Stravinsky as Classicist

It is much too late to ask: Is Stravinsky difficult? Yet much of his music is so tremendously clever that some listeners either shut their ears to it or regard it as some kind of gymnastic exercise—like a Nijinsky entrechat dix. There are others who will remember the rioting in Paris over Le Sacre du Printemps or the Concerto for Jazz Orchestra he wrote more recently for the Woody Herman band and who tend to think of him as a kind of musical Jackson Pollock.

The games which Stravinsky played with tonalities and the more spectacular aspects of his earlier work still reside in the public mind. They overshadow, for example, the lambent and ironic score of L’Histoire du Soldat, whose interplay of speech against a thin instrumental line confounds those who go back to the sharp contrasts and broad splashes of color in, say, Petrouchka. Yet there is no real conflict. Stravinsky is an eclectic who has stamped the genius of a strong personality on an age which, lacking an ars musica, has no real point of reference.

RT

About the Author

Ralph de Toledano

Featured Tags

It is much too late to ask: Is Stravinsky difficult? Yet much of his music is so tremendously clever that some listeners either shut their ears to it or regard it as some kind of gymnastic exercise—like a Nijinsky entrechat dix. There are others who will remember the rioting in Paris over Le Sacre du Printemps or the Concerto for Jazz Orchestra he wrote more recently for the Woody Herman band and who tend to think of him as a kind of musical Jackson Pollock.

The games which Stravinsky played with tonalities and the more spectacular aspects of his earlier work still reside in the public mind. They overshadow, for example, the lambent and ironic score of L’Histoire du Soldat, whose interplay of speech against a thin instrumental line confounds those who go back to the sharp contrasts and broad splashes of color in, say, Petrouchka. Yet there is no real conflict. Stravinsky is an eclectic who has stamped the genius of a strong personality on an age which, lacking an ars musica, has no real point of reference.