Voyager: Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring

Classical Net - Basic Repertoire List - Igor Stravinsky"

Igor Stravinsky

David Gelernter

Built Pieces

Like Igor Stravinsky, Duke Ellington was a brilliant assembler of other people's music

by David Schiff

 

Ellington was an assembler. His band and his compositions were collections of instrumental colors and musical styles brought together by his guiding sensibility.... Once we view Ellington in this light, we can place him head to head with the other great musical pickpocket and assembler of twentieth-century music: Igor Stravinsky. After all, both composers turned Chopin's Funeral March to their own ends (compare the beginning of Stravinsky's Piano Concerto with the end of "Black and Tan Fantasy"), and both dared to reharmonize "The Star-Spangled Banner" and recompose large chunks of Tchaikovsky. And each relied on a close collaborator--Strayhorn for Ellington, Robert Craft for Stravinsky-- to function as a composer. Most important, both were able to transform almost any available musical material through the power of an instantly recognizable style.

Some music grows like a plant from a seed, gradually evolving toward its ultimate goal--call it organic. Other music sounds pasted together and shows its joins--call it cubist. And some music seems to express a timeless perfection--call it geometric. Geometric form is rarer in a medium as provisional as jazz, but you can hear it in such well-polished pieces as Art Tatum's "Willow Weep for Me" and Fletcher Henderson's "Down South Camp Meeting," that anthem of the swing era. Listening to a Sonny Rollins solo, in contrast, we hear an idea gradually unfold and build, often over many choruses.
 

Stravinsky's Rite of Spring

Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (1882-1971)

Igor Stravinsky - Bibliography

Article by Robert Craft - 82.12

Notes on the Pulcinella Suite

The World According to David Gelernter

Atlantic Monthly, January 29, 1998
Harvey Blume

Gelernter is a vivid, engaging writer, and it may well be his literary qualities -- rather than his achievements in parallel processing or interface design -- that brought him to the attention of the Unabomber. In any event, when Gelernter opened a package in his office early one morning in June, 1993, it turned out to be an explosive, obviously built to kill -- and it nearly did. Gelernter's attempts in Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber (1997) to make sense of the media's and society's responses to the bombing differ from his other work in that his customary talent for wresting clarity from ambivalence is replaced by a tone of right-wing stridency. But there's no doubt that David Gelernter would like these political views to be taken as seriously as his others, not discounted as the consequences of an encounter with terrorism....

 

Conversation with David Gelernter moves easily from art to engineering, science to politics -- as it did in this discussion, which took place during the turmoil of Theodore Kaczynski's trial....In Machine Beauty you write, "the scientific and artistic personalities overlap more than they differ.

 

" What role do computers have in bringing art and science together?
I want to make this claim about art and science overlapping completely independently of computers. It's a characteristic of human nature we see in classical times, and certainly in the Renaissance. We tend to think of scientists who look at art, and artists who look at science, as aberrations, but there are a lot of aberrations, and it is often the most talented people who manifest the aberration.

 

Would you say there is an increasing amount of discussion these days about the opening of the borders between art and science?
In a way I think that's true. There's more such discussion today than there was five or ten years ago, and that's desirable. But what's going on is zero compared to what was going on in 1930 or 1940. The two communities were vastly closer than they are today. The schools were vastly more serious then. Public schools were generally respected and generally did a good job. Colleges, particularly public colleges, were getting more serious. It went without saying that if you were getting a B.S. and were a smart young scientist, you were going to sit in on an art-history survey course, you were going to know something about art.
Every college graduate in the thirties and forties was talking about Picasso; it was on the public agenda. If you read Alan Turing's famous 1950 paper about the Turing test, you find it's natural for him to throw in a reference to Picasso.

You write that Turing "fit into the ambient intellectual climate" of his day in his attempt to "strip computing to its basics and seek the simplest possible all-purpose computing machine." You compare him to Russell and Whitehead in their striving to get at the roots of mathematics. If so, wasn't he also like Freud, Stravinsky, and Picasso in their efforts to get to the essence of psyche, music, art?
Absolutely right. In the case of Picasso, it's explicit. He wanted to go back to the primal and original. Stravinsky had exactly the same goal -- as did Freud, in trying to determine the origins of modern consciousness. There are echoes of Freud in Turing. When Turing says, for example, that he can't answer the religious objection to his proposal with regard to machine thinking because it is really a demand for consolation, this is an explicit echo of the conclusion to Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents. Again, it goes without saying that educated scientists and mathematicians like Turing knew the work of Freud and Picasso, not because these people were polymaths but because that's what education meant.

Where does science end and art begin? How do you separate the two?
It's a good question. It's probably more a question of what your materials are than what your mind is doing. I'm not convinced that the character of mental activity is all that different. Some artists are drawn to paint and some are drawn to marble --

Kurt Weill did not, as most critics would have it, sell out to Broadway after his early Berlin brilliance

 

David Schiff in The Atlantic Monthly

...Today Weill's embrace of popular music seems prophetic rather than opportunistic. When so much classical music aspires to the condition of pop, Weill -- the first classical composer to reject high for low -- seems a model of crossover. His music is performed by symphonies trying to lure tune-starved audiences and by lounge acts that want to give themselves an air of world-weary sophistication. On either side of the classical-pop divide there is something pretentious about Weill's adulators. If Weill anticipated anyone of note, it was Stephen Sondheim, another cult composer of popular music for the chosen few. Like Sondheim, Weill is fascinating, and at times maddening, for the unromantic and intellectual quality of his popular-sounding music. His willed simplicity sounds like the real thing -- but is not at all.

...In fact the (Second) symphony sums up the musical revolution that Weill had begun as an enfant terrible in the mid-twenties -- a revolution that glorified the tunefulness of popular song and the catchy rhythms of the fox trot and the tango as an alternative to the hyperbolic excesses of music from Wagner to Schoenberg. Over the preceding hundred years music had become increasingly complex in syntax, form, and expression -- an evolutionary trend that culminated just before World War I with the dense, atonal counterpoint of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire and the asymmetric, unpredictable rhythms of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. After the war, with the musical language dismantled like much of the European landscape, young composers -- in effect the first postmodernists -- had to rebuild the language and re-establish its social function. First under Busoni's tutelage and then under Brecht's, Weill returned to simple harmonies and rhythms. He did not go back to Bach, as did the neo-Baroque Hindemith, or to Pergolesi, as did the neoclassical Stravinsky: if Weill had any musical model, it was probably Mahler, but Weill removed all traces of Mahler's nostalgia, grandiosity, and bombast, and also his contrapuntal complexity and elephantine structure. What remained was Mahler's ironic and tragic sense of life, to which Weill added a sharply bitter aftertaste that captured the contemporary mood.

Music History 102: Igor Stravinsky

Igor Stravinsky - Médiathèque de l'Ircam

Igor Stravinsky Web Page

A Photo Gallery

Robert Craft

Books and Authors:
The Numbers Game

CIA analyst Sam Adams fought the intelligence establishment about its Vietnam policy like David fought Goliath

 

...Here's a story. Once upon a time Stravinsky wrote a new piece that had a very difficult section for the violin. He called in the world's most famous violinist and said, "I want you to perform this." The violinist was very pleased, took the score away, and studied it. He came back in a week and said, "Mr. Stravinsky, I can't do it. Nobody can do it. It's too difficult." Stravinsky said, "But you're the greatest in the world. Go back. Try again. Think about it hard. I know you can do it." The violinist again went off and studied the piece for a week, tried every way he could to play it the way it was written, and finally came back and said, "Mr. Stravinsky, it cannot be done." Stravinsky said, "You don't understand. What I want is the sound of someone trying to play this." That, essentially, is the job given to an intelligence agency. Its agents have got to try to be honest, to try to tell the government what it needs to know. If officials won't listen, they won't listen.