Invidious Antonyms!

One thing I particularly enjoy about Richard Taruskin's prose is his ability to slip in the stiletto, almost without the victim noticing. This particular phrase comes from an essay on historic performance practice, or what pretends to be so. Referring to "authenticity" in performance practice he says:

There it is at last in all its purloined majesty, this word that simply cannot be rid of its moral and and ethical overtones (and which always carries its invidious antonym in tow) being used to priviledge one philosophy of performance over all others.

Of course that "invidious antonym" that he cleverly avoids stating is "inauthenticity," with which no self-respecting musician would wish to be cursed!

How does one build a career as a superstar musicologist? Susan McClary did so by metaphorically accusing Beethoven of being a rapist, Philip Ewell by also accusing Beethoven, but of being merely "above average." Ouch! And Richard Taruskin did so, rather more elegantly, by choosing to examine the ideology lurking behind the Early Music, authentic performance practice and historically-informed performance movements. Yes, in later years it was his astounding Stravinsky monograph and the weighty Oxford History that spread his renown, but in the early days, in the 1980s, it was his papers on performance practice, later collected in the first book of his essays, Text and Act, that really kicked up the dust. The first time I ever encountered his writing was the essay "The Pastness of the Present and the Presence of the Past" in this volume, assigned reading in a doctoral seminar.

I can recall, upon reading that paper, not being very impressed by the argument which seemed to me unconvincing. At the time I was a performer, just beginning to transition into being a musicologist and frankly, I just didn't have the intellectual context to really grasp his argument. Since I am now re-reading Text and Act, I think it might be a good time to do an overview of the argument which spreads over quite a few papers and approaches the issue from a number of different angles. I think at the end of the day, we can get a pretty good handle on the issue which might reveal quite a bit about us, and early music and the act of performing.

Let's start by taking a look at Taruskin's first paper on the topic, first published in 1982, "On Letting the Music Speak for Itself." That's one of those deceptively tricky clichés that, after reading Taruskin, you learn to be wary of. Let's anatomize the argument:

• Historical performance practice is now a recognized subdiscipline
• Let's examine the assumptions that underlie current thinking
• One is "let the music speak for itself" --i.e. don't gussy it up
• This implies a mistrust of performers and interpretation (cf Stravinsky, Babbitt and even Brahms)
• Oddly, in the case of Stravinsky especially, the performances vary wildly from the score
• Music cannot, in fact, speak for itself so what this has to really mean is "let the composer speak for himself." That opens up an epistemological can of worms.
• Composers' intentions may be unknowable, not exist, or not be relevant
• the idea seems to be to try and re-create the external conditions of the original performance but would this actually recreate the composer's inner experience?
• The purpose of all this is to make our performance "authentic"
• Musicological ideals of performance style actually owe a lot to the modernist aesthetic associated with Stravinsky after the First World War
• He connects this also with the "dehumanization" described by Ortega y Gasset in 1925 and the depersonalization discussed by T. S. Eliot in1917
• Music has to be imaginatively re-created in order to be performed
• Lost performing traditions have to be re-invented
• An historical reconstruction would be merely antiquarian
• Authoritative and compelling performances of old music demand a vividly imagined and coherent performance style
• Authenticity stems from conviction of the individual performer who is only interested in the individual cases, pieces with unique meaning
• Scholarship, on the other hand, is always about generalization; scholarly methods don't deal with uniqueness
• So the performer must use intuition as the guide
• Historical reconstruction performances are actually modernist: the artwork is an autonomous object
• The modernist artist is in communion with Art whereas for artists in the past it was about the process or activity
• One indicator is that, with few exceptions, performers of early music today are not great improvisers which was the norm historically (this is probably less true today than in 1982)
• Ironically, in early music performance, the suspension of personality is an indicator of the modern sensibility
• A musicologist is someone capable of playing 14th century music with 17th century ornaments (my joke, but it fits with what he is saying)

You really need to read the whole thing, which is not very long, to get the flavor of the argument, but this will give you the bare bones. In the early 80s was precisely when I was discovering the early music movement for myself and I was loading up Bach lute suites with piles of ornaments and agonizing over tempo relationships. The short essay I am summarizing above is just a brief assay into the question and discussion will expand a lot in later papers.

For an envoi, here is an historical historical performance, meaning one from the fairly early days: Concentus Musicus Wein, Bach, Brandenburg Concerto No. 5, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, 1964.

Richard Taruskin's Envoi

This morning I finished reading Taruskin's last collection of essays. It ends in a rather personal way with his address on the occasion of winning the Kyoto Prize, the first musicologist to do so as previously they have only been given to composers and performers. The address is a wonderful way to end, not only the volume, but a blessed career in music. He recounts his life, outlining how choices and "affordances" (what we used to call opportunities or just chance) led him to the career that he had. How your life goes depends on ability, ambition and luck and stumbling across some Russian cousins in his early teens led Taruskin to become fluent in Russian. Later on, as a graduate student in musicology, this uniquely qualified him to do research into Russian music and we all know how that turned out! That gigantic Stravinsky monograph that no-one else could have written and that has to be the model for future composer studies.

Lots of other instances of providence aided him in developing writing skills, in dropping composition for musicology and dropping the cello for the viola da gamba. All these things led to his scholarship in areas that might otherwise have been neglected.

Let me just take a moment to rejoice a bit. Quite a while back I put up a post here that connected the "Private Language Argument" of Wittgenstein with the problems of hyper-abstract musical compositions such as those by Pierre Boulez. I was delighted to run across the same comparison being made in one of the essays here discussing contextualism.

It is a sorrowful shock to turn to the very last item in the book, the acknowledgements where we read just how devastatingly sudden his illness was. He was diagnosed with stage four esophageal cancer on May 25, 2022 and died thirty-eight days later on July 1.

Now I want to re-read a few things: Text and Act, his first collection of essays which I have on Kindle, but now I am getting in hard copy because I am convinced that the only way to read anything at all serious is by writing notes in the margins in pencil, something awkward to do with Kindle. After that I am going to re-read some of the other collections, then the final volume of the Oxford History (I recently re-read the first four) and then, oh yes, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, this time with pencil in hand...

I want to end with one of my envoi, a musical moment. The first time I saw the name of Richard Taruskin was on an LP of the music of Josquin des Prez recorded by a New York early music ensemble. He was playing viola da gamba. I lost that LP decades ago and it doesn't seem to be on YouTube, so this will have to do:

Richard Taruskin's Big Issues

These are questions or problems that he has wrestled with for decades and we find them taken up in various places in the Oxford History of Western Music as well as many published essays. These are the kinds of problems that he welcomes debating because

it is important that they go on, lest music--and when I say music, I always mean classical music--lapse into utter cultural irrelevance, as it seems to be doing in today's world. [Musical Lives and Times Examined, p. 2]

What are these questions? They are expressed in different ways in different places, but one big one is the social or political context of music which he always wanted to deal with, especially in the face of the romantic and modernist desire to wall music off from any contaminating elements for the sake of aesthetic autonomy. Music without context is essentially arid.

Another issue has to do with ethics and aesthetics. Both are important values, but independent of one another: "Good art can do evil. And of course bad art can do good." [op. cit. p. 9] He mentions preparing a list of compositions that are "musically excruciating but politically attractive" and it is all I can do to resist naming a composer or two myself. But I won't! In any case, he makes the point that it is important to allow, perhaps even arrange, collisions between our ethical and aesthetic sensibilities. In doing so, perhaps we can come to some dim comprehension of how you can listen to Schubert in the evening and go back to torturing prisoners in the morning.

Another one has to do with exoticism and authenticity and why it is that, for example, some singers adopted an untrained, vibratoless sound to sing early music on the grounds that if it sounds strange, it must be authentic. At around the same time, the early 60s, the lutenist Thomas Binkley was developing a performance practice for medieval monophonies based on North African vocal and instrumental techniques. This was very influential and why, to this day, a lot of recordings of the troubadour repertoire sound like Arab music. Again, if it sounds strange, it must be authentic. This discussion is part of Tariskin's long campaign against the marketing of early music as "historically authentic." He was of the opinion that we play Bach with crisp rhythms and articulations because it is to our modern taste and not necessarily because that is what Bach actually wanted or sounded like. I'm still wrestling with that one, but he makes some solid arguments.

Since these issues and debates were sustained over a few decades, they are starting to look like yesterday's problems. Taruskin never quite addressed current issues such as is classical music, heck, civilization itself, inherently racist? Similarly, is meritocracy racist? Can we think of some other recent questions that might come up? I think that he would advocate debating these kinds of questions, whatever they might be.

I want to put up a YouTube clip that I discovered through a Taruskin essay. This is a truly apocalyptic performance: Wilhelm Furtwangler conducting the Berlin Philharmonic in their last concert before the end of World War II in January 1945. The piece is the last movement of Brahms' Symphony No. 1.

This is available because magnetic recording tape had been recently invented, in Germany. About the only concert that might be more apocalyptic would be if there was a performance of Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony in that city while it was besieged by six Panzer Divisions for 900 days. There would be the sound of artillery bombardment in the background.

Prizes and Competition

Shostakovich (center) with the Beethoven Quartet

I'm well past the halfway mark in the new Taruskin collection: Musical Lives and Times Examined. There is a lot to be learned in terms of music history and historiography, but also in areas of social and moral context, and even in personal experience. I just finished "How to Win a Stalin Prize" that deals with the Piano Quintet which received a Stalin Prize, first class, and Taruskin sorts out the truths from the myths surrounding it. Chamber music in Russia does not have a long history and he starts by filling in the background for us with composers like Alyabiev, of whom you have likely not heard, and Chaikovsky and Borodin, of whom you most certainly have. Borodin's second quartet is quite famous and it was paired with Shostakovich's eighth on an LP I picked up around 1971.

The Piano Quintet, op. 57, was composed and premiered in 1940 and Taruskin does an excellent job of filling in the social and political context. Part of this is yet another attempt to correct the distortions thrown up by Solomon Volkov in his two books on Shostakovich, the second of which, in 2004, specifically dealt with the relationship between Stalin and Shostakovich. Taruskin sorts out a lot of detail, which I will pass over, but suffice it to say that Volkov misrepresents the reasons why the Quintet won the Stalin prize and it had nothing to do with Stalin's "obsession" with Shostakovich--the truth is that he wasn't much interested in music and the main critical evaluation came from the Ukrainian-born musicologist Daniel Zhitomirsky who was present at the premiere and wrote:

...it is asked whether this lyrical composition is typical of our music, whether it is connected with its basic tasks. Such doubts call forth a protest from me. Could it be that the embodiment of high ethical qualities, the creation of an image of a full-grown human being with strong, finely-honed, noble yet uncomplicated feelings--could it be that all this is not one of the chief tasks of socialist art? [op. cit. p. 351]

It is important to recall that 1940-41 was a window of relative openness in Soviet aesthetic control. The Cold War was not yet and in fact, neither the USA nor the Soviet Union was yet in the Second World War--the Soviets were still allies of Nazi Germany! The denunciation of Shostakovich in 1936 was past and he had executed a change of course to return to the favor of the authorities. The second denunciation of 1948 was in the future and at this moment in time, Shostakovich took the opportunity to reinvent the role of chamber music in the Soviet Union--all of his string quartets except the first, slight, example, will follow the Quintet. Shostakovich judged the moment well and Taruskin points out the case of Prokofiev who did just the opposite (though he did make some interesting critical comments on the Quintet).

Taruskin observes that

Shostakovich was a better chooser than Prokofieff; his life achieved a better synthesis of personal integrity and necessary adaptation. The Quintet is a beautiful example of such adaptation--adaptation to the demands of Socialist Realism, grand style, life-affirmation, and all, and an adaptation to new affordances vouchsafed by a particularly "German" moment in Soviet Culture.

This makes me reconsider my own choices and adaptation--or rather, lack of it--to a career in music over the last fifty years. Like Prokofiev, my choices were often poor. I tended to avoid adaptation and competition. This was partly because of poor socialization and lack of confidence. I think you need a deep well of confidence to sustain any career in music! If I had it to do over, I think I would try to take the bull by the horns and dive into competition instead of avoiding it.

Let's end by listening to a recording of Shostakovich with the Beethoven Quartet playing the Piano Quintet:

Fiction and History

One of the shorter essays in the new Taruskin collection is "Was Shostakovich a Martyr, or Is That Just Fiction?" which is a review of the novel The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes. Taruskin was a suitable reviewer because the novel is a fictionalization of the life of Dmitri Shostakovich. This has long been highly-contested ground "between those who believe that Shostakovich was a blameless martyr, opposed to and victimized by the Soviet regime, and those of us who believe he made pragmatic compromises to survive and prosper..." [op. cit. p 329] Taruskin labels the novel a "beautifully written botch" and "hagiography."

Taruskin offers the example of Tolstoy in War and Peace who "knew that the difference between real and fictional worlds is that a fictional world is wholly known." But for historians "the whole documentary truth can never be known" as there are always other documents to be discovered, not to mention ones that have been destroyed.

Which brings me to my main point: as industrious activists busily scrub our history of its indiscretions, what is coming into view is not any kind of truth--historical truth will always be messy--but a kind of sanitized lie. As Taruskin mentions later on "No one makes a successful career anywhere without learning and executing a complicated social dance." [op. cit. p. 333] Well, that's a relief as it explains why my career fell short of success! I never really learned the complicated social dance.

History itself will always be complicated, contradictory and only partially known. Only through the adroit application of ideological cleansers can it be made pure. We used to accept that even Homer nods, but now all our cultural icons, from Kanye West to Anna Netrebko, must be ideologically sound, or be banished into the outer darkness.

This is turning history into fiction!

Shostakovich's String Quartet No. 8, mentioned in the essay, might be a suitable envoi.

Taruskin on Van Cliburn

I'm still working my way through the new Taruskin collection Musical Lives and Times Examined, now over halfway. I just finished a short piece, a review of Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story--How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War by Nigel Cliff. Just looking at that title you can guess that Taruskin is going to have a lot to say about that "Cold War." But he usually delivers much more than one expects and does so here. He provides a well-founded estimate of both Cliburn's strengths (by training he was as close as an American could get to being a Russian pianist) and weaknesses (the pressures of his unique career turned him into a "flesh and blood juke box"). But even better than that, in a couple of paragraphs he discerns the landscape of classical music in society since the 60s:

The strongest reaction I felt while reading this book was a pang of recognition that classical music is no longer seen, even fatuously, as an arena for national policy. It no longer represents nations, only (often rapacious) elites. That, rather than the end of superpower competition, is the big change that Cliburn's decline symbolizes. He was indeed a significant figure, and worthy of a book that says so, but Cliff puts him in the wrong context. He was the protagonist--or perhaps, more accurately, the figurehead--of the moment when classical music enjoyed a pinnacle of popularity and prestige from which it would plummet almost immediately. The sixties were the decade in which, as sociologists have shown and sought to explain, big changes in musical taste and consumption patterns, reflecting changes in demography and social attitudes, caused classical music to return to its tiny social niche after a couple of decades of pumped-up status vouchsafed by the New Deal and the touting of middlebrow culture.

Educated people, who until the 1960s habitually "graduated" from popular music to genres with higher social status--classical, jazz, coffeehouse "folk"--upon entering college, began retaining their popular music allegiances into adulthood, as they still do. Since then, no classical musician who was not already popular in the 1950s (perhaps only Leonard Bernstein besides Cliburn) has figured as a mass cultural or political icon, and such icons as still existed were worshiped nostalgically, by aging fans. [Taruskin, op. cit. p. 317]

Which rather makes me realize how out of step I have been, my entire career. In the 1960s I was a big fan of The Beatles and other popular music, but around 1969 I stumbled across classical music--not for any sociological or demographic reasons, but simply because the music affected me more intensely and in many more different ways than popular music. And I have basically stayed the course on that for my whole life. Yes, I guess I do feel I occupy a tiny social niche, but it is certainly not one with any elite status whatsoever let alone a "rapacious" one. I retain the tiny social hope that some of my compositions might reach others trapped in their tiny social niche!

Just a personal note: this week I had a video conference call with the string quartet in Vancouver who will be premiering my new quartet in May. They had a lot of questions about the second movement. Here is part of the score so you can see the problem:

Click to enlarge

This is in moment form, but there are a lot of different ways of skinning that cat. Interestingly, moment form dates from a piece by Stockhausen called Momente that was composed between 1962 and 1969. I probably read about it in a history of 20th century music sometime in the early 70s and I certainly heard some student composer versions between 1971 and 1973. I encountered moment form as a performer around 1980 in a piece for flute and guitar by Anthony Genge. Here is that piece:

The score consists of three pages, each of which is a "movement." The top half of each page has a number of "moments" for the flute and the bottom half the same for the guitar. You play the moments in any order. Some consist of rests. Around that time I wrote my first piece in moment form, organized more as a flow-chart. The moments were arranged in a stream, connected by lines and the conductor signaled which performers were to play which level. The piece was for guitar orchestra. Here is a performance of that work:

My piece Dark Dream for violin and guitar has a brief section in moment form which is structured like Night Rain. In the string quartet, the players start, either in the center or at the periphery and follow the spiral to the other end. Then you can go back, if you wish. There is considerable room for improvisation as each moment is like a kernel or seed that can be expanded on. As I said to the quartet the other day, the cool thing about this piece is that, as of this moment, there is absolutely no performance practice tradition, so we get to invent one.

They looked at me a bit wide-eyed after that...

The Danger of Taruskin

The last time a new collection of Taruskin essays appeared was about three years ago and I put up a post in April 2020: All Kinds of Brows. One essay in that collection troubled me deeply as you can see if you follow the link. I was astonished, the next time I opened up The Music Salon, to discover that Dr. Taruskin had left a comment. I think of all the comments left here from well-known figures in the music world, this one I treasure the most.

I'm reading the new, and sadly, last, collection and the very first essay, "The Many Dangers of Music" has both challenged me yet again and at the same time resolved an old thorn in my side. Dr. Taruskin's point of view is that yes, music does have the power to be dangerous and this is exactly why it is important. The formalist aesthetic that placed music outside of history and society insulates it both from moral criticism and from actually being powerful. Some of those arguing for this point of view (though not one of the best-known, Stravinsky) are actually tone-deaf with no real sensitivity to the invasive powers of music.

One of the best ways of talking about the power of music is through metaphor and one very famous metaphor has troubled me for decades. It concerns a passage in the recapitulation of the first movement of the Symphony No. 9 by Beethoven, a passage that had an enormous impact on me with its grinding chromatic intensity. The great English musicologist Donald Francis Tovey referred to that passage as "the heavens on fire." The metaphor that troubled me came from feminist musicologist Susan McClary when she described it as: "one of the most horrifyingly violent episodes in the history of music" evoking "the murderous rage of a rapist incapable of attaining release." This bothered me because the passage seemed to me to be enormously powerful aesthetically and hence "good" and, somehow missing the fact that this is a metaphor, I thought it seemed extremely unfair to Beethoven to characterize him as a rapist. "Assumes facts not in evidence" a lawyer might say. Also, the fact that this is in the recapitulation which proceeds to an harmonic resolution, it also seems unfair to say that it is "incapable of attaining release." I found the metaphor horrifying even though it is really just a testament to the power of Beethoven's music. Incidentally, there are other passages in Beethoven with similarly violent expression: the Grosse Fuge, for example.

But I went ahead and wrote a post, years ago, attacking Susan McClary for this metaphor. Now, with the aid of Dr. Taruskin, I think I understand it much better and I want to recant. I honestly welcome things that challenge my positions. The metaphor was a bit extreme as I think McClary recognized as she toned it down to "constant violent self-assertion" when the paper was reprinted. But it sure did make her famous in musicology! I don't think that it can be denied that even scholars exhibit a touch of career ambition occasionally. Incidentally, I met Prof. McClary at a conference in Rochester years and years ago and we had a nice chat about old blues guitarists.

What I really want to do here is offer heartfelt thanks to Richard Taruskin and Susan McClary and many others who work to understand the great power of music and while it may transcendentally elevate us, it does not grant us any moral superiority. And music is always in the world and having an effect on the world for which we should be grateful. Otherwise, why would we bother?

The new collection is a very fat volume, so you will see more posts inspired by it. In the meantime, let's listen to that Beethoven movement. This is Paavo Järvi and the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen.

Taruskin has died

The New York Times has the obituary: Richard Taruskin, Vigorously Polemical Musicologist, Dies at 77

“He was the most important living writer on classical music, either in academia or in journalism,” said Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker, in a recent interview. “He knew everything, his ideas were potent, and he wrote with dashing style.”

At a time when the classical canon was considered sacrosanct, Mr. Taruskin advanced the philosophy that it was a product of political forces. His bête noire was the widespread notion that Beethoven symphonies and Bach cantatas could be divorced from their historical contexts. He savagely critiqued this idea of “music itself,” which, he wrote, represented “a decontaminated space within which music can be composed, performed and listened to in a cultural and historical vacuum, that is, in perfect sterility.”

You should read the whole thing, which is a pretty fair summary of his career. Right now I am exactly halfway through my third reading of his Oxford History of Western Music, likely the finest historical summation we are ever likely to see. On the occasion of his latest collection of essays, Cursed Questions, published in 2020, I wrote a post discussing some of the knotty issues presented. Richard Taruskin honored this blog by posting a comment which I treasure:

Hello Mr Townsend, and thanks at long last for reading me so seriously and commenting so seriously on what I've written. You are of course right: I love classical music and high art as much as anyone (even as much as you, I'll bet). My question is whether I am entitled by my love for it to regard myself as a morally superior person. I of course say no, and the piece on which you are commenting is my lengthy justification for my refusal to pat classical music lovers on the back. It's the sober academic version of that Musical Mystique piece from the New Republic a dozen years ago, about which people got rather exercised. But neither piece was an attack on the music or anyone's love for it.

All good wishes, Richard Taruskin

So I am forever disabused of the notion that listening to classical music makes you a better person. Though perhaps the jury is still out on whether playing it might help.

Our heartfelt thanks to Professor Taruskin for his lifelong commitment to the critical examination of classical music and its scholarship, a project that too few actually pursue.

UPDATE: There is a nice followup in the NYT by James Oestreich: Music’s Towering Intellectual, With an Appetite for Trouble

World of Music

As a bit of a footnote to our recent discussion: I decided to re-read Taruskin's Oxford History and the introduction, titled "The History of What?" is a brilliant discussion of the methodology. In fact, he comes down in favor of Maury's recent point about the basic division in music being between formal and informal though he describes it as literate and either pre-literate or post-literate--where we are going currently. But he is speaking as a historian and I have a slightly different perspective. He is good at teasing out the left over elements of German Romanticism and rejecting them, but he also takes a run at the pretensions of Adorno and does an excellent job of unveiling the cop-out that comes with avoiding agency. It is always composers, musicians and audiences that cause things to happen, not vague Hegelian forces. What I found most fascinating was his mention of Howard Becker whose book Art Worlds takes an approach close to mine:

An "art world" as Becker conceives it, is the ensemble of agents and social relations that it takes to produce works of art (or maintain artistic activity) in various media. To study art worlds is to study processes of collective action and mediation, the very things that are most often missing in conventional musical historiography. [op. cit. p. xx]

For an absolutely stunning example of that you could not do better than to read Taruskin's discussion of how Stravinsky's Rite of Spring came to be.

The one thing that I find crucially important that Taruskin carefully avoids, is mention of aesthetic quality, though he does talk a lot about the related concept of taste. Aesthetics has been the weird cousin of philosophy for a long time now, but it is pretty important. I was a performer and am now, sort of, a composer, and in those two roles, what you are aiming for is aesthetic quality. So your perspective is very different from that of a historian.

Of course, what I should be doing is composing and not talking about it!

 For an unusual envoi, here is a mixed concert of chamber music played by Macedonian pianist Simon Trpčeski and friends streamed from Wigmore Hall this morning:

 

 

Avant-Garde and Modernism

I make no apologies for postings inspired by writings of Richard Taruskin for the simple reason that most of what he writes is both interesting and provocative--something not true of most writing on music. But it is a bit surprising to be alerted to the aesthetic virtues of a 20th century composer by Prof. Taruskin. Still, there it is. The composer is Stefan Wolpe discussed in the essay "Optimism amid the Rubble" in the collection The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays. My title comes from one brilliant throw-away paragraph that illuminates a distinction that I had been unaware of:

Avant-garde and modernist, though often interchanged, are far from synonyms. Where "avant-garde," originally a military term, properly connotes a combative, countercultural position, "modernist" has long come to imply an entrenched (indeed, a tenured) high-cultural one. The avant-garde is an outsider faction; modernists are insiders. One faction challenges authority; the other wields it. One stands to gain, the other to lose. And so one is optimistic, the other pessimistic. Wolpe's optimism, by turns exuberant and serene, shines through the craggy surface of his work and wins it new friends. It energizes listeners.

Richard Taruskin. The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays (Kindle Locations 714-717). Kindle Edition.

 The piece by Wolpe that Taruskin directs our attention to is Piece in Three Parts from 1961:

My own stance towards 20th century avant-garde composers like Wolpe, whose name I have heard, but whose music I didn't know, is ambiguous. I went through something of an apostasy towards the whole fraught enterprise, but then have had to return to it and work through the whole history again. It is fascinating to read Taruskin's brief recounting of Wolpe's difficulty with Stalinism in the Soviet Union despite being a committed communist his whole life:

Wolpe was disillusioned by the postwar political crackdown in the Soviet Union, too. The humiliation of Prokofieff horrified him. It confirmed and intensified his avant-gardism--his commitment to oppose all established power, which, he now saw, was by definition reactionary and intolerant of difference.

Richard Taruskin. The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays (Kindle Locations 730-731). Kindle Edition.

Taruskin hangs his essay on a perplexing little quote from Wolpe:

"It is good to know how not to know how much one is knowing," Stefan Wolpe told an audience of young California composers in 1959. New York's most idiosyncratic serialist, a former dadaist approaching his seventh decade, was trying to keep them young at a time when modern music was going gray.

Richard Taruskin. The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays (Kindle Locations 684-686). Kindle Edition.

Which reminds me of a passage in the Summa Theologiae by Thomas Aquinas where he is discussing the relationship between the Good and the Beautiful:

"Good" and "beautiful" have the same reference but differ in meaning. For the good, being what all things want, is that in which the appetite comes to rest; whereas the beautiful is that in which the appetite comes to rest through contemplation or knowledge ... "Beautiful" therefore adds to "good" a reference to the cognitive powers, "good" refers simply to that in which the appetite takes pleasure, but "beautiful" refers to something the mere apprehension of which gives pleasure.

[Quoted in The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas by Umberto Eco, p. 36.]

Apprehension, that is to say, knowledge of--the knowledge of, apprehension of, beauty, gives pleasure. But sometimes, we just think we know what beauty is and we would be better off not knowing how much we are knowing.

Difficult Questions

One of the core projects of this blog has been to advocate for the quality and worth of classical music. The main reason I feel this is a worthwhile project is that classical music seems more and more to be pushed to the margins of society and public life and fewer and fewer people are given enough exposure to find out if it has something for them or not. The great juggernaut of pop music rules us all.

But every time I read something by Richard Taruskin I run into difficult questions that he poses that challenge my project. Take this very succinct statement:

In the West, a century-long tradition of reckless, socially irresponsible, and self-absorbed avant-garde behavior, supported by the dogma that art is the concern of artists only and coupled with an ever-increasing passivity on the part of an audience that is deprived by its education and by the growth of the recording industry of participatory skills in music, has led to the extreme apathy that threatens the continued existence of art music in our culture. And yet anyone who questions the dogma of autonomy, harmful though it has become, is immediately and unthinkingly branded an enemy of art. I am coming to exactly the opposite conclusion. Art must be saved from the dogma. And while saying this I concede to my critics-I do not shrink from it-that a step away from our culture's apathy toward art and artists is a step in the direction of Auschwitz and the Gulag.

Richard Taruskin. The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays (Kindle Locations 222-227). Kindle Edition.

He goes on to say that he thinks the solution is finding a balance. It is a knotty dilemma indeed! On the one hand, one wants composers and performers to have the maximum freedom to follow the paths they find appealing or necessary for the pursuit of the artwork. On the other hand, yes, total autonomy also implies total irrelevance, though this is a bit hard for me to accept. The greatest music we have, however, from early times to Bach and Mozart, was all created under the seal of a current need. Bach wrote for the needs of the church and the Leipzig city fathers. Mozart wrote for patrons and to put bread on the table. It is with Beethoven that the seed of the fundamental autonomy of the composer is planted and we are still living with that dilemma.

This is a dilemma for me personally because I dropped out of a frustrating career as a performer to ultimately take up a new vocation (though long-standing as an inclination) as a composer. As a composer I feel more marginalized than ever, but the question is, what to do about it? What are the true responsibilities of a composer today? To try and write good music, certainly, but for what audiences? And how to do so without an obvious path to renumeration? I certainly can't solve the problem of the "culture's apathy toward art and artists" and how much is it my responsibility to try? And if I did accept the responsibility, how to even go about it?

I don't think that I have ever thought that art is the concern of artists only, but I have certainly thought that the fine arts are only really accessible to people who are willing to put some effort into it. I suppose this is elitist, but the arts have always been principally appreciated and supported by a certain minority in society. If this minority also happens to be the leaders of society, as in an aristocracy, say the rulers of Northern Italy in the 15th and 16th centuries, then the fine arts tend to do pretty well. In a society where the arts are supported and appreciated by a self-selected group of aficionados largely drawn from the middle class, as was the case in the 19th century, then they can still do pretty well. But in much of the world today, the fine arts, or classical music at least, gets less and less support from the general public and becomes more and more marginal. In the competition with pop music, classical music lost.

Was it just because of the "reckless, socially irresponsible, and self-absorbed avant-garde behavior" of the artists themselves as Taruskin implies? I can't quite think so. I see a give and take flow of causality and consequences: avant-garde composers do something challenging, pop artists find gold in more and more vulgarity and the dance goes on and on with each inciting the other. Thus we end up with a polarized environment. Crossover has always seemed to me to be the most distressing nexus of the dilemma because it takes just enough from classical music to be musically plausible, but then that music is stuffed into the seductive garments of a Victoria's Secret fashion show. Is the answer to the dilemma to be found in the clash of these disparate elements?

UPDATE: I really should have mentioned that the very powerful and practical solution that Taruskin goes on to recommend in the essay I quoted from above, lies in public funding of proper, serious, music education, something I heartily agree with.

There is No Hope for Art?

I'm reading Richard Taruskin's newest collection of essays, just published a few days ago. One of the largest pieces in the book is the one titled "Is There a Baby in the Bathwater? On aesthetic autonomy" from which this passage is taken:

To single out as “music worthy of human beings” a music that is inaccessible to all but an infinitesimal, self-congratulating, and possibly mendacious fraction of actual humans seems to me no different from claiming that only the tiny fraction that possess the right bloodlines, or the right class affiliation, or the right racial or religious heritage, are fully human. If this is the use to which the doctrine of aesthetic autonomy is to be put, then the baby has drowned and it might as well be thrown out with the bathwater. 

For if the grim history of the twentieth century has not discredited the idea of redemptive high culture and undermined the authority of its adherents, then there is no hope at all for art.

Taruskin, Richard. Cursed Questions . University of California Press. Kindle Edition.

He is quoting Theodor Adorno and this passage comes in the last section of the very long essay. The music referred to is that of Arnold Schoenberg. Despite the fact that he has built up to this with a meticulous discussion of many examples from many perspectives it feels as if, finally, he has thrown out at least part of the baby! The question is, is art truly autonomous, floating like a fragrant cloud over the messy reality that it offers an alternative to? Or is it possible for a fine art like contemporary classical music to be an active and non-hypocritical agent in the world? In an earlier section that I have to quote at some length Taruskin notes that:

The ideal of aesthetic autonomy at its pinnacle of purity, by fostering a now-discredited and hopelessly academicized avant-garde, has contributed heavily to the social and cultural marginalization of music as a serious fine art. A tragicomic example of that marginalization comes by way of the Pulitzer Prize, one of the most prestigious awards an artist or scholar can earn in America. (And it is also a stunning example of the independence of cultural capital from monetary, because the Pulitzer purse is negligible.) The annual prize recipients in fiction, history, biography, and drama, even (sometimes) poetry, are almost always figures of interest to the public at large. Those awards are publicly debated; sides are taken; approval and disapproval are vehemently aired. The prize in music, until very recently, traditionally went to somebody the general music public had never heard of (often enough to somebody I’d never heard of), and nobody ever cared who won it, except jealous fellow-professionals. 

And then even the professionals began to despise it. When the composer John Adams won it in 2003 for his 9/11 memorial On the Transmigration of Souls, he expressed what one critic called “ambivalence bordering on contempt.” To another he wrote, as if paraphrasing my own judgment, that “among musicians that I know, the Pulitzer has over the years lost much of the prestige it still carries in other fields like literature and journalism,” for “anyone perusing the list of past winners cannot help noticing that many if not most of the country’s greatest musical minds are conspicuously missing, . . . passed over year after year, often in favor of academy composers who have won a disproportionate number of prizes.” With the award of the prize in 2018 to the rapper Kendrick Lamar, about whom a large public certainly does care, the Pulitzer judges have come around to recognizing the meaninglessness of their habitual public recognition of artists without a public. The decision was widely viewed as an attempt to make amends. Can the prize now ever go again to composers of contemporary “classical” music? Or has their marginalization been effectively pronounced hopeless?

Taruskin, Richard. Cursed Questions . University of California Press. Kindle Edition.

I have just the suspicion of a feeling here that Taruskin is perhaps just a tad too competent in his job of ripping away the veil. As a composer of contemporary classical music who has won no prizes and sought no vainglory (nor money for that matter) I think it would be kind and perhaps even moral of Taruskin to point out, oh, just occasionally, that perhaps people in general might look to classical music, even in its contemporary manifestation, as something that might contain expressions and experiences coded in musical terms, that could be widely enjoyed. Of course, he would riposte, this is not his job as historian. True, that. Still...

As an envoi I offer the Six Little Pieces, op 19 of Schoenberg played by Michel Béroff:

Stravinsky and The Rite, part 6

We're getting very near the end, as some pop lyricist said, and not many pages remain to cover in this series. Taruskin delves into the ways that Stravinsky evokes and contrasts three different modalities or "polytonalities": the octatonic collection, the whole tone collection and the diatonic collection. Out of these three he can construct simple C major chords, or strong dissonances. As Taruskin summarizes:

we now have whole-tone, octatonic, and diatonic constructs from the source melodies all running concurrently, and all intersecting on C, which pitch is thus promoted to the status of a specious tonic. [op. cit. p. 930]

I have worked with this kind of structure myself, to a limited extent, and it is both effective and curious. It seems as it you are writing, sort-of, tonal music, but always with strange twists. This is so different from the completely atonal approach of Schoenberg and his followers, where you are always wandering in a trackless (though at times very, very symmetrical!) landscape.

The "Dance of the Earth" is the section that the above discussion is about and Taruskin describes it as:

at once one of the most radical sections of The Rite--surely the most radical by far in Part I--and the dance most rigorously based on folk-derived source melodies.

He goes on to say that The Rite is Stravinsky's "Eroica," referring to the Symphony No. 3 of Beethoven which represented a similar kind of fundamental breakthrough. Nothing before (except, perhaps parts of Petrushka?) prepares you for the bewildering originality of The Rite. Taruskin's book, brilliant as it is, is not a detailed discussion of the technical aspects of the work. For that he directs us to two books: The Harmonic Organization of "The Rite of Spring" by Allen Forte and Stravinsky and "The Rite" by Pieter Van den Toorn.

The Rite resonates, not only with folklore, but with earlier Russian music for the stage such as Rimsky-Korsakov's Mlada and Snegurochka. Incidentally, the Opéra Comique production of the latter opera and Stravinsky's ballet shared not only the same designer of sets and costumes, Nikolai Roerich, but nearly the same designs! The characteristic timbres of Russian folk wind instruments is another shared quality. What Stravinsky did that was truly new and original was to take two elements present in Russian music, the folkloristic and modernistic, and synthesize them in an original way.

One unifying factor in The Rite is its use of two octatonic tetrachords, a tritone apart:

A characteristic "triad" is created by taking the outer notes of the upper tetrachord, D and G, and the lowest note of the lower one, G#, or the outer notes of the lower and the top note of the upper: G#, C# and G. This kind of sonority is common enough for Taruskin to dub it The Rite chord by analogy with the Petrushka chord.

Taruksin points to an exact contemporary of Stravinsky's, Mikhail Laryonov (1881 - 1964) and his partner Natalia Goncharova (1881 - 1962), as pursuing the same synthesis between folklore and modernism in his work:

Click to enlarge

Both have transcended their sources and contexts to achieve a "pan-human" result in the phrase of Roerich. Both are about a radical formal simplification, the sacrifice of kul'tura on the altar of stikhiya. The culture rejected by The Rite was that of the German symphonic tradition. Instead, formal procedures are stripped down to what is most basic: extension through repetition, alternation and sheer accumulation. This is what gives The Rite its elemental power. Instead of harmonic progression, thematic development and smooth transitions there would be stasis and abrupt discontinuities.

Taruskin sees two different kinds of rhythmic innovations: the immobile, hypnotic ostinato and the irregularly spaced downbeats, both features of Russian folk music. Here is an example of the latter, which Rimsky-Korsakov took down from the singing of Borodin's maid!

The barring, both in this song transcription and in The Rite, is rather arbitrary. When you combine the two different rhythmic techniques, as Stravinsky characteristically did, you obtain one of his most original textures.

And that brings us to the end of our long journey. I might offer a drive-by analysis of one or two movements in the near future, but this, I think, completes our survey of the context for The Rite of Spring. This has been just a collection of notes from Richard Taruskin's monumental work of music scholarship, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works Through Mavra.

So for our final envoi, here is, yet again, a performance of the work. This is the Cleveland Orchestra conducted by Pierre Boulez, which is, I think, the version I first purchased around 1970:

Stravinsky and The Rite, part 5

When I talk about the "use" of folk melodies in The Rite, do not think for a moment that this is not a wholeheartedly creative act! As you can see from the last post, the rhythmic transformations were so thorough that you might not even see the connection. Other kinds of transformation were from major to Dorian mode, inserting a profusion of leaping grace notes reminiscent of dudki, the expansion of intervals (replacing half steps with thirds) and so on. There are some instances where the relationship between a folk melody source and The Rite is only traceable through the mediating authority of Stravinsky's sketchbook, where we can witness the transformation.

Taruskin explores four different instances of these transformations which he describes as Stravinsky's use of Russian folk music as a self-emancipation from the cul-de-sac that Russian music was trapped in. Let's look at one of his examples. Here is a facsimile page from the sketchbook. At the top of the page, tidily written out, is the Semik song "Nu-ka, kumushka, mï pokumimsya" which comes from Rimsky-Korsakov's anthology. The rest of the page shows developments of the tune for the "Spring Rounds" or "Khorovodï."

From p. 907 of Taruskin, op. cit.

We are so lucky to have access to Stravinsky's sketchbook! Taruskin offers a comparative analysis showing how the tune was transformed and incorporated in The Rite:

Taruskin, p. 909

What is really remarkable here is not that he found inspiration in folk melodies, that was quite common in composers of many countries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. What is remarkable is that he absorbed some stylistic elements, such as the leaping grace notes, and wholly transformed the original material with great freedom.

Another example, that I won't quote (see Taruskin pp. 911 et seq.), involves the deconstruction of a wedding song by using motifs from it as tesserae in a melodic mosaic, subjected to varied juxtapositions, internal repetition, transposition and so on. There is even a folk source for the kind of dissonant counterpoint we often find in The Rite. I mentioned many posts back that Russian folk music is actually performed by groups, not soloists, and it is typically full of heterophonic polyphony, meaning a melody accompanied by variants of itself. Taruskin quotes examples from the sketchbook. 

In a burst of enthusiasm, on page 36 of the sketchbook, Stravinsky scrawled a phrase that might serve as a motto for The Rite of Spring: "There is music wherever there is rhythm, as there is life wherever there beats a pulse."

And with that, let's pause for today and listen to another performance of The Rite. This is the Radio Filharmonisch Orkest of the Netherlands conducted by Jaap van Zweden. Just follow the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UJOaGIhG7A&t=22s

Stravinsky and the Rite, part 4

Taruskin goes into great detail about the peasant rites and the sources that document them, much of which we can skip, though I encourage you to read the account in his book. One of the primary sources for Roerich and therefore Stravinsky seems to have been the Russian Primary Chronicle which describes the rites of the Kupala festival in exactly the same order that they appear in Stravinsky's sketchbook (see Taruskin, p. 884 et. seq.) Things like the notorious bar of 11/4 might have been inspired by a passage describing an old woman beating on a linden bark drum and the opening bassoon solo by the folk instrument dudki, mentioned in Roerich's scenario.

The ethnological accuracy of the scenario and costumes (based on peasant originals) is also reflected in the music, though Stravinsky was keen to disavow this in later years. He confided in one biographer that the opening bassoon solo was taken from an anthology of Lithuanian folk songs, and did so largely to give the impression, later clearly stated, that this was the only instance in The Rite! As we shall see, the use of folk melodies was extensive. With few exceptions, the ones that have been discovered so far belong to the type known to ethnographers as obryadnïye pesni or ceremonial songs, specifically to the category of kalendarnïye pesni, seasonal or calendar songs. That is, ones associated with the very festivals on which Roerich based the scenario. These songs are some of the oldest and come down, largely intact, from pagan times.

Roerich recounts that when he and Stravinsky were meeting at Talashkino in the summer of 1911, another guest was the singer and gusli player Sergey Kolosov (1855 - after 1915) who was then collecting folk material. He sang for the collaborators and Stravinsky took down a number of melodies. It is unlikely, therefore, that it will ever be possible to identify all of the folk melodies in The Rite. There are about a dozen, however, that are easily identified. It is astonishing that no-one even bothered to look up any sources for folk melodies in The Rite until Lawrence Morton, in 1979, began examining the mammoth anthology of Lithuanian melodies (over 1700) that Stravinsky had used. Morton found not only the source of the opening bassoon solo, but three additional melodies he also used. Why the long delay? Prior to this, all the approaches had been strictly abstract and analytical, typified by Pierre Boulez' in the early 1950s, in which not a single mention is made of the scenic or choreographic design.

Here are all the melodies taken from the Lithuanian anthology (collected by Anton Juszkiewicz) used in The Rite:

And here is how they appear in the work (in the same order):

As you can see, the transformations are largely rhythmic.

That should give you enough to chew on for today. Let's listen to a concert performance, with score, by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra conducted by Yoel Levi:

Stravinsky and the Rite, part 3

"The Great Sacrifice" as the original project was called, was set, not in Spring, but in midsummer to correspond to the ancient Slavic rite of Kupala which was the one with the sacrificial aspect. After Russia was Christianized in the tenth century the festivals of the folk calendar were accommodated to those of Christianity and Kupala became associated with the feast of John the Baptist. In Russia there grew up a set of ritual folksongs known as Ivanovskiye pesni, "Songs of St. John's Eve." One of these was published in a collection in 1899 and part of the tune found its way into the middle section of Stravinsky's Danse russe from Petrushka:

This Ivanovskaya could be described as a khorovod, often translated as "round dance." But khorovodï are more than that, they are often enactments of folk rituals that contain elements of long-forgotten folk customs. One Vladimir Propp has given a description:

Unlike ... songs [that] are performed only vocally [khorovods] are accompanied by various body movements. ... The khorovod may be performed by various movements in a circle (usually to the left posodon', that is, as the sun moves), with or without stopping; there can be two circles, one inside and one outside, moving in opposite directions. While those moving in the circle sing, those standing inside the circle (a young man, or a girl, or a pair) perform and portray what is being sung. ... the chorus may form not only a circle, but also a chain, it can perform different movements in a straight line or in various line formations... [quoted in Taruskin, op. cit. p. 868]

And so on. We see all of this reflected in the scenario and choreography. The opening tune used in the Danse russe was also a khorovod and the text was associated with matchmaking. Both this and the tune quoted above refer to the ancient "ritual of abduction" a somewhat rough form of matchmaking where the youth abducts the girl. This was part of the ritual of Kupala. Recall that Stravinsky had actually started sketching "The Great Sacrifice" before he began composing Petrushka. Obviously the Danse russe was originally intended for it.

The scenario was finalized towards the end of July 1911 in a visit Stravinsky paid to Roerich in Talashkino where the latter was designing and supervising the creation of murals and mosaics for Princess Tenisheva's private church, one of the landmarks of the neonationalist movement. At this time the scenario was divided into two parts instead of one and the name was changed to Prazdnik vesni or "The Festival of Spring." Later the Russian name would become "Vesna svyashchennaya" or "The Consecrated Spring." Stravinsky's sketchbook, which has survived, contains the titles for the individual dances, worked out in this meeting. Here they are, together with the equivalents in the published score:

 

The most significant change from this to the final arrangement is the movement of the "Jeu de rapt" from its penultimate position in Part I to much earlier, just after "Les augures printanières." The earliest surviving synopsis of the action is in a letter of Stravinsky dated December 1912:

The first part, which bears the name "The Kiss of the Earth," is made up of ancient Slavonic rituals--the joy of spring. The orchestral introduction is a swarm of spring pipes [dudki]; later, after the curtain goes up, there are auguries, khorovod rituals, a game of abduction, a khorovod game of cities, and all of this is interrupted by the procession of the "Oldest-and-Wisest." the elder who bestows a kiss upon the earth. A wild stomping dance upon the earth, the people drunk with spring, brings the first part to its conclusion.

In the second part the maidens at night perform their secret rituals upon a sacred hillock. One of the the maidens is doomed by fate to be sacrificed. She wanders into a stone labyrinth from which there is no exit, whereupon all the remaining maidens glorify the Chosen One in a boisterous martial dance. Then the elders enter. The doomed one, left alone face to face with the elders, dances her last "Holy Dance"--the Great Sacrifice. These last words are in fact the name of the second part. The elders are witness to her last dance, which ends in the death of the doomed one.

Throughout the whole composition I give the listener a sense of the closeness of the people to the earth of the commonality of their lives with the earth, by means of lapidary rhythms. [quoted in Taruskin, op. cit. p. 874]

A number of other synopses are extant, some were published around the time of the premiere. Stravinsky went to great lengths to disavow some of these later in life.

The ultimate source for the folk rituals was likely the three volume compendium by Alexander Afanasyev published 1866-69 titled, in English, The Slavs's Poetic Attitudes Toward Nature. Rimsky-Korsakov had drawn heavily on Afanasyev for a number of his operas. The book was a kind of bible for the Russian Symbolists and World of Art circle.

The original choreographer was going to be Fokine, but he left the Ballets russes and the job was given to Nijinsky who began work in November 1912.

Let's stop here for today and listen to a performance of the Danse russe from Petrushka. The conductor is Valeria Martinelli at the INTERNATIONAL BARTÓK SEMINAR AND FESTIVAL 2014:

Stravinsky and the Rite, part 2

The 1912 Ballets Russes season did not have a Stravinsky premiere--he was hard at work on The Rite already. He also took time to write Three Japanese Lyrics and make the acquaintance of Schoenberg, with whom he was quite impressed at the time (later on their rivalry came to the fore). Stravinsky heard Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire at a concert in Berlin's Choralion Saal on 8 December 1912. Just a few days before, Schoenberg had been Stravinsky's guest at a performance of Petrushka.

Taruskin discerns some influence by Schoenberg on Stravinsky around this time in a tendency towards a spare linearity. Stravinsky was also impressed with Schoenberg's virtuoso writing for instruments.

The Three Japanese Lyrics were received positively in France, but performances in Russia were greeted with the most vicious invective (see Taruskin, pp. 844-5). It is not surprising that more and more Stravinsky turned away from Russia and to the West. Ironically, The Rite itself, while usually viewed as being a powerful break with tradition is in reality profoundly linked to tradition, which gave Stravinsky a unique approach, different from most composers of the day. Taruskin writes:

The usual accounts of the work place almost exclusive emphasis on the putative rupture with tradition; and despite all his subsequent disclaimers, that is the view the composer chose to abet, increasingly alienated as he was from the cultural milieu in which the ballet was conceived. It was, however, precisely because The Rite was so profoundly traditional, both as to cultural outlook and as to musical technique, that Stravinsky was able to find through it a voice that would serve him through the next difficult phase of his career.

Precisely because The Rite was neither rupture nor upheaval but a magnificent extension, it revealed to Stravinsky a path that would sustain him through a decade of unimaginable ruptures and upheavals brought on by events far beyond his control. [Taruskin, op. cit. p. 847 ]

 The cultural context in Russia in the early part of the 20th century was characterized by a "relentless sense of catastrophe" in the words of the poet Alexander Blok. The tragedy of modern man lay in his estrangement from the earth and the business of humanity was to heal this rift, to recover the stikhiya or elemental spontaneity of the people. Artists must renounce kul'tura (culture of the intelligentsia) and become elemental people, indivisible from the earth. The model for all this was the life of the peasant, who still practices the ancient religion of the earth. One of the artists who followed this project was Nikolai Roerich (1874 - 1947), then (early 1909) head of the revived World of Art organization. Benois recalled him as:

utterly absorbed in dreams of prehistoric, patriarchal and religious life--of the days when the vast, limitless plains of Russia and the shores of her lakes and rivers were peopled with the forefathers of the present inhabitants. Roerich's mystic, spiritual experiences make him strangely susceptible to the charm of the ancient world

Apart from being a masterly essayist,  Roerich was the creator of a series of archaistic paintings that depict this kind of ancient life, one of which, Idols, Taruskin reproduces in his book. Unfortunately, all the photos in the book are black and white and extremely muddy! Shame on you, University of California Press. Luckily, the Internet can provide us with much better.

Nikolai Roerich, Idols. Click to enlarge

Roerich was catapulted to fame when Diaghilev chose him to provide the curtain, decor and costumes for the second act of Borodin's Prince Igor, presented in the opening program of the first saison russe in Paris, May 18, 1909. The Parisian audiences felt as if transported to the ends of the earth. 

A while back we mentioned the trend called "Scythianism" which was just one manifestation of a longing for a primitive wholeness that influenced writers, poets, painters and composers. The only source of information about the ancient Scyths is found in Herodotus, The Persian Wars, Bk. IV where they sound a lot like the Reavers from Firefly, using the skulls of their enemies as drinking bowls. The most Scythian composer was the young Prokofiev even before he wrote his Scythian Suite in 1915. The one thing we know for sure is that the conception of The Rite of Spring arose out of a whole complex of ideas and trends that were very much "in the air." After Stravinsky had a dream of pagan sacrifice, he wrote to Roerich in early December 1912, who had a similar dream of his own. Stravinsky described his dream in his autobiography in these words:

One day, when I was finishing the last pages of L'Oiseau de feu in St. Petersburg, I had a fleeting vision which came to me as a complete surprise, my mind at the moment being full of other things. I saw in imagination a solemn pagan rite: sage elders, seated in a circle, watched a young girl dance herself to death. They were sacrificing her to propitiate the god of spring. [quoted in Taruskin, op. cit. p. 862]

In other accounts, Stravinsky describes it as an actual dream and later on he demoted Roerich's role to being one of mere designer. Other accounts from the time actually credit Roerich with the original idea (Taruskin cites a number of sources on p. 863). The truth is likely that they were both equally responsible for the idea and its fleshing out into a ballet scenario. "The Great Sacrifice," to use the original working title, would be all stikhiya, all primitive immediacy, with choreographic action devoid of a conventional plot. The ballet would not "tell the story" of a primitive ritual, it would be that ritual. The balletic equivalent of recitative, the mime that was so prevalent in The Firebird, would be eliminated entirely in favor of dance.

That sets the scene for the composition of the ballet, which we will get to in subsequent posts. For now, let's look and listen to a revival of the original production with Roerich's costumes and sets and Fokine's choreography. UPDATE: Correction, the choreographer was Nijinsky, not Fokine, who had already left the Ballets russes.

Stravinsky and The Rite of Spring, part 1

Now it is finally time to take up Le Sacre du Printemps, The Rite of Spring, but before doing that, I want to just mention a couple of things regarding influence. So many who wrote about Petrushka assumed that, since it was written in France and premiered there, that it was somehow a "French" piece on Russian themes. Just how this is the case is never specified. Taruskin points out that composers like Ravel, who might use sonorities resembling the Petrushka chord, do so in a quite different way, as a decorative surface to an underlying classical structure. Whereas in Stravinsky, his usages come out of a long Russian octatonic tradition and are quite structural. In the case of Debussy, on the other hand, it seems to be the case that it was Debussy in his second book of Preludes for piano, dating from 1913, who was influenced by Petrushka, his favorite piece by Stravinsky. Taruskin refers to the Prelude 11, "Les tierces alternées" as "from beginning to end a study in Petrushka textures." [op. cit. p. 773]

The influence of Petrushka was particularly strong on the Parisian aesthetic of the 1920s, on composers like Les Six, particularly Auric and Poulenc. But enough of the "street ballet" Petrushka. On to the Rite.

The original conception of "The Great Sacrifice" actually predates Petrushka and Stravinsky promised his collaborator Roerich that he would get back to it as soon as the earlier ballet was finished. But before he did, he did some vocal settings, one of which provided a path to the latter ballet. Konstantin Balmont, while not the most fashionable poet, was, due to the sonorousness of his verse, immensely popular with composers. The anthology Zelyonïy vertograd (A Green Garden) from which the poem Zvezdolikiy was taken, consists of stylizations of Russian spiritual folklore. The inspiration was a sect, the skoptsï, known for their ritual castration, that were a breakaway from the khlïstï, known for their ritual, whirling dances. These late 18th century sects, with their evocation of a huge army of the castrated rather remind one of the Unsullied from Game of Thrones! This is the  esoteric subtext to the poem Stravinsky set.

A musical influence around this time on Stravinsky, despite his later denials, appears to have been Scriabin whose Prometheus was published in early 1911. Incidentally, one of the chords from the "motto" of the Stravinsky song Zvezdolikiy is a C minor chord superimposed on a C major chord:

"Coll. III" refers to one of the three possible octatonic scales

This is almost identical to the chord used by Jimi Hendrix that appears in "Purple Haze" though I wouldn't claim any influence. Others who used this sonority include Scriabin. As Hendrix used it, the root is doubled, the fifth omitted and a seventh added, (likely due to the way it lies on the guitar fingerboard) but the fundamental idea of having both the major and the minor thirds is shared with the Russians:

"Hendrix" chord

The melodic line found in the Zvezdolikiy motto also connects to perhaps the most memorable melodic motif from the Rite, the ostinato found in the pizzicato strings in "Augures printaniers":

Zvezdolikiy, dedicated to Debussy, is also known under its French title Le roi des étoiles:

Debussy, among others, regarded this little "cantata" as being unperformable due to intonation problems for the choir and it was not premiered until 1939! The importance  of the song is due to its development of the intersections between the octatonic collections and the diatonic and whole-tone ones, techniques that will prove to be of great importance in the composition of the Rite.

Stravinsky and the Ballet, part 5

We are not yet done with Petrushka, I'm afraid. What we are getting from Taruskin, via my summaries in these posts, is even more than you would get in a graduate seminar on Stravinsky. I know, as I have done one! In doctoral seminars it often seems there is not enough time to really get into the details, everything is rather rushed. But here we can take the time to go through Taruskin's exhaustive book on Stravinsky (just volume one, mind you) that he spent decades researching. As one of my musicology professors remarked in a seminar on DuFay, "it is the details that we are interested in."

A couple of interesting details are the discovery by Russian musicologists that, contrary to long-standing opinion, Russian folk music is actually polyphonic! Yuliy Nikolayevich Melgunov (1846 - 93) was the first to assert this and notate in his 1879 collection the "undervoicelets" or little heterophonic elements typically found in performance. Prior to this, the collectors of folksong tended to sit down with individual informants to notate what they sang. But Russian folksong is nearly always performed by a group. Until the advent of the use of the phonograph to record these performances, it was nearly impossible to notate what was going on. The first musicologist to go into the field and record these performances was Yevgenia Eduardovna Linyova (1853 - 1919). Her first expedition using the phonograph was in 1903 and the third and last collection of folksongs transcribed from recordings was published in 1909. It was her view that only now was a true neonationalist program in music possible because only now was the true nature of Russian folksong revealed. Was Stravinsky even aware of this research? You bet! Taruskin's exhaustive research into the archives turned up a letter from Stravinsky to his mother asking her to send him:

folk songs of the Caucasian peoples that have been phonographically transcribed ... I already have the first volume of "Great Russian Songs in Folk Harmonization" (as transcribed phonographically by Linyova). [op. cit. p. 733]

 Taruskin points out some interesting ironies: despite the authenticity that underlies the depiction of the Shrovetide festivities, the impression is not naturalistic. The street scenes are a magical invocation, but viewed through the eyes of the puppets, who are the only real "characters" with individuality. The world of the puppets is more "real" than the world of the humans, danced by the corps de ballet.

Taruskin traces some hints of the "Petrushka chord" polytonality in previous music by Rimsky-Korsakov, in Scheherezade, where a great deal of the music is exhaustively octatonic. You might recall that the "Petrushka chord," much-loved by theorists, is a superimposition of a C major chord and an F# major chord, something not possible in common practice harmony, but very feasible in an octatonic context as both chords are derivable from an octatonic scale. Here are the two possibilities starting on C. The upper one consists of a tone/semitone sequence and the lower is the semitone/tone version:

If you look at the lower version of the scale you will see that it contains the three notes of a C major triad: C E G and also the three notes of an F# major triad, though they are spelled as a G flat major triad: G flat, B flat and D flat. In Petrushka we have not only a vertical conjunction of the two chords, but also their extension in time as a structural device. The second tableau, Petrushka's Room, for example, begins with a passage on C and ends with a cadence on F#. I'm not going to discuss all of Taruskin's analysis here, fascinating though it is. If you are interested, please go directly to the book yourself.

The idea of two competing tonal centers a tritone apart fits well with Stravinsky's original vision in his Konzerstück for piano and orchestra, sketches for which precede the ballet. The idea was that of a conflict between order and chaos that became mapped onto the ballet scenario. In the ballet, the polarity is between the human world and the puppet world, reflected in the "white key" versus "black key" music of the C major/F# major opposition.

What of the reception of Petrushka? It was an enormous hit with the Parisians and while Russians would not hear a performance in Russia until years later, there were certainly commentators who had either seen a performance in Paris or at least studied the score, published in 1911. Myaskovsky wrote:

Petrushka is life itself. All the music in it is full of such energy, such freshness and wit, such healthy, incorruptible merriment, such reckless abandon, that all its deliberate banalities and trivialities, its constant background of concertinas, not only fail to repel, but, quite the contrary, carry us away all the more, just as you yourself, on a Shrovetime aglitter with sun and snow, in the full ardor of your fresh young blood, once mingled in the merry, rolicking holiday crowd and flowed with it in an indivisible exultant whole. [op. cit. p. 762]

There were others who now regarded Stravinsky as an apostate, among them his erstwhile friend, Rimsky-Korsakov's son Andrey. He wrote, regarding a performance of three fragments from the work:

Petrushka glitters with an artificial assortment of bright rags and patches and clatters with ringing rattles. Were it not for the big talents of Benois and Stravinsky, this piece, with its vulgar tunes, would have been a monstrous crime.

Even fifty years later Stravinsky was still so wounded by this that he recalled it with bitterness. In other reviews Stravinsky's music was compared unfavorably with his conservative antipode, Glazunov. Possibly the most thorough and penetrating review came, unexpectedly, from the patriarch of Russian music criticism, the seventy-six year old Nikolai Dmitriyevich Kashkin who ended his lengthy commentary by saying:

The main thing to be said in conclusion is that Petrushka is the work of a real talent, from whom we may expect a very great deal in the future.

Right he was!

One thing that is immediately noticeable, to me at least, is how Petrushka is a kind of antithesis to The Firebird. Their structures are kind of mirror-images. The Firebird begins in mystery while Petrushka ends in mysterious pizzicati. The Firebird builds to a magnificent, blaring climax while Petrushka begins with the magnificent tapestry of the Shrovetide fair. The Firebird looks back in homage to Rimsky-Korsakov while Petrushka absorbs authentic folklore and fuses it with an incipient modernism. With Petrushka Stravinsky finally becomes Stravinsky.

Let's end with two more performances of the ballet. The first, with the score, is Pierre Boulez conducting the New York Philharmonic:

This is a restaging of the ballet by Nicolas Beriosov for the Paris Opera, based on the original sets. The audio in this clip is pretty iffy, but it is interesting to see a different production: