Modernism Flashcards
Stravinsky as modernist revolutionary
Butler 2003
Locates Stravinsky within the modernist context of his time
Stravinsky as revolutionary
● Stravinsky: ‘I was the vessel though which Le Sacre passed’
o Butler: this ‘has all the marks of a fashionable, anachronistic, post-Surrealist explanation which transfers the impulse for innovation into the unconscious or the dreaming faculty’
● Rite
o Key work for modernist interest in ‘primitive’ (25)
o Was unique in 1913
▪ ‘Stravinsky’s achievement, and it was unprecedented, was to give a crucial structural importance to rhythm instead of harmony, and to use the tension of dissonance to fuel this powerful engine still further’ (Michael Oliver 1995, p60)
o Stravinsky later emphasised that music (and his work) progresses through development/evolution (Stravinsky in conversation p138)
o Controversial innovative work involves erotically engaging sacrifice of the female
● Never references Freud in writings/conversations: not part of artists/intellectuals who saw themselves as critics of society and therefore peripheral
● Analogy with cubism
o Both disrupt accepted types of ordering, and contest the idea of a single ordered viewpoint on the world
o Watkins: early 20thC music has ‘conscious movement towards simultaneous non-alliance in matters of harmony, rhythm, phraseology and cadence’ that mirrors conflicting viewpoints of the same object depicted simultaneously in cubism
▪ Symphonies: collage-like juxtaposition of musical sections
Stravinsky as modernist traditionalist
Butler 2003
● 1920s stylistic pluralism and interest in popular arts reflected in Ragtime, Soldier’s Tale, Pulcinella, Mavra
o Analogous to Picasso’s change from pre-war primitivism and analytic/hermitic cubism through collage towards more accessible mode by 1915
● Pulcinella
o Costume designs by Picasso
o Classical, clear, French (non-Russian)
o Stravinsky termined it his ‘discovery of the past, the epiphany through which the whole of my late work became possible’
o Transcends mere pastiche through astringency/irony/detatchment (already evident from Petrushka-on
● Walsh on Stravinsky’s style: pre-1918 dichotomy between Russian ballets and easy pieces is merged in 1918
● Modernist context
o Post-war modernism typified by ‘a change from the pre-war avant-garde formal experiments (which established the techniques of atonality, Cubism and the juxtapository stream of consciousness) to an adaptation of modernist technique ot the production of a whole variety of socially acceptable, indeed fashionable, styles’
▪ Stravinsky followed this trajectory post-Rite
o Modernist techniques superimposed onto obvious/popular subject-matter
o Stravinsky’s neoclassicism mirrors other modernists’ detachment/humour
o Stravinsky becomes like T.S. Eliot as a classicist and then as a Christian: both ‘reconverted’ in 1926, partly due to their declared conservative aesthetic
▪ Both asserted older forms still had ‘a personality to express’ (Eliot)
● Octet
o Stravinsky uses visual analogy (‘musical object’)
o Bach given inflections of jazz, Handelian slow introductions, toccata-like passages, etc.
3rd phase
● Consolidatory
● Pairs up with W.H. Auden
Modernism: conclusion
Butler 2003
● Stravinsky is ‘three types of modernist’
o Rite modernism: provocative, original, influential
o ‘fashionable style-changer who can also be austerely traditionalist’
▪ Allusion/deviation, like literary modernists (e.g. T.S. Eliot) and Picasso
▪ Minor transformation (Pulcinella)
▪ Imitation (Apollo, The Fairy’s Kiss)
▪ Total transfiguration of language (serialism in Agon)
o Belated progressive [?]
▪ Takes on sound-world of Boulez
● Stravinsky was socially conformist
o Adorno attributed this to being ‘bourgeois’
o Butler suggests ballet and religion had pragmatic external demands that prevented Stravinsky from identifying with avant-gardist notions of ‘new language’ and ‘progress’ (35)
● 2 strands of modernist thought
o 1) Marxist/Hegelian ‘progressives’: progress towards social emancipation correlated with avant-gardism
o 2) (Stravinsky’s strand)
▪ Saw languages of art as inherently social, belonging to competing institutions
▪ Innovation related to untidy historical development of competing institutions, and their rivalries/co-operations
Modernism
Butler 2003
Stravinsky’s modernism derived from the French modernist tradition as opposed to the German; conceived as a “conservative innovator”
- His modernism did not explore the potential of the unconscious or irrational; he never referenced Freud in his extant writings
- Characterised by a sensitivity to his reception: Stravinsky often communicated his position and intentions via the concert hall and lecture theatre, with a lucidity that served to disguise internal conflict, in heavy contrast to contemporary Expressionists
- Stravinsky was highly networked but with no commitment to any specific movement; he was a “modernist by association”
o Invites comparison with contemporary Parisian artists e.g. Butler aligns him with Picasso, comparing Stravinsky’s move from the innovation of the Rite with Picasso’s move from Cubism to neoclassicism; both artists united by a willingness to change styles
o However, he also criticises Glenn Watkins’ claim that the superimposition of three essential layers in the Three Pieces for String Quartet (1914) reflects the simultaneous, conflicting points of view in Cubist painting
• Stravinsky was a “good, landowning bourgeois”, not a critic of society from without; the Rite should be considered not as an attempt to comment on the social order, but as an attempt at visceral excitement trading on ideas of the “primitive”
Modernism
Cross 1998
Considering Stravinsky’s modernism retrospectively, in light of its influence on later composers, he breaks its essential features down into several broad categories.
• His ‘Russianness’, particularly the way it places him outside the Austro-German tradition and thus at odds with the aesthetic criteria of figures like Theodor Adorno
o Draws heavily on Taruskin (1996), invokes drobnost’ and nepozvizhnost’ as distinct categories for the consideration of Stravinsky’s music
• A positive attitude towards repetition, considered a re-evaluation of musical time
o Along with block-like forms, the idea of static, non-developmental textures is held as a feature of Debussy, the modernism of whom is described as “parallel” with Stravinsky
- ‘Hypostatisation’, the focus on the moment as independent event; focus on musical “effects” generated through orchestral colour standing on their own
- The ‘machine’ aesthetic, as represented both by the ‘mechanical’, ‘proto-Futurist’ use of ostinato in the Rite, and in Stravinsky’s fascination with the pianola, for example
• Ritual, invoked through various structures throughout his career; chimes with modernist strands of Brecht, Cocteau etc. which opposed the Romantic narrative, representational theatre focused on the individual subject
o Also brings into focus his primitivism and orientalism
- An abstract attitude to existent musical material, identified with an alienation also found in Brecht and extending to an accommodation between ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms
- Objectivity: thought of either as a regressive tendency (Adorno), or as manifest in a sense of irony and eclecticism that counterbalances the Romantic tradition
Modernism
Carr 2014
The project of the whole book is to fashion a narrative of Stravinsky’s “progress” towards neoclassicism through contextualised examination of Stravinsky’s sketches.
• Russian Futurism: in visual art, it introduced the idea of construction and a mechanical approach to the canvas, encouraging an orientation towards form that influenced Formalism
o Important figure in Viktor Shklovsky, who in 1917 introduced “defamiliarization” as the concept of making the familiar seem strange
o Carr posits a “unanimity of spirit” among Stravinsky, Shklovsky, Arthur Lourié, the artist Sonia Delaunay and others; prevailing aesthetic oriented around a rejection of the past
