Volume 2 of Findeizen's landmark study surveys music in court life during the reigns of Elizabeth I and Catherine II, music in Russian domestic and public life in the second half of the 18th century, and the variety and vitality of Russian music at the end of the 18th century.

The Rake's Progress is Stravinsky's biggest work and one of the few great operas written since the 1920s, rare too for the unusual quality of its libretto, by Auden and Kallman. Its importance is undisputed, but so too are the problems it raises: problems of both performance and understanding, caused by the irony with which it is so thoroughly permeated. In aspects of style and operatic convention it looks back to the eighteenth century, and in particular to the operas of Mozart and da Ponte, while making references also to other periods, to operas from Monteverdi to Verdi. Yet at the same time it is wholly a work of the twentieth-century, and indeed it is centrally concerned with the impossibility of return, artistic, psychological or actual, as well as with the nature and limitation of human free will. The Rake's Progress is not one of unbridled dissipation but rather, more interestingly, one of attachment to naive notions of freedom and choice, and his tragedy is that he can never go back.

"In this new study, Paul Griffiths surveys Stravinsky's vastly variegated life and output in one chronological sweep, showing how certain basic images and principles emerge again and again in the music, but also emphasizing his capacity to start afresh, to confront us not with one Stravinsky but with many. Since Stravinsky's death, publication of his correspondence and other material has made possible a deeper investigation of his creative methods. Profiting from this, and exploring the works both as individual creations and as elements in a wider context, Paul Griffiths's book is a new and stimulating guide to Stravinsky's life and music."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Stravinsky's reinvention in the early 1920s, as both neoclassical composer and concert-pianist, is here placed at the centre of a fundamental reconsideration of his whole output - viewed from the unprecedented perspective of his relationship with the piano. Graham Griffiths assesses Stravinsky's musical upbringing in St Petersburg with emphasis on his education at the hands of two extraordinary teachers whom he later either ignored or denounced: Leokadiya Kashperova, for piano and Rimsky-Korsakov, for instrumentation. Their message, Griffiths argues, enabled Stravinsky to formulate from that intensely Russian experience an internationalist brand of neoclassicism founded upon the premises of objectivity and craft. Drawing directly on the composer's manuscripts, Griffiths addresses Stravinsky's lifelong fascination with counterpoint and with pianism's constructive processes. Stravinsky's Piano presents both of these as recurring features of the compositional attitudes that Stravinsky consistently applied to his works, whether Russian, neoclassical or serial, and regardless of idiom and genre.

Igor Stravinsky left behind masterpieces in every major genre and worked in each of the most significant compositional styles of the twentieth century. His output was staggering, his innovations far-reaching and sometimes scandalous. Stravinsky Retrospectives puts the diverse achievements of this protean composer into critical and historical perspective. The contributors provide a variety of perspectives on Stravinsky's work and career. Richard Taruskin examines Stravinsky's use of text, its relation to Russian folk music, and its consequences for his rhythmic practice. Milton Babbitt vastly extends our knowledge of Stravinsky's twelve-tone procedures. Paul Johnson, Ethan Haimo, and Joseph Straus all examine Stravinsky's neoclassical works. Claudio Spies looks at the early Russian influences on Stravinsky, and William Austin provides a nuanced analysis of Stravinsky's historical importance and of recent research on his many compositions.

The Rite of Spring is Stravinsky's most revolutionary work. This important new book provides a comprehensive guide to the work, telling in vivid detail the story of its inception and composition, of the stormy rehearsals which led to the scandalous premiere on 29 May 1913, and of Stravinsky's later betrayal of the ballet's first choreographer, Vaslav Nijinsky. At the same time, in a radical reassessment of the work's musical values, Peter Hill probes beneath the surface of the music to reveal an architectural conception of unsuspected guile and subtlety. A feature of the book is a detailed discussion of the work in performance, drawing on recordings by the Rite's greatest interpreters, Stravinsky himself included. Finally, the significance of the Rite is thoroughly reviewed in a hard-hitting conclusion which poses a radical challenge to the orthodox view of the work.

Author Gretchen Horlacher portrays the whole of Stravinsky's repertoire as radical or modern not because it eschews continuity and connection, but because it places them in relation to their opposites: the music holds our interest because undeniable references toward continuity are dynamically coordinated (rather than subsumed) with stasis and discontinuity. From this vantage point, Stravinsky's music becomes a commentary on the nature of time: the music draws into relation the tension between time as it is punctuated by fixed reference and as it flows from one event to another. It is quintessentially modern because of its inherent emphasis on multiple vantage points. A sensitive and sophisticated approach to the work of this iconic composer, Building Blocks will appeal to students and scholars of Stravinsky and his music, scholars of musical modernism and twentieth century music, and to a more limited extent, to performers - particularly conductors, pianists, and orchestral instrumentalists.

The 80th birthday in 1962 of Stravinsky was made the occasion for a serious new look at this master's contributions to modern techniques of musical composition. The six eminent musicologists whose critiques of Stravinsky are presented in this volume have dealt with varying aspects of his style and have also suggested what his significance will be to composers of the future. Edward T. Cone, Professor of Music at Princeton University, discusses Stravinsky's use of traditional form; Wilfred Mellers, English composer and author, analyzes the musical characterization in Stravinsky's opera, Oedipus Rex; Lawrence Morton, conductor of the Los Angeles Monday Evening Concerts, shows how Stravinsky turned some of Tchaikovsky's music to his own uses; Robert U. Nelson, Professor of Music at U.C.L.A., writes of Stravinsky's variation technique; and Boris Schwarz of Queens College describes the vicissitudes of Stravinsky in Soviet Russian music criticism. Paul Henry Lang, editor of The Musical Quarterly, contributes an introduction interpreting Stravinsky's creative genius in terms of the composer's own goals. The complete list of works includes names of publishers and dates of first performance.

Ton de Leeuw's lifetime engagement with music, European and Oriental, gives this book its unique insight into what constitutes true modernity and innovation

The idea that the body plays an essential role in music has stimulated a wide range of new approaches in recent musicology. This book tries to apply them to the music of Igor Stravinsky from the perspective of the creative process and the construction of meaning. Most of the works examined are compositions for theatre and dance, and the analyses address many other features of the spectacle, such as choreography, scenography, stage, and television direction. That said, many compositions not intended for the stage are also considered from the perspective of the 'embodied' creative process and their implicit bodily expressiveness. Each chapter focuses on a number of Stravinsky's most famous and significant works, from the Firebird to the late serial compositions. A special place is reserved for the latter, which undoubtedly constitute the least well-known part of Stravinsky's output. The chapters are accompanied by a large number of analyses that invite readers to go 'beyond' the musical text while still relying on it, allowing them to understand how the strong physicality clearly perceived in Stravinsky's music can be associated with some of its formal and structural characteristics. In so doing, the book encourages the reader to overcome overly rigid dichotomies such as formalist/contextualist, or historical/ analytical.

The Bolsheviks' 1917 political coup caused a seismic disruption in Russian culture. Carried by the first wave of emigrants, Russian culture migrated West, transforming itself as it interacted with the new cultural environment and clashed with exported Soviet trends. In this book, Klára Móricz explores the transnational emigrant space of Russian composers Igor Stravinsky, Vladimir Dukelsky, Sergey Prokofiev, Nicolas Nabokov, and Arthur Lourié in interwar Paris.   Their music reflected the conflict between a modernist narrative demanding innovation and a narrative of exile wedded to the preservation of prerevolutionary Russian culture. The emigrants' and the Bolsheviks' contrasting visions of Russia and its past collided frequently in the French capital, where the Soviets displayed their political and artistic products. Russian composers in Paris also had to reckon with Stravinsky's disproportionate influence: if they succumbed to fashions dictated by their famous compatriot, they risked becoming epigones; if they kept to their old ways, they quickly became irrelevant. Although Stravinsky's neoclassicism provided a seemingly neutral middle ground between innovation and nostalgia, it was also marked by the exilic experience. Móricz offers this unexplored context for Stravinsky's neoclassicism, shedding new light on this infinitely elusive term.  

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) is regarded as the inventor of modern music, his phenomenal achievements being comparable to those of his close friend and contemporary Pablo Picasso.  This comprehensive biography traces the influences that informed his style and sets all his major works into context; above all the book concentrates on Stravinsky's creativity, describing how his musical mind worked and relating this to his complex and fascinating personality.

This book is the first to be devoted to the music of Stravinsky's last compositional period. In the early 1950s, Stravinsky's compositional style began to change and evolve with astonishing rapidity. He abandoned the musical neoclassicism to which he had been committed for the preceding three decades and, with the stimulus provided by his newly gained knowledge of the music of Schoenberg and Webern, launched himself on a remarkable voyage of compositional discovery. The book focuses on five historical, analytical, and interpretive issues: Stravinsky's relationship to his serial predecessors and contemporaries; his compositional process; the problem of creating formal continuity in a repertoire so obviously discontinuous in so many ways; the problem of writing serial harmony; and the problem of expression and meaning. Challenging conventional interpretations, the book shows that Stravinsky's serial music is not only of great historical significance, but also of astonishing structural originality and emotional power.

An Autobiography chronicles the first half-century of Stravinsky's life, all the while offering his opinions and "abhorrences." A Parsifal performance at Bayreuth? "At the end of a quarter of an hour I could bear no more." Nijinsky? "The poor boy knew nothing of music." Spanish folk music? "Endless preliminary chords of guitar playing."

This book undoes 50 years of mythmaking about Stravinsky's life in music. During his spectacular career, Igor Stravinsky underplayed his Russian past in favor of a European cosmopolitanism. Richard Taruskin has refused to take the composer at his word. In this long-awaited study, he defines Stravinsky's relationship to the musical and artistic traditions of his native land and gives us a dramatically new picture of one of the major figures in the history of music. Taruskin draws directly on newly accessible archives and on a wealth of Russian documents. In Volume One, he sets the historical scene: the St. Petersburg musical press, the arts journals, and the writings of anthropologists, folklorists, philosophers, and poets. Volume Two addresses the masterpieces of Stravinsky's early maturity--Petrushka, The Rite of Spring, and Les Noces. Taruskin investigates the composer's collaborations with Diaghilev to illuminate the relationship between folklore and modernity. He elucidates the Silver Age ideal of "neonationalism"--the professional appropriation of motifs and style characteristics from folk art--and how Stravinsky realized this ideal in his music. Taruskin demonstrates how Stravinsky achieved his modernist technique by combining what was most characteristically Russian in his musical training with stylistic elements abstracted from Russian folklore.

Widely regarded the greatest composer of the twentieth century, Igor Stravinsky was central to the development of modernism in art. Deeply influential and wonderfully productive, he is remembered for dozens of masterworks, from The Firebird and The Rite of Spring to The Rake's Progress, but no dependable biography of him exists. Previous studies have relied too heavily on his own unreliable memoirs and conversations, and until now no biographer has possessed both the musical knowledge to evaluate his art and the linguistic proficiency needed to explore the documentary background of his life--a life whose span extended from tsarist Russia to Switzerland, France, and ultimately the United States.

Stravinsky's opera-oratorio Oedipus rex is widely acknowledged as one of the most original music-theatre works of the twentieth century. This clear and concise guide is the first ever to be written on this work and it describes the music and its staging in close detail. It offers the first proper explanation of the plot and its relation to its literary sources and provides a fully documented discussion of the origins of Oedipus rex in Stravinsky's own work and thinking. By placing the work in its social context Stephen Walsh paints a vivid picture of Parisian artistic politics in the twenties from which emerges one of the richest and most suggestive works of art of modern times.

Stephen Walsh's magisterial, engagingly written two-volume Stravinsky is the most detailed and extensive work available on the life of the man widely regarded as the greatest composer of the twentieth century. This second volume takes up the composer's story in 1934, in a Europe growing ever more chaotic in the lead-up to World War II. Walsh follows Stravinsky's emigration to the United States, where he courted Hollywood, associated with writers and artists including Aldous Huxley, W.H. Auden, and George Balanchine, began a career as a conductor and recording artist, and composed a string of masterpieces that changed the course of twentieth-century music. Stravinsky: The Second Exile takes full account of Russian-language sources, including much correspondence, made available since the composer's death and since the fall of the Soviet Union, and is the first work to thoroughly assess the authenticity of many of the writings published under Stravinsky's name.

In the second edition of the definitive account of Igor Stravinsky's life and work, arranged in two separate sections, Eric Walter White revised the whole book, completing the biographical section by taking it up to Stravinsky's death in 1971. To the list of works, the author added some early pieces that have recently come to light, as well as the late compositions, including the Requiem Canticles and The Owl and the Pussycat. Four more of Stravinsky's own writings appear in the Appendices, and there are several important additions to the bibliography.

A study of the effect of Cubism on Stravinsky's compositional style.

Van den Toorn and McGinness take a fresh look at the dynamics of Stravinsky's musical style from a variety of analytical, critical and aesthetic angles. Starting with processes of juxtaposition and stratification, the book offers an in-depth analysis of works such as The Rite of Spring, Les Noces and Renard. Characteristic features of style, melody and harmony are traced to rhythmic forces, including those of metrical displacement. Along with Stravinsky's formalist aesthetics, the strict performing style he favoured is also traced to rhythmic factors, thus reversing the direction of the traditional causal relationship. Here, aesthetic belief and performance practice are seen as flowing directly from the musical invention. The book provides a counter-argument to the criticism and aesthetics of T. W. Adorno and Richard Taruskin, and will appeal to composers, critics and performers as well as scholars of Stravinsky's music.

The perils of equating notions of freedom with artistic vitality Eloquently extolled by President John F. Kennedy, the idea that only artists in free societies can produce great art became a bedrock assumption of the Cold War. That this conviction defied centuries of historical evidence--to say nothing of achievements within the Soviet Union--failed to impact impregnable cultural Cold War doctrine. Joseph Horowitz writes: "That so many fine minds could have cheapened freedom by over-praising it, turning it into a reductionist propaganda mantra, is one measure of the intellectual cost of the Cold War." He shows how the efforts of the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom were distorted by an anti-totalitarian "psychology of exile" traceable to its secretary general, the displaced Russian aristocrat/composer Nicolas Nabokov, and to Nabokov's hero Igor Stravinsky. In counterpoint, Horowitz investigates personal, social, and political factors that actually shape the creative act. He here focuses on Stravinsky, who in Los Angeles experienced a "freedom not to matter," and Dmitri Shostakovich, who was both victim and beneficiary of Soviet cultural policies. He also takes a fresh look at cultural exchange and explores paradoxical similarities and differences framing the popularization of classical music in the Soviet Union and the United States. In closing, he assesses the Kennedy administration's arts advocacy initiatives and their pertinence to today's fraught American national identity. Challenging long-entrenched myths, The Propaganda of Freedom newly explores the tangled relationship between the ideology of freedom and ideals of cultural achievement.

One of the country's most enduringly successful composers, Aaron Copland created a distinctively American style and aesthetic in works for a diversity of genres and mediums, including ballet, opera, and film. Also active as a critic, mentor, advocate, and concert organizer, he played a decisive role in the growth of serious music in the Americas in the twentieth century. In The American Stravinsky, Gayle Murchison closely analyzes selected works to discern the specific compositional techniques Copland used, and to understand the degree to which they derived from European models, particularly the influence of Igor Stravinsky. Murchison examines how Copland both Americanized these models and made them his own, thereby finding his own compositional voice. Murchison also discusses Copland's aesthetics of music and his ideas about its purpose and social function.

When Igor Stravinsky's ballet Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) premiered during the 1913 Paris season of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, its avant-garde music and jarring choreography scandalized audiences. Today it is considered one of the most influential musical works of the twentieth century. In this volume, the ballet finally receives the full critical attention it deserves, as distinguished music and dance scholars discuss the meaning of the work and its far-reaching influence on world music, performance, and culture. Essays explore four key facets of the ballet: its choreography and movement; the cultural and historical contexts of its performance and reception in France; its structure and use of innovative rhythmic and tonal features; and the reception of the work in Russian music history and theory.