Primary Sources

Question 1

‘Some Ideas about My Octuor’

Stravinsky

Answer 1

1. ‘differences of matter determine differences of form’
   - —- Wind instruments suit rigidity of form, unlike warmer/vaguer string instruments
2. Terms performer ‘executant’
3. ‘musical architecture…is the most important question in all my recent compositions’
4. ‘not an “emotive” work but a musical composition based on objective elements which are sufficient in themselves’
5. [Emotive suggests reaction in listener]
   (1) Works which are ‘emotive in themselves’ through ‘heterogeneous plays of movements and volumes’
   (2) ‘a musical composition in which the emotive basis rides not in the nuance but in the very form of a composition risks little in the hands of its executants’

Question 2

Poetics of Music Third Lesson

Stravinsky

Answer 2

Recounts in detail creative process, and bemoans how misunderstood it is

1. ‘Modern man is progressively losing his understanding of values and his sense of proportions’ (61)

• —- Consequences for music are twofold:
  (1) Neglection of ‘the higher mathematics of music in order to degrade music to servile employment, and to vulgarise it by adapting it to the requirements of an elementary utilitarianism’

(2) Self-styled ‘pure’ music carries symptoms of pathologic blemish and spreads germs of refusal to acknowledge fundamental laws

—– Implies popular music and socially useful music is degraded

2. Biblical quote
3. Complains that uneducated listener unquestioningly accepts (superficially) ‘pleasurable’ music, while question ‘displeasing’ music
   (1) ‘the least informed of music lovers readily clings to the periphery of a work; it pleases him for reasons that are entirely foreign to the essence of music’
   (2) Metaphor: fruit judged by its tree, but its roots are also meddled with
4. ‘It is through the unhampered play of its functions…that a work is revealed and justified’
5. ‘In the pure state, music is free speculation’
   - —- ‘speculative volition…is at the heart of all creation’
6. On composing: ‘I cannot separate the spiritual effort from the psychological and physical effort [of creation]’
7. Rejects ‘pretentious term’ ‘artist’
8. In medieval civilization, artist merely held rank of artisan, ‘And his individualism was forbidden any sort of anarchic development, because a natural social discipline imposed certain limitative conditions upon him from without’
   (1) Mentions Maritain
   (2) Andriessen p94: French neoclassical aesthetics elaborated with neo-Thomist bias
   (3) Conservative hierarchical social thought
9. Prefers term ‘inventor of music’ over ‘composer’
10. Creator ‘must ceaselessly refine his taste or run the risk of losing his perspicacity’
11. ‘Tradition’
    (1) ‘not the relic of a past that is irretrievably gone; it is a living force which animates and informs the present’
    (2) Different from unconscious ‘habit’: it is consciously and deliberately accepted
12. Attacks modern musical culture
    (1) ‘the individual caprice and intellectual anarchy’
    (2) The tendency ‘’to reduce everything to uniformity in the realm of matter’ and ‘to shatter all universality in the realm of the spirit in deference to an anarchic individualism’
13. Attacks Wagnerian opera, specifically its lack of order and discipline’
    (1) Likens Wagnerism to an Art Religion, ‘its vocabulary seasoned with an adulterated religiosity’
    (2) ‘the Wagnerian drama reveals continual bombast. Its brilliant improvisations inflate the symphony beyond all proportion and give it less real substance than the invention, at once modest and aristocratic, that blossoms forth on every page of Verdi’

(3) Wagner’s pedestaling reveals audience finding ‘sublimity in the cult of disorder’
- —- Wagner shows tendency that attempts to compensate for lack of order
- —- Cites endless melody
- —– ‘perpetual becoming of a music that never had any reason for starting’
- —- [Reminiscent of Bergsonism]
- —- ‘A mode of composition that does not assign itself limits becomes pure fantasy’
- —- ‘The more art is controlled, limited, worked over, the more it is free’
- —- ‘Whatever diminishes constraint, diminishes strength’
- —– [Webern says same thing in Path to Twelve-Note Composition lecture]

14. Speaks of ‘the voice that commands me to create’

Question 3

Seminar analysis of Poetics Ch3

Stravinsky

Answer 3

1. Stravinsky as mythmaker
2. Model of what composer is/does

(1) Inventor of music
- —- Inspiration does not play role
- —- More art is controlled, the more it is free

(2) Artisan not artist: not about psychological state
- —- What do we mean by emotion: Romantic understanding of emotion?
- —- Presents model that is polar opposite of expressionism

3. Attacks Wagner
   (1) Teutonic lack of order/fantasy
   (2) Music being subservient to drama: music controlled by rules that aren’t musical
   (3) Religious
4. Mirrors Webern’s sentiment about increasing restriction leading to increased productivity
   - —- Positivist context
5. Composer as constructor

Question 4

Stravinsky and HIP

Answer 4

1. Use of smaller ensembles
2. Removal of emotion/indulgence
3. Steadier tempi