Form Flashcards
Block forms
Cross 1998
Examines formal ‘stratification’ (Cone): musical forms made from the juxtaposition of successive, sharply differentiated blocks of musical material
Symphonies and Picasso’s Nude 1910
Cross 1998
- ‘Roughness’ in Stravinsky (shared with Picasso):
(1) Orchestration: instruments pushed to extremes
(2) Conjoining of ‘high’ and ‘low’ (folk music/jazz influence)
(3) Hand-made character to invented forms (e.g. cut-and-paste approach to Symphonies declared by Stravinsky and vindicated by Cone’s analysis and Walsh’s study of Stravinsky’s manuscripts
(4) ‘Neoclassical’ transformation of pre-existing forms and material
(5) Unpredictability/irregularity in melodic/harmonic construction - Influence of Picasso
- —- Glen Watkins: ‘Stravinsky was aware of and responded to the Cubist vision in the period around 1912-1914’ (despite not meeting Picasso until 1917)
Petrushka
Cross 1998
- ‘Cinematic’ idea of static blocks being broken off only to be exactly repeated
- —- Allows quotation from Russian folk melodies and other popular tunes - Anticipates ‘eclectic juxtaposition of a wide range of material’ in later works
- Jann Pasler argues Petrushka and Rite are ‘total works of theatre’
- —- Argues discontinuity in Petrushka tableau 1 derives from co-ordinating music with rapid succession of narrative events - Discontinuity through sheer multiplicity of characters and events on stage
- Ways in which the music has coherence (although not unification/direction) Sense of continuity greater than in Symphonies (although discontinuity still emphasised)
(1) Harmonically (diatonic D scale, or diatonic-octatonic interaction)
(2) Motivically (rising perfect fourth)
(3) Rhythmically (constant pulse across changing metres [prefigures more systematic tempo modulation in Symphonies)
(4) Shared pedal points - Character of the blocks
(1) Static, through melodic repetition/pedal points/ostinatos
(2) Dynamism through
▪ Rhythm
▪ Varying rate of change between blocks
▪ Layering of distinct musical ideas
- Adorno:
(1) Complained it was infantile and ‘grotesque’
(2) Conceded that ‘the montage of various fragments is based upon wittily organizational procedure’
Rite
Cross 1998
- Cross ‘cannot accept [Adorno’s view that] to listen to the Rite is to be complicit with the barbarism it represents; rather, like Kundera, I believe that such representation of destructiveness is necessary in order to be able to grasp its horror’
- Analyses of Boulez/Forte/van der Toorn demonstrate Rite is highly structured
- —- Dionysian content mediated through Apollonian precision and lucidity
Symphonies
Cross 1998
- Breakthrough work of proportional tempi
- —- Particular musical ideas identified with specific tempi (crotchet = 72/108/144), and the ratios between them (2/3/4) become a crucial structural feature (125)
- —- Articulates discontinuity of blocks while expressing a relationship between them) - Walsh: indicative of Stravinsky’s ‘empiricism’
- Taruskin: ‘spectacular peak’ of drobnost’ in Stravinsky
- —- Coherence through octatonic-diatonic harmonic interplay, exploiting ‘harmonic potential of the “Russian” tetrachords’ (Taruskin)
- —- ‘Taruskin’s ultimate need to find “organic” connectedness here stems from his desire to interpret the Symphonies as “Stravinsky’s ‘Russian’ valedictory”’ (Cross 27) - Kramer refreshingly focuses on discontinuity and nonlinearity
(1) Argues for ‘a subtle tension…, as this middleground stasis of form is contradicted by foreground details and background pitch connections that do progress through time’
(2) Argues juxtaposed blocks have order/consistency through proportional temporal ratios
- —- 3:2 tempo ratio of first block is basis for later duration of sections
- Adorno avoids writing on Symphonies
- Cross: Symphonies has ‘unending’ character
Conclusion on Form
Cross 1998
- Stravinksy’s drobnost’ goes against Western Romantic tradition in its anti-organicism
- —- Appears utterly modern, but derives from 19thC Russian musical attitudes
- —- Mighty Handful’s approach to symphony - Debussy (similarly influenced by Russia) anticipated many of Stravinsky’s innovations e.g. nascent block-like structure of Jeux
- Evaluation of Stravinsky’s influence:
(1) Rite’s rhythmic innovations Symphonies’ huge formal influence are somewhat legends, but there is a core of truth
(2) Taruskin: ‘Stravinsky bequeathed a russkiy slog [Russian manner] to the whole world of twentieth-century concert music’
(3) Symphonies’ influential attributes ▪ Bold oppositions ▪ Conviction of fragmentation ▪ Radicalism of various (contradictory) continuities ▪ Novelty of overall structure
(4) Chapter examines Stravinsky’s influence on Varese’s Ameriques, Messiaen, Ferneyhough
4. Conclusion: ‘Stravinksy’s modernism….and in particular the radical structure of the Symphonies of Wind Instruments helped create a climate in which formal experiment, in which non-directed, non-developmental unending structures, were seen not only as possible but legitimate…we are justified in regarding it as a structural paradigm for the twentieth century’ (80)
Form
Cone 1962
• Symphonies: consistent use of interruption as a device
• Stratification: separation in musical space of musical areas juxtaposed in time
o Interruption marks separation
o At least one element of connection between successive levels
o Ways of smoothing opposition between strata
Bridge e.g. Symphonies Fig6
Divergence: division of single layer into 2 or more
• Interlock
o Stratified areas counterpointed against each other
o Delayed resolution of stratified areas through interruption
• Synthesis (disproved)
o Diverse elements brought into gradually closer relation until all are accounted for
Analysis of Symphonies
• Tempi are proportional to final chorale (crotchet = 72)
Form
Rehding (1998)
• Stravinsky on stratification in Orpheus: ‘I cut off the fugue with a pair of scissors’
A logic of Discontinuity
Analysis of Symphonies • Central mechanism: interpolation of neighbour note figures • Set [0,1,3] is important • Coherence through: o Stepwise background connections o Consistent proportions
Form
Van den Toorn (2012)
• Argues Stravinsky’s formalism/performance directives as ‘logical outgrowth…of processes of displacement, juxtaposition, and stratification’
o Musical rationale for features/belief systems contradict Adorno’s critique
• Machine analogy for Stravinsky’s stratified forms
o Separately moving parts in piece of machinery: changes in alignment result from pre-built mechanism/system itself rather than intervention
Form
Andriessen 1979
• ‘Montage’: to build, top make stacks, to give form by means of assembling parts
• Montage in Symphonies corresponds to that in 1920s experimental film (Einstein et al.):
o Adjacent shots relate so that A+B (fragments) dialectically produce C (the montage)
o ‘Short, continually recurring fragments each with their own identity, abruptly alternated with contrasting structures’ with contrasting but undeveloped characteristics
• Collage vs montage
o Collage: relationship between various elements is imposed exclusively from outside
o Montage: parts are related in a material aspect (e.g. harmonically)
• Stravinsky never used objet trouvés. The objets he uncovered…he discovered himself’ (163)
Introduction to Rhythm
Cross 1998
● ‘A history of rhythmic practices in 20thC music is a history of the legacy of The Rite’, such was its influence
● Stravinsky offered ‘complete reinterpretation of the role of rhythm in music’
o Rite indicated rhythm could act as a ‘principal structural agent’ (Boulez)
o Post-Petrushka, ‘it was Stravinksy’s resolute challenge to received rhythmic and metric conventions, his bold embrace of rhythmic practices from folk, popular and non-Western musics, and his construction of new kinds of non-linear musical temporality that have had so profound an impact on those that came after’ (81)
● Stravinsky’s problematic writings on rhythm in Poetics of Music declare his music works in ontological time rather than psychological time
o Time was defining theme of early modernism: Schoenberg’s Freudian dream time or ‘ritual’ time of Jungian collective unconscious in Rite and Les Noces
● Stravinsky’s rhythmic aesthetic parallels that of medieval ars nova (84)
o New mode of organising rhythm and newfound freedom of rhythmic expression
o Umberto Eco suggests 20thC can be described as ‘neomedieval’
o Verse-refrain forms are a prototype for Stravinsky’s block-structures (89)
o Precedents of layering of ideas in medieval polyphonic works (89)
● 1889 Paris Exposition was seminal event in modernism (89)
o Debussy discovered of Javanese gamelan: idea of rhythmic layering within static harmonic context was highly influential on his structures
o Glenn Watkins: ‘Orientalism’ was widespread in turn-of-20thC art (linked with interest with ‘primitive’)
o Rhythm was mined for its potential to imbue harmonically static/non-developmental music with a renewed dynamism
Stravinsky’s rhythmic innovations
Cross 1998
● Taruskin: Petrushka has ‘momentous’ rhythmic originality
o Stravinsky’s first conjoining of folklorism and modernism
o First use of Stravinskian trademark: ‘static, additive, nondeveloping ostinati of variable length that continually break off and start up again’
● Challenged rhythmic common-practice in mode akin to atonality
● Focus on repetition/recurrence over development (85)
o Replaces dominant aesthetic of wholeness/connectedness/unity/continuity/directedness with modernist aesthetic of fragmentation/discontinuity/opposition
o Replaces ‘becoming’ with ‘being’
o Taruskin: post-Petrushka, ‘there would be no harmonic progression, no thematic or motivic development, no smoothly exeuted transitions. His would be a music not of process but of state, deriving its coherence and its momentum from the calculated interplay of ‘immobile’ uniformities and abrupt discontinuities’ (pp956-7)
Stravinsky’s rhythmic language
Cross 1998
● Stravinsky’s rhythmic language:
o (1) ‘Immobile’ ostinato (neprovidhost) (van der Toorn’s type II)
▪ These ostinatos can be used for ‘“tiling – the layering of developments one on top of another’ (Boulez)
o (2) Foreground metric irregularity; an irregular or shifting meter (Van der Toorn’s type I)
▪ Irregularly spaced downbeats (requiring variable metric barring) = variable metric stress
▪ Associated with definition of block structures
o Regular (1) ostinato can be pitted against irregular (2) pattern
● Stravinsky’s ‘innovative practices have become the rhythmic paradigm for the century, and The Rite of Spring their exemplar
Rhythm: Three pieces for String Quartet
Cross 1998
Three pieces for string quartet (94)
● Paradigm for layered structures (ch2)
o Each voice characterised by pitch, rhythm and dramatic function (Ch2)
o Despite various unifying schemes, each component is distinct and opposes the others throughout
o Divided by pitch, but distinctive rhythmic ostinatos form their identities
o Van der Toorn: each voice built from clearly looping material that is organised into periods of different lengths
Rhythm: Rites of Spring
Cross 1998
● Van der Toorn (rhythmic types), Boulez (tiling) and Messiaen (‘personnages rythmiques’) all concur that rhythm drives the Rite’s structures
● Boulez’s analysis of Introduction’s ‘tiling’ (98-99)
o 4 principal phrases which spawn subsidiary themes, which in turn effect transitions to new themes
o ‘extraordinary rhythmic diversity’
▪ Exceptional complexity, even for Stravinsky
o Rhythmic development through
▪ Rational/irrational subdivisions of the basic durational unit
▪ Varied repetitions
▪ Symmetries
▪ Contrasts
o Suggests Stravinsky builds a dynamic structure from seemingly static/repetitious motifs: overall structure shaped by handling of materials rather than being shaped independently
▪ Rebuts Adorno’s accusation of lack of structure (‘rhythm of the whole’)
▪ Cross N.B.: motivic developments are elements of a new kind of continuity within a discontinuous musical structure, not the vestiges of Teutonic thinking
● Section from figs 10-12 ‘forms the tumultuous climax to the introduction b mans of the gradual superimposition of nearly all the main and subsidiary motifs heard up to this point’
o Cross identifies 14 motifs and divides them evenly:
▪ Group A: background, circular, inflexible (rational)
▪ Group B: principal melodic motifs, linear/developmental, individualised but united by C aeolian, flexible (irrational)
o Layers gradually introduced
▪ From fig 11 the frequency of their repetition is increased
o At the point of maximum density, ‘the music is violently broken off, eah motif stopping abruptly at whatever point in its cycle of repetitions it finds itself’
o ‘the superimposition of layers produces the effect of a shifting kaleidoscope of hues’ (99)
o ‘the music surrenders its singularity (unity) for a nonetheless coherent and rich multiplicity’
o Productive tension in opposition between horizontal and vertical (which upsets Adorno due to its non-compliance with Schoenbergian 12-note model)
● Forte has shown the influence of Rite’s harmony
● Adorno (102-3)
o ‘contradiction between the moderated horizontal and the insolent vertical’
o Bemoans ‘fetish made of rhythm’
● Taruskin (103-4)
o Rebuts Adorno by evaluating the work through a Russian rather than Austro-German tradition
▪ Argues from Rite on Stravinsky ‘would revel in the drobnost’ that, according to Mussorgsky, came naturally to a Russian composer, and he would turn it into a high esthetic principle’
o Stravinsky ‘made determined efforts – efforts that may be traced in the Rite sketchbook in engrossing detail – to scotch the symphonic, the developmental, the transitional’
o Rite’s basic formal procedures: ‘extension though repetition, alternation, and – above all – sheer inertial accumulation’
▪ Cross: introduction encapsulates this
