Musical innovations of Stravinsky

 “Works like Piano Concerto could never spread so far as Firebird. They
presumed sophistication. They alluded not simply to Bach and
Beethoven, but to separate traits of the classic styles. They treated these
traits with such dry irony, such jerky stiffness, and such evident distortion
that even a sympathetic listener needed several hearings to penetrate
beneath the wit and skill to the glowing warmth of the melodies and the
subtle continuity of the forms. All these works are often cited in
discussion of 20th-century harmony of neo-classicism, but passages torn
out of context do not fairly represent the pieces. Their melodies and
forms need to be studied patiently, together in the light of such
precedents as the Rite, the Volga Boatmen, and the Symphonies of
Winds. [...] Once the works are known as wholes, they become amazingly
rich, sweet, moving, unforgettable.” – William W. Austin “Music in the
2oth Century” p. 330-331 (talking about Piano Concerto, Piano Sonata,
and Serenade in A.)
 “In a couple of brightly coloured orchestral scherzos the fledgling
composer had shown a flair for féerie, the chief necessity for a
‘Miriskusnik’ composer – that is, a composer in the spirit of Mir isskustva
and its aristocratic, decorative values.” – R. Taruskin “Oxford history of
Western Music. Volume 4: The early 20th century” p. 152
 Work more with Taruskin!!! ML160 T
 “Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions” ML410 S/Vol.1, Vol.2
 “The Cambridge companion to Stravinsky” ML410 S
 “Unlike Scriabin’s occultism (or Schönberg’s, for that matter), Stravinsky’s
fascism and his anti-Semitism were not, as a rule, matters the composer
saw fit explicitly to thematise in his work. Although he did choose to set a
couple of anti-Semitic texts in his American years, the texts do not seem
 to have been selected for the sake of their anti-Semitism. […] In the
absence of any explicit indication from the composer, it cannot suffice
merely to assert that his social circumstances and political attitudes
ineluctably shaped his musical output. That amounts to no more than
truism, impervious to falsification and therefore empty of information.”
R. Taruskin “Defining Russia Musically” p. 362-363 (ML300 T)
 “Reacting to my own historical investigations concerning Stravinsky’s
patrimony and stylistic evolution (and, as often happens, attributing to
me stronger claims than I would care to make), Pieter van den Toorn has
declared himself to be “not all that certain that this early Russian
heritage is invariably the most useful context within which to position
the terms of Stravinsky’s musical particularity,” because “what may
astonish most about this music is not the ties that bind it to its
immediate past but the distance that separates it from that past.”
Taruskin “Defining…” p. 364
 “Plenty of composers have taken till their late twenties to discover a
personal manner. But with Stravinsky the effect is magnified by the
meteoric success of The Firebird when Diaghilev presented it in Paris in
June 1910, a success which Stravinsky himself always felt was out of
proportion to the work’s merits but came from the fact that the music
was brilliant and surprising without being in any way challengingly new.
No doubt this is the natural exaggeration of an artist who went on
outgrowing his first conquest. After all, the general reaction to The
Firebird was at least prophetic. But musically it does nevertheless belong
with the ‘pre-Stravinskian’ works, even if the competence it evinces is
and was devastating; and once this view is accepted the gradient of the
composer’s development before Petrushka (the real turning point) seems
more regular and intelligible.” S. Walsh “The Music of Stravinsky” p. 4
 “It seems obvious that Rimsky-Korsakov was a fortunate choice of
teacher for Stravinsky. [his earlier works] no doubt irked him; yet it must
have usefully nurtured his ability to compose architecturally, while his
empirical skills were being developed by Rimsky’s admirable method of
tuition in orchestration – he would show Stravinsky recent music of his

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 own in short score, get him to orchestrate it, then compare the young
composer’s solution with his own. Stravinsky was also lucky in the
opportunities Rimsky’s weekly class-meetings gave him of hearing his
music well played in a sympathetic environment. Moreover, Rimsky could
and did use his influence to arrange private performances of his pupil’s
orchestral works.” Walsh “music…” p 5-6
 “It was through Rimsky-Korsakov that Stravinsky gradually assumed the
task of carrying forward the Russian tradition of the nineteenth century.
This was of course a romantic tradition, and romantic models are
paramount for Stravinsky up to The Firebird. Walsh p. 6
 “The direction of his [earlier works] for the time being evaded the
specific issue of Russian music in the late nineteenth century which it
was to be one of Stravinsky’s eventual achievements to resolve: the
struggle, that is, between academism and the so-called realism of the
Balakirev clique. Any student of the period is bound to be struck by the
peculiar and apparently shifting relationship between the two sides in
this controversy – a controversy which sprang from the much deeper-
seated disagreement between Slavophiles and pro-Western modernisers.
Even in that crucial argument battle lines were often very unclearly
drawn.” Walsh p. 6-7
 “In Khovanshchina Mussorgsky suggests, through the character of
Galitsin, that westernising liberalism was no more than a façade
disguising a barbarism no less repressive than that of ‘old Russia’; and in
both his major operas he shows that for the mass of the people, weighed
down by poverty and superstition, political ideology had in any case little
importance. For Mussorgsky realism was pre-eminently a way of
asserting the individuality of Russian people, whether they were tyrants
like Boris or Khovansky, or poor men like the simpleton in Boris Godunov,
or rogues like Varlaam. But he was almost alone among Russian
composers of his time in making a clear correlation between verism,
popularism and the anti-academic stance. In Balakirev, Borodin and
Rimsky-Korsakov, Western forms and genres are not so much displaced
as infiltrated by a no less artificial orientalism, which in much of their

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 work merely overlays a fundamentally academic approach to musical
form. Their symphonies, symphonic poems and even operas stick closely
to Western patterns; and when Rimsky took it on himself to revise
Mussorgsky, all he did in reality was to regularise, academicise, in fact
westernise it.” Walsh p. 7
 “Like his younger contemporary Vladimir Nabokov, with whom there are
some intriguing biographical parallels, Stravinsky did not care to be
pigeon-holed or linked with any particular artistic trend after he left
Russia. Above all, because of a sense of cultural inferiority which
stemmed from the fact that Russia’s musical tradition was so much
younger than that of other European nations, he came to disavow his
own musical heritage, which necessitated embroidering a complex
tapestry of lies and denials. So proficient was Stravinsky in creating an
elaborate smoke-screen about who he really was, in fact, that the highly
controlled image he projected of his artistic independence remained
largely intact for over two decades following his death in 1971. It is an
achievement of the painstaking scholarship of Richard Taruskin and
Stephen Walsh that in the twenty-first century we can now look behind
Stravinsky’s cosmopolitan façade to see the carefully concealed but
manifestly Russian identity that lies behind it. […] Stravinsky’s habit of
falsifying his own life story means that we must clearly treat all his
pronouncements with circumspection, but his highly emotional and
apparently involuntary reaction in 1962 to being back on Russian soil
(which he claimed even had a particular smell), nevertheless speaks
volumes about the continuing importance of his native origins.” R.
Bartlett “Stravinsky’s Russian origins” in “The Cambridge companion to
Stravinsky” p. 3-4
 “Until Rimsky-Korsakov’s death in 1908, Stravinsky remained a relatively
docile pupil who was not yet fully aware of the artistically sterile
environment in which he was serving his musical apprenticeship. Apart
from the time he spent in his teacher’s apartment, he regularly
accompanied him to opera performances at the Mariinsky and shared at
that point his antipathy towards ballet. At the end of the following year,

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 however, Stravinsky was already at work on the Firebird, his first ballet
commission for Diaghilev. It soon became apparent that the
sophisticated and cosmopolitan milieu which Diaghilev and his associates
inhabited, mostly abroad in Paris, was a more natural Russian
environment for Stravinsky.” R. Bartlett p. 12
 “When considering Stravinsky’s Russian origins, it is significant that he
grew up in imperial St Petersburg. Like Vladimir Nabokov, he never once
visited Moscow when he was growing up, and first saw the city on his
celebrated return to Russia in 1962. Old Slavonic Moscow had remained
a quiet provincial backwater throughout the nineteenth century, and it
was only at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century that it
suddenly began to vie with St Petersburg as a centre of the Russian
artistic avant-garde. Stravinsky also adored his native city, of course,
because of its physical beauty. As Mikhail Druskin has commented, there
is a correlation between the ‘bright, solemn, spacious’ proportions of its
neoclassical architecture and the economy and simplicity of the
neoclassical style Stravinsky was later to adopt.” R. Bartlett p. 13
 “[…]it was only when Stravinsky came into contact with the World of Art
(Mirisskustva) circle that he first started to consider Russian folklore as
source material for his music.” R. Bartlett p. 13
 “Stravinsky was the first Russian composer to turn to folklore as a source
for stylistic renewal and experimentation, but it was only some time after
he began working with Diaghilev and the World of Art group in Paris that
he started consciously exploiting its potential. In so doing he moved
abruptly away from the ‘academic’ and ‘de-nationalised’ style of
composition that characterised much of the Russian music written at that
time. Ethnographic colour – as artistic content – had been the
cornerstone of nationalist aesthetics of the 1870’s, but by this time had
come to be regarded as distinctly outmoded. It was Diaghilev’s genius to
perceive that native style, made part of a modernist aesthetic, was an
essential ingredient if Russia was to come to its own and contribute
something new to world culture, and this was a factor in the creation of
the Ballets Russes, in whose success Stravinsky was to become such a

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 linchpin. And, after his first commission to write the score to Firebird in
1909, it inspired the development of a neo-nationalist orientation in
Stravinsky’s music that would later explode with The Rite of Spring and
culminate in the composition of Les Noces, the representation of the
Russian peasant wedding, where even the intricate oral rules followed by
folk singers are scrupulously replicated.” R. Bartlett p. 14-15