Caring for Stravinsky

Musical Times, Summer 2002 by Gritten, Anthony

Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring Peter Hill Cambridge UP (Cambridge, 2000), x, pp.170; L26.95/L9.95. ISBN 0 521 62221 2/ 0 521 62714 1.

Stravinsky's late music Joseph N. Straus Cambridge UP (Cambridge, 2001); xviii, 260pp; L45, ISBN 0 521 80220 2.

Stravinsky inside out Charles M. Joseph Yale UP (New Haven & London, 2001); xx, 320pp; L22.50. ISBN 0 300 07537 5.

Stravinsky ... Quite the Concert of the Year! (Siegfried Sassoon, quoted in Hill, p.99)

IN RECENT YEARS there has been a steady flow of revisionist writing about Stravinsky. Spearheading the current were the first volume of Stephen Walsh's encyclopaedic biography,1 an extraordinary study of Stravinsky's musical Russia from Richard Taruskin,2 and Glenn Watkins's kaleidoscopic Pyramids at the Louvre.3 There is also the fantastically creative The Apollonian clockwork by Louis Andriessen & Elmer Schonberger, and a searching critique by Robin Holloway4 And we now have Jonathan Cross's wide-ranging The Stravinsky legacy5 and a detailed analytical interpretation of Stravinsky's Bach.6 Perhaps only now are we really beginning to understand the enormity of Stravinsky's foundational role in the twentieth century. Long gone are the days when the composer's autobiography and Poetics of music were the unquestionable primary sources, and Eric Walter White's third book on the composer7 the standard and unquestioned secondary source (not that Stravinsky himself thought much of White (see Joseph, pp.6-7)). These three new books from Peter Hill, Joseph Straus and Charles Joseph consider different aspects of Stravinsky and offer different interpretations. All three are good companions to Stravinsky.

A virtuoso pianist who has recorded Stravinsky, including the piano duet version of The rite of spring, Peter Hill naturally approaches the music with the attitude of a seasoned performer. `Heard in concert the four-hand version makes a distinctive and valid alternative: pared to essentials the music's rhythmic and harmonic dissonance have an even sharper focus' (Hill, p.13). He writes with verve about The rite as a concert piece, describing the pianistic qualities of the musical textures (Hill, pp.13, 16, 19, 59) - `Notice that the dominant seventh [in the 'Augurs' chord] is always in the first inversion, this being the most compact, punchiest version' (Hill, p.50) - and taking note of the pianistic source of the music's octatonicism (Hill, pp.45, 46-47) and the interaction between pianistic and octatonic speech genres (Hill, p.49). Now and then, remarks about performance practice and the choices made by performers emerge in a state of limbo, perhaps as the (internal? silent?) thoughts of a performer prior to performance, written not so much for the drawer as for the green room (Hill, pp.67, 86, 127, 137).

Straus and Joseph, too, are concerned to emphasise Stravinsky's relation to the piano (Joseph, after all, has written a book on it8), and that `Even when the music seems most abstract, most reliant on intricate precompositional schemes, Stravinsky always worked out the details at the piano, in constant physical contact with the tactile and acoustical realities of the sounds he was writing' (Straus, pp.49, 48). Indeed, one of the best aspects of all three books is this kind of healthy attitude towards the more earthy aspects of Stravinsky's musical activities. A brief crosssection of their insights casts much light on both the man as a composer and the composer as a man, the latter of which has often been swept under the carpet by the Formalist broom (oseph, p.xii), and in doing so contributes to the general demystification that has swept across Stravinsky studies in the last decade or so.

All three authors point out that as a composer Stravinsky was very pragmatic. Hill, for example, observes that he chose which folk tunes to use in The rite on the basis of which ones appeared on the lower right hand corners of pages as he riffled through a printed collection (Hill, p.35), a `method' which seems devoid of inspiration and an absurdly banal way of going about composition, coming from a Romantic school of thought; but of course Stravinsky didn't, and `anything and everything was grist to his mill provided he could make it work' (Hill, p. 143). Unlike, say, Debussy, he was 'a parsimonious chef' (Hill, p.12), always reluctant to waste anything once he'd begun it, and he had no qualms about borrowing from himself (Hill, p. 12) - an idea Straus picks up on with regard to Stravinsky's segmental construction of his rows (Straus, p.86 n.6). Despite even the forbidding arcana of `the verticals of the rotational and four-part arrays, Stravinsky was not so much building a system as responding pragmatically to an immediate and pressing expressive need' (Straus, p.181).

His pragmatism, moreover, as Hill notes refreshingly about his use of octatonic collections (Hill, p.49), was prosaic. 'A browser, not a scholar' (Joseph, pp.23, 263),9 his way of learning was not goal-directed or even linear, but followed the same psychological trajectory as that of satisfying an appetite (Joseph, p.22).10 He `enjoyed improvising' at the piano, as did his friend Aldous Huxley (Joseph, p.124). Indeed, as both Straus and Joseph remark (the former with, it seems, an occasional note of regret), `There is nothing suggesting that he wrestled with deeper musicological or analytic problems' (Joseph, p.252; Straus, pp.21, 158, 175, 199). Nor did Robert Craft, Straus notes for the record (Straus, p.8), concluding that `Stravinsky was aware of new music around him, but in the world of twelve-tone composition, he was largely an auto-didact' (Straus, p.37). Moreover, contrary to the heady mythology spiralling about the composer, Stravinsky didn't always discover the instrumentation of his ideas immediately, and sometimes he would rethink ideas quite late in the day (Joseph, pp.47-48, 183-84, 190, 204, 300 n.25). Hill even quotes some interesting suggestions about possible improvements to the orchestration of The rite which Pierre Monteux made in a letter to Stravinsky, and which, amazingly, `Stravinsky meekly implemented' (Hill, p.29).