Neoclassicism Flashcards
Dates and features of Stravinsky neoclassicism
Stravinsky’s neoclassical period: c. 1920-1950
Features of neoclassicism
- Simplification
- Traditional forms/genres
• Harmony/tonality
—– Leading-tones, dominant functions
• Quotation
Schoenberg v Stravinsky’s neoclassicism
Cross 2008
- Argues for a ‘re-evaluation of neoclassicism as central to, rather than a reaction against, modernism’.
- Discusses Schoenberg’s neoclassicism and the modernism of Stravinsky’s neoclassicism to break down dichotomy between the two.
- Schoenberg’s 3 stylistic periods largely result of self-historicising (implies Stravinsky is same)
- Reads Schoenberg’s Op. 11 (which Forte terms his first atonal masterpiece) as if he is ‘straining back to reach [the] past, but cannot quite touch it’
- Schoenberg became neoclassicist after WWI: stylisation in Baroque suite (Op. 25)
- Neoclassical’ labelling traps, constrains and distorts
- —- Neoclassical period viewed as reneging modernism of Rite - Schoenberg and Stravinsky have ‘a shared modernism in their attitudes to the past that moves beyond a crude claim to neoclassicism’
(1) Modernism ‘characterised by alienation, nostalgia, loss and mourning’
(2) Both are ‘articulating similar kinds of alienation’ - Examples of alienated subject in music
(1) Schoenberg: Pierrot luniare, esp. final scene
(2) Stravinsky: Petrushka, The Nightingale, The Soldier’s Tale, Oedipus Rex, Persephone, The Rake’s Progress
- —- These are not ‘l’art pour l’art’, as Stravinsky claimed
- —- Steven Walsh: this music, ‘that supposedly expresses nothing, and always seemed studiously, impenetrably deaf to the world around it, has turned out to be the most exact echo and the best response to those terrifying years that brought it into being
Modernism of Stravinsky’s neoclassicism: Symphony in C
Cross 1998
- Work’s title ‘boldly declares its neoclassical intentions’
- Follows 18thC form, thematic organisation and key structure
- Context: early WWII, when Stravinsky exiled from Europe to America
- —- Represents ‘both Stravinsky’s personal circumstances and the war’s dire situation over these years’
(1) Personal circumstances:
• Loss of homeland, daughter, wife and mother in 7-month period
• Stravinsky: ‘most tragic’ period of his life
(2) ‘Stravinsky’s personally tragic circumstances led him to take refuge in the music of the past but with which, ultimately, he was no longer able to identify directly (despite an ongoing yearning so to do)’
- C-maj figure represents ‘longing for what cannot be’
(1) Opening Beethovenian B-C-G (^7-^8-^5) figure contains unexpectedly elongated leading-note
(2) Leading-note = yearning for resolution/closure/completeness
(3) Reiterated Es and Gs (no Cs) resist C maj: static harmony denies leading-note’s yearning for resolution - ‘The Symphony as a whole, right through to its concluding chorale, represents a kind of lament; it is an expression of Stravinsky’s late-modernity. The completeness of the (lost) past cannot be regained; it is present here in the shape and gestures of the classical symphony but, ultimately, only as a poignantly nostalgic memory’
Neoclassicism as ideology
Taruskin 1993
- Problematises traditional definition of neoclassicism (retrospectivism and stylistic allusion, especially pastiche or parody of 18thC styles or forms)
(1) Strauss’ stylistic retrospectivism (Der Rosenkavelier) is not neoclassical
(2) Stravinsky/early Hindemith were not stylistically retrospective, but truly modernist (departure from Romanticism rather than maximalisation of Mahler/Strauss’ ‘modernism’ - Teleological/dialectical prejudices blind us to fact that neoclassicism was neither modernist nor nostalgic, but ‘a tendentious journey back to where we had never been’
Origins of Stravinsky’s neoclassicism
Messing
- Cites traditional neoclassical characteristics: clarity, simplicity, objectivity, purity, refinement, constructive logic, concision, sobriety
- —- Explores how these characteristics construct not only artistic identities, but also national and ethical ones - Stravinsky transformed meaning of neoclassicism between 1914-23
- Examines critical responses to Stravinsky’s music and Stravinsky’s own writings to determine link between Stravinsky’s musical style and aesthetic that defined it
- Taruskin argues Messing’s book is unpopular because it explores the ‘extramusical’, discussion of which Babbitt lambasted
Critical responses to Stravinsky’s music
Taruskin 1993
Critical responses to Stravinsky’s music shaped his aesthetic, expressed in his writings and work
- Rivière 1913 review of Rite lavishly praises work using lexis of neoclassicism: ‘absolutely pure’; ‘everything is crisp, intact, clear and crude’
(1) ‘by misreading Stravinsky so early as a classicist and positivist Riviere actually turned him into one’
(2) Ranked below Glazunov in Russian tradition, so susceptible to hyperbolic praise placing him above Debussy - Pulcinella: accommodates Pergolesi within anhemitonic pseudo-folkish style (Diaghilev’s commission interrupted Les Noces)
- Neoclassicism first applied unironically by Schloezer (émigré Russian) in contemporary review of Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments (290)
- —- Ignores work’s actual conception as tombeau to Debussy that faithfully mimics Orthodox funeral service - Schloezer review quotes:
(1) ‘only a system of sounds, which follow one another and group themselves according to purely musical affinities’
(2) Music eschews psychology: ‘strongly expressive’ purely through ‘musical emotion’
(3) ‘attains grace infallibly through its force and by its perfection’ - Schloezer’s review reflects values by which French defined themselves against decadently psychological Germans
- —- Romantic tradition glorified individualistic subjectivity - Stravinsky’s neoclassicism
(1) Evoked ‘a distanced, ironicized past – betokening a stance of highly self-conscious contemporaneity’
- —- Mavra ‘Russian’s Maiden Song’ comprised of misaligned overlapping ostinati, so their outlining of V-I is rendered redundant
(2) ‘a reactionary move, a furious rejection of the horrible new order – Bolsheiviks overrunning his country, proletariats rampant everywhere – that he called “modernism”’
- —- Stravinsky: ‘modernists have ruined modern music’ (interviews c. 1925)
- Stravinsky’s reactionary neoclassicism (1920s-30s) was ‘counterrevolutionary’, not conservative
- ‘French Bachianism’
(1) Represented by Octuor, Concerto, Sonate
(2) ‘meant purity: the renunciation of all national character in favour of a musical Esperanto with a lexicon heavily laced with self-conscious allusions to the perceived fountainhead of “universal” musical values’
(3) Insistence on objectivity sought to defend art against psychopathology
(4) ‘Affirmation of cultural elitism’
(5) Stravinsky: ‘I go back to Bach, not Bach as we know him today, but Bach as he really is’
- —- Notion of authenticity (later became HIP concept)
- —- Attempt to hijack Bach from subjective/psychological Germans and restore supposed purity/detatchment/transcendency
Contrast between Hindemith and Stravinsky
Taruskin 1993
- Hindemith and Stravinsky’s neoclassicism serves contrasting cultural purposes
(1) Hindemith: socially motivated anti-Romanticism; challenged musical autonomy; transcendental kitsch
(2) Stravinsky: socially detached Parisian elitism; promoted musical autonomy; transcendental chic - Hindemith
(1) Part of anti-expressionist ‘New Objectivity’ movement
(2) Wrote Gebrauschmusik (second-hand music) and Gemeinschaftmusik (community music)
(3) Believed in perishable art: planned obsolescence
- —- Context: suspicion of Romantic sublime, nationalism, transcendence
- Hindemith advocated neoclassicism as ethical imperative: ‘the poor connection in music which exists nowadays between producer and consumer is to be regretted’
(1) Stravinsky: ‘the trick, of course, is…to compose what one wants to compose and get it commissioned afterward’
(2) Schoenberg: accused Hindemith of ‘disturbing lack of responsibility’, since artist’s obligation was to art not people - Hindemith and Stravinsky’s neoclassical ideologies were dichotomous, but both ‘united against the arrogant individual whose hubris had brought disaster’
- Late 1920s: Stravinsky had self-consciously cast himself as the Mussolini of music
- —- Lourie: ‘the dictator of the reaction against the anarchy into which modernism degenerated’ - Poetics of Music framed in fascist terms:
(1) Declared his words were ‘dogmatic’ and ‘objective’, delivered under ‘the stern auspices of order and discipline’
(2) Fourth lesson cites Bach fugue as ‘pure form in which the music means nothing outside of itself’
- —- Stricture of rules provides freedom as creator - Stravinsky’s Apollo represents Apollonian (Classical) values over Dionysiac (Romantic) values
- —- Oedipus Rex: Stravinsky revived 18thC classical stage conventions - Stravinsky viewed Schoenbergian atonality as degenerate ‘anarchy’, analogous to Bolshevik Russia
- Mid-1920s: Schoenberg had joined authoritarian reaction against psychology/subjectivity
- Serialism’s ties with fascism and Nazism are played down in scholarship
(1) Klenau (Nazi serialist) openly associated it with Nazism and claimed it was ‘totalitarian’
(2) Stravinsky: ‘the twelve-tone composers are the only ones who have a discipline I respect. Whatever else it may be, twelve-tone music is certainly pure music
Conclusion on Stravinsky neoclassicism
Cross 2008
- Equates Said’s notion of ‘lateness’ with ‘the defining features of modern music and the late-modern condition
- —- ‘a kind of self-imposed exile from what is generally acceptable, coming after it, and surviving beyond it’
- —- ‘increasing sense of apartness and exile and anachronism’ - Key aspect of modernism: ‘profound nostalgia for what had been lost’, and dwelling on its irretrievability as critique of present
- —- Neoclassicism adopts manner/techniques of pre-revolutionary, pre-romantic Europe to highlight alienation from present horrors
Neoclassicism
Martha M. Hyde 2003
Neo-classicism an impulse to revive/restore an earlier style separated from the present by some intervening period, both to recover a past model and clear space for modern artists by devaluing intervening styles.
- For Hyde, the central issue in regarding Stravinsky’s neoclassical works is the extent to which the anachronism of the works is “controlled”, or employed to create a meaningful dialogue between past and present
- E.g. Mavra (1921) in its dedication to Pushkin, Glinka, and Tchaikovsky was Stravinsky’s first explicit re-engagement with classical traditions; its opening aria alludes to tonality by layering ostinati with different alternations of I and V harmonies and rhythms to delay proper cadential alignment until the end of its first section; related to Stravinsky’s placing of “familiar objects in new contexts” (Cross)
o Contrasts with neo-classicism of The Fairy’s Kiss (1928), a “reverential imitation” of Tchaikovsky fastidiously obeying a specific classical model
o Contrasts again with the neo-classicism of The Rake’s Progress (1948-51), which creates a dialogue with its model through diverse allusions to earlier pieces and traditions
Neoclassicism
Maureen Carr 2014
Takes as a point of departure Pierre Boulez’s views on and definitions of neoclassicism, which reflect his consistent philosophical concern for the future
- Boulez, Stocktakings of an Apprenticeship (1991): two tendencies within neoclassicism, one aiming to rediscover the objectivity of ‘pure music’, the other aiming to create a new “universality of style” through historical dialectic
- Boulez in a 1996 lecture: three attitudes towards the past – classical as model, as example, and as reference, where only the latter is capable of continuing musical innovation because of its conceptual, rather than literal, relationship with the past
o Carr then frames her study around how Stravinsky’s compositional process moved from model to example to reference
Neoclassicism
Stravinsky, ‘Some Ideas about my Octuor’ 1924
Presents key ideas in his objectification of music, essentially conceiving of his Octet as an object given form by its musical matter. His first published text explaining a piece of music, which has resulted in the Octet often being treated in scholarship as the first neoclassical work.
- Emphasis on a strict following of the musical text, the choice of wind instrumentation deliberate to emphasise lack of emotionality
- However, the means of composition are emotive in themselves; these means produce a composition, which is then to be presented according to its form by the “executant”
- “In general, I consider that music is only able to solve musical problems… The play of musical elements is the thing”
Neoclassicism
Stephen Walsh 1999
Contextualises ‘Some Ideas about my Octuor in contemporary intellectual currents and Stravinsky’s own past statements.
- Stravinsky’s past views: in 1913 he claimed in Montjoie! that he excluded strings from the Rite’s prelude because they were too evocative of the human voice and woodwinds are “drier, cleaner, less expressively facile”; in 1920 he claimed the Rite was no more than an emanation of the music, deriving from a single theme that “came to him” after The Firebird
- Stravinsky’s business: denying the status of past collaborations was in Stravinsky’s monetary interest, as acknowledging collaboration meant royalties had to be paid e.g. disputes over mutual dependence of music and text delayed the Paris premiere of The Soldier’s Tale until April 1924; advocating for absolute music in his best interest
o By 1923 Stravinsky had also become an in-demand international concert performer with much correspondence needed to manage his career; the severe, matter-of-fact tone of ‘Some Ideas’ similar to that of his business letters
• The “recall to order” in post-war French criticism
o Ernest Ansermet (1921): insists on the primacy of counterpoint; states that a work by Stravinsky “neither describes nor relates things, but manifests them”
o Jacques Maritain (1920): art the activity of the humble maker who must insist on the integrity of his work and its freedom from external moral/emotional pressures; art as an autonomous intellectual “virtue”; Stravinsky likely read this but didn’t yet subscribe to Maritain’s Neo-Thomism
• The relationship with and influence of Jean Cocteau and Les Six
o Cocteau, Le Coq et l’Arlequin (1918): hailed Satie, dismissed Stravinsky as “one of the rest” particularly in the “religious complicity” surrounding the Rite that was evocative of Wagner; called for music to be simpler, more mundane, frivolous
o By 1922 the positive response of Cocteau and members of Les Six like Poulenc to Mavra made up for the insult; saw in Mavra an homage to Satie-esque ideals; in 1922-23 Stravinsky spent considerable time with Cocteau and his set
Neoclassicism
Taruskin 1993
Here, following Scott Messing, the neoclassical impulse is defined by “clarity, simplicity, objectivity, purity, refinement, constructive logic, concision, sobriety etc.”, and with youth culture, cultural elitism, and authoritarianism
• Neoclassicism as first emerging in France at the end of the nineteenth century, partly as opposition to the influence of Wagner but primarily part of a process of nationalist root-seeking
o The term was first applied to Stravinsky in 1923 with reference to the Symphonies of Wind Instruments by Boris de Schloezer, on the basis that the Symphonies are “only a system of sounds” organised according to “purely musical affinities”; it was used from the beginning to distinguish him from Schoenberg
• The application of neoclassical ideas, situated within a French nationalism, actually come earlier: Jacques Rivière’s nationalistic literary forum La Nouvelle Revue française was pointed in its support of him from its origins in 1909
o E.g. describing the Rite: “everything is crisp, intact, clear and crude… his voice becomes the object’s proxy… instead of evoking it, he utters it… he has passed from the sung to the said, from invocation to statement”; figured in contrast to the hazy outlines of the Impressionists, for example
o Tempting to argue that this praise influenced Stravinsky towards classicism and positivism
• Skips past Pulcinella as a choice Stravinsky made due to lack of funds; Taruskin instead highlights the third piece of Les cinq doigts (1920-21) as presenting the first example of a real leading tone and thus functional harmony in Stravinsky, though this piece was also an unadvertised arrangement of the famous Russian folk tune Kamarinskaya
o It was then taken up in Mavra
• Stravinsky’s classicism read as a classicising reassertion of aristocratic taste in the face of materialism and the “loss of Russia”; cultural elitism further exemplified by the ‘back to Bach’ tendency
o Characterises Stravinsky as a “transcendent imperialist artisan” and emphasises, as usual, the associations between Stravinsky and the far Right
Neoclassicism
Louis Andriessen and Elmer Schoenberger 1983
Describe two competing images of Stravinsky the neo-classicist, one of the petit bourgeois composer, family man and good Christian writing for God; another of the grand bourgeois of business-like artistry.
• Stravinsky’s career as one in which façade became genuine behaviour; his behaviour in 1924-1939 characterised by “the cynicism of the dethroned god who would rather be misunderstood than vilified”
o Typified by a strong desire to take control, hence his career as a conductor and performer of his own works from 1924, alongside his tendency to preface every new composition from Mavra on with some kind of lecture or statement
o The Poétique musicale (1942) represents an ideal of aesthetic law-and-order of which he is shown off as the epitomisation; a collection of catch-words from inter-war France characteristic of general anti-Romantic thought
• Contextualise Stravinsky in ‘Neo-Thomism’, the philosophical foundation of post-War neo-Catholicism positing universal principles of truth, order, and unchangeability
o Look back to and idealised the Middle Ages, rejecting the humanism of the intervening years
o Idealised a renunciation of individualisation as represented by the “artisan” of Bach, who was guided by social discipline into making music for God, rather than expressing individual caprice and “intellectual anarchy”
o Promoted by Jacques Maritain, who seemed to hold Stravinsky in good standing and vice versa, and whose views were further promoted by Arthur Lourié
Neoclassicism: context of Stravinsky’s neoclassicism
Taruskin 1996
o Consolidation of Soviet power after Russian civil war meant dream of possessing Russia evaporated
o Stravinsky, along with Diaghilev enterprise, turned resolutely towards the West
—– This mirrored past Westernized Russian music of 19thC, hence Stravinsky switching allegiances from Rimsky to Tchaikovsky
o Mavra represents the start of a new Russian Italianism: ‘accommodation between the irreducibly Eurasian elements of his style and the harmonic traditions and musical conventions of Italian opera’
Modelled (partially parodically) on Westernized romances/operas of early 19thC Russia
Hence the switch of allegiances in neoclassic years from Rimsky to Tchaikovsky
o Stravinsky’s late-life creative crisis and turn to serialism brought on by inferiority complex towards West
