Igor Stravinsky

Music Home >> Music Genres >> Undetermined Music



< < < < < > > > > > More Info on Igor Stravinsky Similar Undetermined Music Search Artistopia

Biography

Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (sometimes spelled Strawinsky or Stravinskii ; Russian: ????? ????????? ??????????? , Scientific transliteration of Cyrillic|transliterated : Igor' Fëdorovic Stravinskij; ; 6 April 1971) was a Russia n, and later France|French and United States|American composer, pianist and conductor. He is acknowledged by many as one of the most important and influential List of 20th-century classical composers by birth date|composers of the 20th century .

Stravinsky's compositional career was notable for its stylistic diversity. He first achieved international fame with three ballet s commissioned by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev and first performed in Paris by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes : The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (ballet)|Petrushka (1911) and The Rite of Spring (1913). The Rite of Spring , which provoked a riot during its premiere, transformed the way in which subsequent composers thought about rhythmic structure and was largely responsible for Stravinsky's enduring reputation as a musical revolutionary who pushed the boundaries of musical design. His so-called Russian phase was followed in the 1920s by a period in which he turned to neoclassicism (music)|neoclassical music . The works from this period tended to make use of traditional musical forms ( concerto grosso , fugue and symphony ). They frequently concealed a vein of intense emotion beneath a surface appearance of detachment or austerity and often paid tribute to the music of earlier masters, for example Johann Sebastian Bach|J.S. Bach and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky|Tchaikovsky . In the 1950s, Stravinsky adopted serialism|serial procedures. His compositions of this period shared traits with examples of his earlier output: rhythmic energy, the construction of extended melodic ideas out of a few two- or three-note cells and clarity of form, of instrumentation and of utterance.

Life and career

Early life in Russia

Stravinsky was born on 17 June 1882 in the Russian Empire|Russian resort town of Lomonosov, Russia|Oranienbaum Greene 1985, 1101. and was brought up in Saint Petersburg .White 1979, 4. His parents were Fyodor Stravinsky , a Bass (voice type)|bass singer at the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg, and Anna Kholodovsky.Walsh 2001. He recalled his schooldays as being lonely, later saying that "I never came across anyone who had any real attraction for me".Stravinsky 1962, 8. During his boyhood, Stravinsky began piano lessons, studied music theory and attempted some composition. In 1890, he was mesmerised by his first exposure to an orchestra, when he saw a performance of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky|Tchaikovsky 's ballet The Sleeping Beauty (ballet)|The Sleeping Beauty at the Mariinsky Theatre: by the age of fifteen, he had mastered Felix Mendelssohn|Mendelssohn 's Piano Concerto No. 1 (Mendelssohn)|Piano Concerto in G minor and finished a piano reduction of a string quartet by Alexander Glazunov|Glazunov , who considered the young Stravinsky to be unmusical and thought little of his composition skills.Dubal 2001, 564.

Despite his enthusiasm for music, his parents expected him to become a lawyer. Stravinsky enrolled to study law at the University of Saint Petersburg in 1901, but he attended fewer than fifty class sessions during his four years of study.Dubal 2001, 565. In the summer of 1902 Stravinsky stayed with the composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and his family in the German city of Heidelberg , where Rimsky-Korsakov, arguably the leading Russian composer at that time, suggested to Stravinsky that he should not enter the Saint Petersburg Conservatoire, but instead study composing by taking private lessons, in large part because of his age.White 1979, 8. Stravinsksy's father died of cancer that year, by which time his son had already begun spending more time on his musical studies than on law.Palmer 1982. The university was closed for two months in the spring of 1905 in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday (1905)|Bloody Sunday :Walsh 2000, 83. Stravinsky was prevented from taking his final law examinations and later received a half-course diploma in April 1906. Thereafter, he concentrated on studying music. In 1905, he began to take twice-weekly private lessons from Rimsky-Korsakov, whom he came to regard as a second father. These lessons continued until Rimsky-Korsakov's death in 1908.Stravinsky 1962, 24.

In 1905 he was betrothed to his cousin Katerina (Catherine) Gabrielovna Nossenko, whom he had known since early childhood.White 1979, 5. In spite of the Eastern Orthodox Church|Orthodox Church 's opposition to marriage between first cousins, the couple married on 23 January 1906: their first two children, Fyodor (Theodore) and Ludmilla, were born in 1907 and 1908.White 1979, 11–12.

In February 1909, two orchestral works, the and ( Fireworks ) were performed at a concert in Saint Petersburg, where they were heard by Sergei Diaghilev , who was at that time involved in planning to present Russian opera and ballet in Paris. Diaghilev was sufficiently impressed by Fireworks to commission Stravinsky to carry out some orchestration s and then to compose a full-length ballet score, The Firebird .White 1979, 15–16.

Life in Switzerland

Stravinsky travelled to Paris in 1910 to attend the final rehearsals and the premiere of The Firebird . His family joined him before the end of the ballet season that year and they decided to remain in the West for a time, as his wife was expecting their third child. They moved to Switzerland , living in Clarens, Switzerland|Clarens and then Lausanne where, in September 1910, their second son Soulima Stravinsky|Siatoslav Soulima was born.White 1979, 18. A second daughter, Maria Milena, was born in 1913. While pregnant with Maria Milena, Catherine was found to have tuberculosis and she was placed in a Swiss sanatorium in Leysin for her confinement.White 1979, 29.

Over the next four years Stravinsky and his family lived in Russia during the summer months and spent each winter in Switzerland, which became a second home to them.White 1979, 33. During this period Stravinsky composed three further works for the Ballets Russes— Petrushka , a ballet in four scenes (1911), the two-part ballet The Rite of Spring (1913) and his 'ballet with song' in one act, Pulcinella (ballet)|Pulcinella (1920).Oliver 1995, 221. He briefly travelled to Russia in July 1914 to collect research materials for his dance cantata Les noces before returning to Switzerland, just before the national borders closed following the outbreak of World War I .Oliver 1995, 74. He was not to return to his homeland for nearly fifty years.

The family struggled financially during this period. Russia (and its successor the USSR ) did not adhere to the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works|Berne convention and this created problems for Stravinsky when collecting royalties for the performances of all his Ballet Russes compositions.White 1979, 85. Stravinsky blamed Diaghilev for his finanical troubles, whom he accused of failing to live up to the terms of a contract they had signed. He approached the Swiss philanthropist Werner Reinhart for financial assistance during the time he was writing Histoire du soldat (''The Soldier's Tale ). Reinhart sponsored and largely underwrote its first performance, which was conducted by Ernest Ansermet on 28& nbsp;September 1918 at the Theatre Municipal de Lausanne.White 1979, 47-48. In gratitude, Stravinsky dedicated the work to Reinhart and gave him the original manuscript.Keller 2011, 456. Reinhart supported Stravinsky further when he funded a series of concerts of his chamber music in 1919: Included was a suite from Histoire du soldat arranged for violin, piano and clarinet,Stravinsky 1962, 83. which was first performed on 8 November 1919, in Lausanne.White 1979, 50. In gratitude to his benefactor, Stravinsky also dedicated his Three Pieces for Clarinet (October–November 1918) to Reinhart, who was an excellent amateur clarinettist.

Life in France

Stravinsky moved with his family to France in 1920,Stravinsky 1962, 84-86. He formed a business and musical relationship with the French piano manufacturing company Pleyel et Cie|Pleyel . Pleyel essentially acted as his agent in collecting Royalties#Mechanical royalties|mechanical royalties for his works and provided him with a monthly income and a studio space at its headquarters in which he could work and entertain friends and business acquaintances. pianola.org. Retrieved 3 March 2012. Under the terms of his contract with the company, Stravinsky agreed to arrange (and to some extent re-compose) many of his early works for the Pleyela, Pleyel's brand of player piano .White 1979, 573. He did so in a way that made full use of all of the piano's eighty-eight notes, without regard for human fingers or hands. The rolls were not recorded, but were instead marked up from a combination of manuscript fragments and handwritten notes by the French musician Jacques Larmanjat, the musical director of Pleyel's roll department. Among the compositions that were issued on the Pleyela piano roll s are The Rite of Spring , Petrushka , The Firebird and Song of the Nightingale . During the 1920s, Stravinsky recorded Duo-Art rolls for the Aeolian Company in both London and New York, not all of which have survived.Lawson 1986, 298-301.

Patronage was never far away. In the early 1920s, Leopold Stokowski gave Stravinsky regular support through a pseudonymous 'benefactor'.See "Stravinsky, Stokowski and Madame Incognito", Craft 1992, 73–81. The composer was also able to attract commissions: most of his work from The Firebird onwards was written for specific occasions and was paid for generously.
Stravinsky met Vera de Bosset in Paris in February 1921,Walsh 2000, 336. when she was married to the painter and stage designer Serge Sudeikin , and they began an affair which led to Vera leaving her husband. bbc.co.uk. Retrieved 3 March 2012. From then until his wife's death in 1939, Stravinsky led a double life, spending some of his time with his first family and the rest with Vera.Cooper 2000, 306. Catherine bore her husband's infidelity "with a mixture of magnaminity, bitterness, and compassion", passively accepting it as inevitable and permanent.Joseph 2001, 73.

After living near Paris for a short while, the Stravinsky family moved to the south of France, becoming French citizens in 1934 and returning to Paris that year, to live at the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré .White 1979, 77; 84. Stravinsky later remembered this last European address as his unhappiest, as his wife's tuberculosis infected both himself and his eldest daughter Ludmila. Ludmila died in 1938 and Catherine, to whom he had been married for 33 years, died of tubercolosis a year later.White 1979, 90. Stravinsky himself spent five months in hospital, during which time his mother died.Stravinsky; Craft 1960, 18.

During his later years in Paris, Stravinsky had developed professional relationships with key people in the United States: he was already working on his Symphony in C (Stravinsky)|Symphony in C for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Joseph 2001, 279. and he had agreed to deliver lectures at Harvard during 1939.Walsh 2006, 595. A few months after World War II broke out in September 1939, Stravinsky moved to the United States. Vera followed him the following year and they were married in Bedford, Massachusetts on 9 March 1940.White 1979, 93.

Life in America

Stravinsky settled in Los Angeles , living at 1260 North Wetherly Drive, West Hollywood . He spent more time living in Los Angeles than in any other city.Holland 2001. He became a naturalized United States citizen in 1945.White 1979, 390.

Stravinsky had adapted to life in France, but moving to America at the age of 58 was a very different prospect. For a while, he maintained a circle of contacts and emigré friends from Russia, but he eventually found that this did not sustain his intellectual and professional life. He was drawn to the growing cultural life of Los Angeles, especially during World War II, when so many writers, musicians, composers and conductors settled in the area: these included Otto Klemperer , Thomas Mann , Franz Werfel , George Balanchine and Arthur Rubinstein . He lived near to Arnold Schoenberg , though he did not have a close relationship with him. Bernard Holland notes that he was especially fond of British writers, who often visited him in Beverly Hills, "like W. H. Auden , Christopher Isherwood , Dylan Thomas . They shared the composer's taste for hard spirits - especially Aldous Huxley , with whom Stravinsky spoke in French".Holland 2001 Stravinsky sometimes conducted concerts with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the famous Hollywood Bowl and he conducted other orchestras throughout the United States. His plans to write an opera with W. H. Auden coincided with a meeting with the musicologist Robert Craft , who became Stravinsky's interpreter, chronicler, assistant conductor and wikt:factotum|factotum for countless musical and social tasks, living with him until his death.

Stravinsky's unconventional major seventh chord in his arrangement of " The Star-Spangled Banner " led to an incident with the Boston police on 15 January 1944, but he was only warned that the authorities could impose a $100 fine upon any "rearrangement of the national anthem in whole or in part".Anonymous 1944.According to Michael Steinberg's liner notes to Stravinsky in America , RCA 09026-68865-2, p. 7, the police "removed the parts from Symphony Hall", quoted in Thom 2007, 50. The incident soon established itself as a myth, in which Stravinsky was supposedly arrested for playing the music.Walsh 2006, .

Stravinsky was on the lot of Paramount Pictures during the recording of the musical score to the 1956 film The Court Jester . The red 'recording in progress' light was illuminated to prevent interruptions and Vic Schoen , the composer of the score, had started to conduct a cue, but at that moment he saw that the entire orchestra had turned to look at Stravinsky, who had just walked into the studio. Schoen said, "The entire room was astonished to see this short little man with a big chest walk in and listen to our session. I later talked with him after we were done recording. We went and got a cup of coffee together. After listening to my music Stravinsky told me, "You have broken all the rules". At the time I didn't understand his comment, because I had been self-taught. It took me years to figure out what he had meant".
Stravinsky's professional life encompassed most of the 20th century, including many of its modern classical music styles, and he influenced composers both during and after his lifetime. In 1959, he was awarded the Sonning Award , Denmark's highest musical honour. In 1962, he accepted an invitation to return to Leningrad for a series of concerts. During his stay in the USSR , he visited Moscow and met several leading Soviet composers, including Dmitri Shostakovich and Aram Khachaturian .White 1979, 146–48.

In 1969, Stravinsky moved to the Jumeirah Essex House|Essex House in New York , where he lived until his death in 1971 at the age of 88. He was buried in Venice on the cemetery island of Isola di San Michele|San Michele , close to the tomb of his long-time collaborator Diaghilev.

He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and in 1987 he was posthumously awarded the Grammy Award for Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award|Lifetime Achievement . He was inducted into the National Museum of Dance and Hall of Fame|National Museum of Dance C.V. Whitney Hall of Fame in 2004.

Personality

Stravinsky displayed an inexhaustible desire to explore and learn about art, literature and life, which manifested itself in several of his Paris collaborations. Not only was he the principal composer for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, but he also collaborated with Picasso ( Pulcinella , 1920), Jean Cocteau (, 1927) and George Balanchine (, 1928). His taste in literature was wide and reflected his constant desire for new discoveries. The texts and literary sources for his work began with a period of interest in Folklore|Russian folklore , which progressed to classical authors and the Roman Rite|Latin liturgy and moved on to contemporary France ( André Gide , in Persephone ) and eventually English literature, including Auden, T. S. Eliot and medieval English verse.

According to Robert Craft, Stravinsky remained a confirmed monarchist throughout his life and loathed the Bolshevik s from the very beginning., . In 1930, he remarked, "I don't believe that anyone venerates Benito Mussolini|Mussolini more than I... I know many exalted personages, and my artist's mind does not shrink from political and social issues. Well, after having seen so many events and so many more or less representative men, I have an overpowering urge to render homage to your Duce. He is the saviour of Italy and – let us hope – Europe". Later, after a private audience with Mussolini, he added, "Unless my ears deceive me, the voice of Rome is the voice of Il Duce . I told him that I felt like a fascist myself... In spite of being extremely busy, Mussolini did me the great honour of conversing with me for three-quarters of an hour. We talked about music, art and politics".Sachs 1987, 168. When the Nazis placed Stravinsky's works on the list of " Entartete Musik ", he lodged a formal appeal to establish his Russian genealogy and declared, "I loathe all communism, Marxism, the execrable Soviet monster, and also all liberalism, democratism, atheism, etc..". Towards the end of his life, at Craft's behest, Stravinsky made a return visit to his native country and composed a cantata in Hebrew , travelling to Israel for its performance.
Stravinsky proved adept at playing the part of a 'man of the world', acquiring a keen instinct for business matters and appearing relaxed and comfortable in public. His successful career as a pianist and conductor took him to many of the world's major cities, including Paris, Venice, Berlin, London, Amsterdam and New York and he was known for his polite, courteous and helpful manner.

Stravinsky was reputed to have been a philanderer and was rumoured to have had affairs with high-profile partners such as Coco Chanel . He never referred to it himself, but Chanel spoke about their affair at length to her biographer Paul Morand in 1946 and their conversation was published thirty years later.Morand 1976, 121–24. The accuracy of Chanel's claims has been disputed by both Stravinsky's widow Vera and by his amanuensis Craft.Davis 2006, 439. The Chanel fashion house has stated that there was never proof that an affair between Coco and Igor Stravinsky ever existed.. Expatica.com, Swiss News, 25 May 2009. Retrieved 28 Dec 2010. A fictionalization of the supposed affair formed the basis of the 2002 novel Coco and Igor and a 2009 film, Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky . Despite these supposed liaisons, it is known that Stravinsky was a family man who devoted considerable amounts of his time and money to his children.T. Strawinsky and D. Strawinsky 2004, .

Faith

Stravinsky was a devout member of the Russian Orthodox Church during most of his life, remarking at one time that, "Music praises God. Music is well or better able to praise him than the building of the church and all its decoration; it is the Church's greatest ornament".

Although Stravinsky was not outspoken about his faith, he was a deeply religious man throughout some periods of his life. As a child, he was brought up by his parents in the Russian Orthodox Church. Baptized at birth, he later rebelled against the Church and abandoned it by the time he was fourteen or fifteen.Stravinsky and Craft 1969, 198. Throughout the rise of his career he was estranged from Christianity and it was not until he reached his early forties that he experienced a spiritual crisis. After befriending a Russian priest named Father Nicolas after his move to Nice in 1924, he reconnected with his faith. He rejoined the Russian Orthodox Church and afterwards remained a committed Christian.Stravinsky and Craft 1960, 51. Robert Craft noted that Stravinsky prayed daily, before and after composing, and also prayed when facing difficulty.Stravinsky and Craft 1966 172–75 Towards the end of his life, he was no longer able to attend Russian Orthodox services.

In in his late seventies, Stravinsky said:

I cannot now evaluate the events that, at the end of those thirty years, made me discover the necessity of religious belief. I was not reasoned into my disposition. Though I admire the structured thought of theology (Anselm's proof in the Fides Quaerens Intellectum , for instance) it is to religion no more than counterpoint exercises are to music. I do not believe in bridges of reason or, indeed, in any form of extrapolation in religious matters. ... I can say, however, that for some years before my actual "conversion," a mood of acceptance had been cultivated in me by a reading of the Gospels and by other religious literature. ...Copeland 1982, 565, quoting Stravinsky and Craft 1962, 63–64.

Music

Stravinsky's career as a composer may be divided roughly into three stylistic periods:

Russian period (from about 1908 to 1919)

Stravinsky's first period (which excludes some of his early minor works) began with '' Feu d'artifice ( Fireworks'') and included the three ballets he composed for Diaghilev. These three works have several characteristics in common: they are scored for an extremely large orchestra; they use Ethnic Russian music|Russian folk themes and motifs ; and they were influenced by Rimsky-Korsakov's imaginative scoring and instrumentation. They also exhibit considerable stylistic development, from The Firebird , which emphasizes certain tendencies in Rimsky-Korsakov and features pandiatonicism in a conspicuous way in the third movement, to the use of polytonality in Petrushka and the intentionally brutal polyrhythm s and Consonance and dissonance|dissonances of The Rite of Spring .

The first of his ballets, The Firebird , is noted for its imaginative orchestration . This is evident from the outset, as heard in the introduction, which exploits the double bass's low register. Petrushka , the first of Stravinsky's ballets to draw on folk mythology , is also distinctively scored. In The Rite of Spring , the composer attempts to depict the brutality of pagan Russia in his music, the inspiration of the violent motifs that recur throughout the work.

If Stravinsky's stated intention was "to send them all to hell",Wenborn 1985, 17, alludes to this comment, without giving a specific source. then he may have rated the The Rite of Spring#Premiere|1913 premiere of The Rite of Spring as a success: it is a famous classical music riot and Stravinsky referred to it on several occasions in his autobiography as a " scandale ".Stravinsky 1936 There were reports of fistfights among the audience and the need for a police presence during the second act. The real extent of the tumult is open to debate and the reports may be apocryphal.See Eksteins 1989, 10–16, for an overview of contradictory reportage of the event by participants and the press.

Other pieces from the Russian period include: ( The Nightingale ); Renard (Stravinsky)|Renard (1916); Histoire du soldat (1918); and ( The Wedding ) (1923).

Neoclassical period (from about 1920 to 1954)

The next phase of Stravinsky's compositional style extends from the opera Mavra (1921–22), which is regarded as the start of his neo-classical period, until 1952, when he turned to serialism . Pulcinella (ballet)|Pulcinella (1920) and the Octet (Stravinsky)|Octet for wind instruments (1923) are the first of his compositions to feature his re-examination of the classical music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart|Mozart , J. S. Bach and their contemporaries. Works such as (1927), (1928) and the Concerto in E-flat (Dumbarton Oaks)|Dumbarton Oaks Concerto (1937–38) continued his re-thinking of eighteenth-century musical styles.

Other works from this period include the three symphonies: the Symphonie des Psaumes ( Symphony of Psalms , 1930), Symphony in C (Stravinsky)|Symphony in C (1940) and the Symphony in Three Movements (Stravinsky)| Symphony in Three Movements (1945). Apollon , Persephone (1933) and Orpheus (1947) exemplify not only Stravinsky's return to the music of the Classical period, but also his exploration of themes from the ancient Classical world such as Greek mythology .

In 1951 he completed his last neo-classical work, the opera '' The Rake's Progress '', to a libretto by W. H. Auden that was based on the etchings of William Hogarth . It premiered in Venice that year and was produced around Europe the following year, before being staged in the New York Metropolitan Opera in 1953.Griffiths, Stravinsky, Craft, and Josipovici 1982, 49–50. It was staged by the Santa Fe Opera in a 1962 Stravinsky Festival, in honour of the composer's 80th birthday.Anonymous 1962. The music is direct but quirky and borrows from classic tonal harmony, but also interjects surprising dissonances. It features Stravinsky's trademark off-rhythms and harks back to the operas and themes of Claudio Monteverdi|Monteverdi , Christoph Willibald Gluck|Gluck and Mozart. It was revived by the Metropolitan Opera in 1997.

Serial period (from 1954 to 1968)

In the 1950s, Stravinsky began using serial compositional techniques such as dodecaphony , the twelve-tone technique originally devised by Arnold Schoenberg .Craft 1982.

He first experimented with non-twelve-tone serial techniques in small-scale vocal and chamber works such as the Cantata (Stravinsky)|Cantata (1952), the Septet (1953) and Three Songs from Shakespeare (1953). The first of his compositions to be fully based on such techniques was In Memoriam Dylan Thomas (1954). Agon (Stravinsky)|Agon (1954–57) was the first of his works to include a twelve-tone series and (1955) was the first piece to contain a movement entirely based on a tone row .Straus 2001, 4. Stravinsky later expanded his use of dodecaphony in works such as Threni (Stravinsky)|Threni (1958), A Sermon, a Narrative, and a Prayer (1961) and The Flood (Stravinsky)|The Flood (1962), which are based on biblical texts.

Agon is choreographed for twelve ballet dancers. It forms an important transition between Stravinsky's neo-classical period and his serial style. Parts of Agon are reminiscent of the 'white-note' tonality of his neo-classic period, while others (for example Bransle Gay ) display his re-interpretation of serial methods.

Innovation and influence

Stravinsky is known as "one of music's truly epochal innovators".AMG (2008). , AllMusic . The most important aspect of Stravinsky's work, aside from his technical innovations (including in rhythm and harmony), is the 'changing face' of his compositional style while always 'retaining a distinctive, essential identity'. He himself was inspired by different cultures, languages and literatures. As a consequence, his influence on composers both during his lifetime and after his death was, and remains, considerable.

Stravinsky's use of motif (music)|motivic development (the use of musical figures that are repeated in different guises throughout a composition or section of a composition) included additive motivic development. This is where notes are subtracted or added to a motif without regard to the consequent changes in metre. A similar technique can be found as early as the sixteenth century, for example in the music of Cipriano de Rore , Orlande de Lassus|Orlandus Lassus , Carlo Gesualdo and Giovanni de Macque , music with which Stravinsky exhibited considerable familiarity.Stravinsky and Craft 1960, 116–17.

The Rite of Spring is notable for its relentless use of ostinato|ostinati , for example in the eighth note ostinato on strings accented by eight horn (instrument)|horns in the section Augurs of Spring (Dances of the Young Girls) . The work also contains passages where several ostinati clash against one another.

Stravinsky was noted for his distinctive use of rhythm, especially in The Rite of Spring .Simon 2007. According to the composer Philip Glass , "the idea of pushing the rhythms across the bar lines led the way . The rhythmic structure of music became much more fluid and in a certain way spontaneous".Simeone, Craft, and Glass 1999. Glass mentions Stravinsky's "primitive, offbeat rhythmic drive". According to Andrew J. Browne, "Stravinsky is perhaps the only composer who has raised rhythm in itself to the dignity of art".Browne 1930, 360. Stravinsky's rhythm and vitality greatly influenced the composer Aaron Copland . near 33:30.

Stravinsky's first neo-classical works were the ballet Pulcinella of 1920 and the stripped-down and delicately scored Octet for Wind Instruments (1923). He may have been preceded in his use of neoclassical devices by composers such as Sergei Prokofiev|Prokofiev and Erik Satie . By the late 1920s and 1930s, the use by composers of neoclassicism had become widespread.
Stravinsky composed pieces that elaborated on individual works by earlier composers, a tradition that goes back at least to the fifteenth century quodlibet and parody mass . An early example is his Pulcinella of 1920, where he used music then attributed to Giovanni Battista Pergolesi|Giovanni Pergolesi . His source material was at times Musical quotation|quoted directly and at other times reinvented. He developed this technique further in the ballet ''The Fairy's Kiss'' (1928), which was based on music by Tchaikovsky. Later examples of comparable musical transformations include Stravinsky's use of Franz Schubert|Schubert 's Three Marches Militaires (Schubert)#March No. 1 in D major|Marche Militaire No. 1 in his Circus Polka (1942) and " Happy Birthday to You " in Greeting Prelude (1955).

In The Rite of Spring , Stravinsky stripped folk themes to their most basic melodic outlines, often contorting them beyond recognition using added notes, inversion (music)|inversion and diminution .

Use of the orchestra

As with many romantic music|late romantic composers , Stravinsky often called for huge orchestral forces, especially in his early ballets. The Firebird proved him to be the equal of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and lit the "fuse under the instrumental make-up of the 19th century orchestra". In The Firebird he took the orchestra apart and analysed it.Hazlewood 2003. Aaron Copland characterized The Rite of Spring as the foremost orchestral achievement of the 20th century.Copland 1952, 37

Stravinsky wrote for unique combinations of instruments in smaller ensembles, chosen for their precise tone colours. For example, Histoire du soldat is scored for clarinet , bassoon , cornet , trombone , violin, double bass and percussion, a strikingly unusual combination for 1918.

Stravinsky occasionally exploits the extreme ranges of instruments, most famously at the opening of The Rite of Spring , where he uses the extreme upper reaches of the bassoon to simulate the symbolic 'awakening' of a spring morning.

Reception

Stravinsky is acknowledged as one of the most important and influential composers of the 20th century.Page 2006; Théodore and Denise Stravinsky 2004, vii.Anonymous 1940.Cohen 2004, 30. He was named by Time (magazine)| Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of the century.Glass 1998. He became a naturalized French citizen in 1934 and a naturalized United States citizen in 1945. In addition to the recognition he received for his compositions, he achieved fame as a pianist and a conductor, often at the premieres of his works.

In 1923, Erik Satie wrote an article about Igor Stravinsky in Vanity Fair (magazine)|Vanity Fair .Satie 1923. Satie had met Stravinsky for the first time in 1910. His attitude towards the Russian composer is marked by deference, as can also be seen from the letters he wrote to him in 1922, in preparation for the Vanity Fair article. With a touch of irony, he concluded in one of these letters, "I admire you: are you not the Great Stravinsky? I am but little Erik Satie". In the published article, Satie argued that measuring the 'greatness' of an artist by comparing him to other artists, as if speaking about some 'truth', is illusory and that every piece of music should be judged on its own merits and not by comparing it to the standards of other composers. That was exactly what Jean Cocteau did when he commented deprecatingly on Stravinsky in his 1918 book .Volta 1989, first pages of chapter on contemporaries.

According to The Musical Times in 1923:

All the signs indicate a strong reaction against the nightmare of noise and eccentricity that was one of the legacies of the war.... What has become of the works that made up the program of the Stravinsky concert which created such a stir a few years ago? Practically the whole lot are already on the shelf, and they will remain there until a few jaded neurotics once more feel a desire to eat ashes and fill their belly with the east wind. The Musical Times , October 1923.

In 1935, the American composer Marc Blitzstein compared Stravinsky to Jacopo Peri and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach|C.P.E. Bach , conceding that, "there is no denying the greatness of Stravinsky. It is just that he is not great enough".Blitzstein 1935, 330. Blitzstein's Marxism|Marxist position was that Stravinsky's wish to "divorce music from other streams of life", which is "symptomatic of an escape from reality", resulted in a "loss of stamina", naming specifically Apollo , the Capriccio , and Le Baiser de la fée .Blitzstein 1935, 346–47.

The composer Constant Lambert described pieces such as as containing "essentially cold-blooded abstraction".Lambert 1936, 94. Lambert continued, "melodic fragments in are completely meaningless themselves. They are merely successions of notes that can conveniently be divided into groups of three, five, and seven and set against other mathematical groups" and he described the cadenza for solo drums as "musical purity...achieved by a species of musical castration". He compared Stravinsky's choice of "the drabbest and least significant phrases" to Gertrude Stein 's: "Everyday they were gay there, they were regularly gay there everyday" ("Helen Furr and Georgine Skeene", 1922), "whose effect would be equally appreciated by someone with no knowledge of English whatsoever".Lambert 1936, 101–105.

In his 1949 book Philosophy of Modern Music , Theodor W. Adorno described Stravinsky as an acrobat and spoke of Disorganized schizophrenia|hebephrenic and psychotic traits in several of Stravinsky's works. Contrary to a common misconception, Adorno didn't think that the hebephrenic and psychotic imitations that the music was supposed to contain were its main fault, as he pointed out in a postscriptum that he added later to his book. Adorno's criticism of Stravinsky is more concerned with the 'transition to positivity' that he found in the his neoclassical works.Adorno 2006, 167. Part of the composer's error, in Adorno's view, was his neo-classicism,Adorno 1973, 206–9. but of greater importantance was his music's "pseudomorphism of painting", playing off (time-space) rather than (time-duration) of Henri Bergson .Adorno 1973, 191–93. According to Adorno, "one trick characterizes all of Stravinsky's formal endeavors: the effort of his music to portray time as in a circus tableau and to present time complexes as though they were spatial. This trick, however, soon exhausts itself".Adorno 1973, 195. Adorno maintained that the "rhythmic procedures closely resemble the schema of catatonic conditions. In certain schizophrenics, the process by which the motor apparatus becomes independent leads to infinite repetition of gestures or words, following the decay of the ego".Adorno 1973, 178.

Stravinsky's reputation in Russia and the USSR rose and fell. Performances of his music were banned from around 1933 until 1962, the year Nikita Khrushchev invited him to the USSR for an official state visit. In 1972, an official proclamation by the Soviet Minister of Culture, Ekaterina Furtseva , ordered Soviet musicians to "study and admire" Stravinsky's music and she made hostility toward it a potential offence.Karlinsky 1985, 282.

While Stravinsky's music has been criticized for its range of styles, scholars had "gradually begun to perceive unifying elements in Stravinsky's music" by the 1980s. Earlier writers, such as Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, Boris de Schloezer and Virgil Thomson, writing in Modern Music (a quarterly review published between 1925 and 1946), could find only a common " 'seriousness' of 'tone' or of 'purpose', 'the exact correlation between the goal and the means', or a dry 'ant-like neatness' ".Pasler 1983, 608.

From the mid-1960s onwards Stravinsky's music influenced the work of musicians such as Steve Reich and Philip Glass.

He was honoured in 1982 by the United States Postal Service with a 2¢ Great Americans series postage stamp.

Awards

1959: Léonie Sonning Music Prize

Grammy Award s

*1962: Grammy Award for Best Classical Contemporary Composition|Best Classical Composition by Contemporary Composer ( The Flood (Stravinsky)|The Flood )

*1962: Grammy Award for Best Orchestral Performance|Best Classical Performance – Orchestra ( The Firebird , Igor Stravinsky conducting Columbia Symphony Orchestra )

*1962: Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Soloist(s) Performance (with orchestra)|Best Classical Performance – Instrumental Soloist (with orchestra) ( Violin Concerto (Stravinsky)|Violin Concerto in D , Isaac Stern ; Igor Stravinsky conducting Columbia Symphony Orchestra)

*1987: Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award|Lifetime Achievement (posthumous)

Recordings and publications

Igor Stravinsky found recordings a practical and useful tool in preserving his thoughts on the interpretation of his music. As a conductor of his own music, he recorded primarily for Columbia Records , beginning in 1928 with a performance of the original suite from The Firebird and concluding in 1967 with the 1945 suite from the same ballet. In the late 1940s he made several recordings for RCA Victor at the Republic Studios in Los Angeles. Although most of his recordings were made with studio musicians, he also worked with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra , the Cleveland Orchestra , the CBC Symphony Orchestra , the New York Philharmonic Orchestra , the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the Bavarian Broadcasting Symphony Orchestra.

During his lifetime, Stravinsky appeared on several telecasts, including the 1962 world premiere of The Flood (Stravinsky)|The Flood on CBS television. Although he made an appearance, the actual performance was conducted by Robert Craft. Numerous films and videos of the composer have been preserved.

Stravinsky published a number of books throughout his career, almost always with the aid of a (sometimes uncredited) collaborator. In his 1936 autobiography, Chronicles of My Life , which was written with the help of Walter Nouvel , Stravinsky included his well-known statement that "music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all".Stravinsky 1936, 91–92. With Alexis Roland-Manuel and Pyotr Suvchinsky|Pierre Souvtchinsky , he wrote his 1939–40 Harvard University Charles Eliot Norton Lectures , which were delivered in French and first collected under the title in 1942 and then translated in 1947 as Poetics of Music .The names of uncredited collaborators are given in Walsh (2001). In 1959, several interviews between the composer and Robert Craft were published as Conversations with Igor Stravinsky ,Stravinsky and Craft 1959. which was followed by a further five volumes over the following decade.

Copyright Citations

This article is licensed under the GNU License
Click here for original article: Igor Stravinsky


1. Bix Beiderbecke 2. Adrian Belew 3. Niels Viggo Bentzon 4. Idil Biret 5. Gwendolyn Bradley 6. Marilyn Horne 7. Christopher O'Riley 8. Anne Sofie von Otter 9. Ian Partridge 10. Sviatoslav Richter 11. Rites of Spring 12. Bryn Terfel 13. Devin Townsend 14. Dawn Upshaw 15. John Zorn 16. Eric Dolphy 17. Clarinet 18. Hammered Dulcimer 19. Recorder 20. The Bad Plus 21. Echolyn 22. Magma 23. Steve Reich 24. Karlheinz Stockhausen 25. Iannis Xenakis

Undetermined Music Artists