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Caring for Stravinsky Anthony Gritten. Musical Times. London: Summer 2002.Vol.143, Iss. 1879;  pg. 66, 8 pgs

Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring Peter Hill Cambridge UP (Cambridge, 2000), x, pp.170; L26.95/L9.95. ISBN 0 521 62221 2/ 0 521 62714 1.

Stravinsky's late music Joseph N. Straus Cambridge UP (Cambridge, 2001); xviii, 260pp; L45, ISBN 0 521 80220 2.

Stravinsky inside out Charles M. Joseph Yale UP (New Haven & London, 2001); xx, 320pp; L22.50. ISBN 0 300 07537 5.

Stravinsky ... Quite the Concert of the Year! (Siegfried Sassoon, quoted in Hill, p.99)

IN RECENT YEARS there has been a steady flow of revisionist writing about Stravinsky. Spearheading the current were the first volume of Stephen Walsh's encyclopaedic biography,1 an extraordinary study of Stravinsky's musical Russia from Richard Taruskin,2 and Glenn Watkins's kaleidoscopic Pyramids at the Louvre.3 There is also the fantastically creative The Apollonian clockwork by Louis Andriessen & Elmer Schonberger, and a searching critique by Robin Holloway4 And we now have Jonathan Cross's wide-ranging The Stravinsky legacy5 and a detailed analytical interpretation of Stravinsky's Bach.6 Perhaps only now are we really beginning to understand the enormity of Stravinsky's foundational role in the twentieth century. Long gone are the days when the composer's autobiography and Poetics of music were the unquestionable primary sources, and Eric Walter White's third book on the composer7 the standard and unquestioned secondary source (not that Stravinsky himself thought much of White (see Joseph, pp.6-7)). These three new books from Peter Hill, Joseph Straus and Charles Joseph consider different aspects of Stravinsky and offer different interpretations. All three are good companions to Stravinsky.

A virtuoso pianist who has recorded Stravinsky, including the piano duet version of The rite of spring, Peter Hill naturally approaches the music with the attitude of a seasoned performer. `Heard in concert the four-hand version makes a distinctive and valid alternative: pared to essentials the music's rhythmic and harmonic dissonance have an even sharper focus' (Hill, p.13). He writes with verve about The rite as a concert piece, describing the pianistic qualities of the musical textures (Hill, pp.13, 16, 19, 59) - `Notice that the dominant seventh [in the 'Augurs' chord] is always in the first inversion, this being the most compact, punchiest version' (Hill, p.50) - and taking note of the pianistic source of the music's octatonicism (Hill, pp.45, 46-47) and the interaction between pianistic and octatonic speech genres (Hill, p.49). Now and then, remarks about performance practice and the choices made by performers emerge in a state of limbo, perhaps as the (internal? silent?) thoughts of a performer prior to performance, written

not so much for the drawer as for the green room (Hill, pp.67, 86, 127, 137).

Straus and Joseph, too, are concerned to emphasise Stravinsky's relation to the piano (Joseph, after all, has written a book on it8), and that `Even when the music seems most abstract, most reliant on intricate precompositional schemes, Stravinsky always worked out the details at the piano, in constant physical contact with the tactile and acoustical realities of the sounds he was writing' (Straus, pp.49, 48). Indeed, one of the best aspects of all three books is this kind of healthy attitude towards the more earthy aspects of Stravinsky's musical activities. A brief crosssection of their insights casts much light on both the man as a composer and the composer as a man, the latter of which has often been swept under the carpet by the Formalist broom (oseph, p.xii), and in doing so contributes to the general demystification that has swept across Stravinsky studies in the last decade or so.

All three authors point out that as a composer Stravinsky was very pragmatic. Hill, for example, observes that he chose which folk tunes to use in The rite on the basis of which ones appeared on the lower right hand corners of pages as he riffled through a printed collection (Hill, p.35), a `method' which seems devoid of inspiration and an absurdly banal way of going about composition, coming from a Romantic school of thought; but of course Stravinsky didn't, and `anything and everything was grist to his mill provided he could make it work' (Hill, p. 143). Unlike, say, Debussy, he was 'a parsimonious chef' (Hill, p.12), always reluctant to waste anything once he'd begun it, and he had no qualms about borrowing from himself (Hill, p. 12) - an idea Straus picks up on with regard to Stravinsky's segmental construction of his rows (Straus, p.86 n.6). Despite even the forbidding arcana of `the verticals of the rotational and four-part arrays, Stravinsky was not so much building a system as responding pragmatically to an immediate and pressing expressive need' (Straus, p.181).

His pragmatism, moreover, as Hill notes refreshingly about his use of octatonic collections (Hill, p.49), was prosaic. 'A browser, not a scholar' (Joseph, pp.23, 263),9 his way of learning was not goal-directed or even linear, but followed the same psychological trajectory as that of satisfying an appetite (Joseph, p.22).10 He `enjoyed improvising' at the piano, as did his friend Aldous Huxley (Joseph, p.124). Indeed, as both Straus and Joseph remark (the former with, it seems, an occasional note of regret), `There is nothing suggesting that he wrestled with deeper musicological or analytic problems' (Joseph, p.252; Straus, pp.21, 158, 175, 199). Nor did Robert Craft, Straus notes for the record (Straus, p.8), concluding that `Stravinsky was aware of new music around him, but in the world of twelve-tone composition, he was largely an auto-didact' (Straus, p.37). Moreover, contrary to the heady mythology spiralling about the composer, Stravinsky didn't always discover the instrumentation of his ideas immediately, and sometimes he would rethink ideas quite late in the day (Joseph, pp.47-48, 183-84, 190, 204, 300 n.25). Hill even quotes some interesting suggestions about possible improvements to the orchestration of The rite which Pierre Monteux made in a letter to Stravinsky, and which, amazingly, `Stravinsky meekly implemented' (Hill,

p.29).

Chapter 8, `The Rite recorded', is the best chapter in the book. Hill gives an interesting account of changing traditions of performance practice (Hill, p. 135), especially with regard to longer-range structural aspects of performance (Hill, p.140). Lamenting the general gradual loss of character in more recent recordings (Hill, pp. 137-39), Hill observes that, while early conductors who had learnt the work in the theatre (Hill, p. 137) `regarded the Rite's rhythms as melodic and gestural rather than mechanical' (Hill, pp.120, 126, 127), as time has gone by and recording technology has developed (by almost fateful coincidence, in sync with The rite itself (Hill, p.118)), recording has become a means of exerting greater and greater 'control' over performance (Hill, p.118). The irony of this has been that slavish adherence to Stravinsky's doctrinaire letter as promulgated in his written polemics has tended to make performances Apollonian, in only a narrow sense and often rather graceless.

Indeed, because The rite was `formally very strong' (Hill, p.142), more so than Firebird and Petrushka, and did not require refashioning into a suite, being a concert work as it stood, this has made it ideally suited to the `modern [read: Modernist?] ideals of clarity' (Hill, p.130) preached by certain performers and ideologues, in which `steadiness and implacable force often takes precedence over any characterising of the "cells"' (Hill, pp.136, 127). Hill describes Boulez's 1969 recording, for example, as `so meticulous as to be "precious" (hence sinister)' (Hill, p.131), in contrast to the `sumptuous, glamorised sound (and tempo) of Karajan, Mehta or Nagano' (Hill, p.129). This differentiation between the broadly "`Romantic" approach' (Hill, p.131) and the mechanical echoes an important recent article on the two main strands of performance practice which have been associated with The rite, namely the 'vitalist' and the 'geometrical'.11 Hill's endorsement of his preferred recording (Simon Rattles CBSO) seems pragmatically to mediate between the two extremes he distinguishes, equating `great architectural - one might say "symphonic" - statement' (Hill, p.139) with `imbued with character' (Hill, p.138).

DAVID Smyth has described the project which has resulted in Joseph Straus's latest book as 'a monumental investigation of Stravinsky's late music'.12 Indeed it is, and a worthy rejoinder to Erwin Stein, Stravinsky's London editor, who once wrote to the composer, saying that `Your 12-tone rows will cause an upheaval in the musical world and will keep analysts busy' (quoted in Straus, p.58). Containing a treasure trove of information about the serial underpinnings of Stravinsky's last twenty works, Stravinsky's late music is the first booklength study of the repertoire and contains valuable explications of Stravinsky's talmudic compositional thought during the 1950s and 1960s, especially of the infamous `rotational arrays' and 'verticals' - and some curious discoveries, one being, for example, that Stravinsky copied out, with an as yet unfathomed intention, the row from Boulez's Structures 1A in his Threni sketchbook (Straus, p.33 n.60). This, though, is not a book about the cultural reception and significance of Stravinsky's serial music and about the place of serialism in the history of musical styles; that's for another author to write (though Straus has tried his hand at

it13).

The Foreword to Stravinsky's late music (Straus, pp.xi-xii), provided by Ian Bent, provides four images of the relation between theory and analysis: 'a chain of alternating activities', `two hemispheres that fit together to form a globe (or cerebrum!)', `an intersection: an area that exists in common between two subdisciplines', and `the spectrum between two extremes'. Straus himself chooses to move inductively from theory towards analysis (telling rather than showing (Straus, p.130)), often pausing to break into theoretical fantasy, and the main body of his text is straight-- down-the-line theory and analysis in search of Stravinsky's `most original and important contribution to the theory and composition of twelve-- tone music' (Straus, p.63). This was to be expected, given that, according to the blurb describing the series to which this book contributes, `This series is designed for those absorbed by the theoretical and intellectual issues of music, whether as historians of ideas, as practical analysts, or as theoreticians'. Nevertheless, I was disappointed to find that, despite all-too-brief analyses of the first movement of the Septet and the Postlude from the Requiem canticles at the close of the final chapter, there is not a single nominally full analysis of a complete serial work, not even of the seven-bar Epitaphium, the entire score of which is even printed twice (Straus, pp.64, 135). As things stand, we are treated to detailed and valuable descriptions of which row forms Stravinsky chose but come away lacking a sense of why (if indeed there are plausible reconstructable reasons) Stravinsky read them off his charts forwards or backwards (Straus, p. 106). This is work for the future. Despite this though, in fact more properly because of it, Stravinsky himself, were he around in person, might well have quite liked this book well, up until the final chapter, `Expression and meaning'.

This chapter, at sixty-six pages the longest in the book, `takes up perhaps the most difficult question in musical interpretation, and particularly in the interpretation of apparently autonomous instrumental works, namely the question of expression and meanings (Straus, p.xiii). Straus has stepped into a brave new world here, boldly going into the realm of Stravinskyian 'topics' nay, apres Stravinsky, twentieth-century topics. One of the myths surrounding Stravinsky, and perpetrated by the composer himself through a famous remark to Milton Babbitt in 1962 (quoted in Straus, p.38 n.76), was the notion that hermeneutical interpretation was irrelevant to his music; the only necessary understanding was technical (in what is now seen as the narrow sense). There is a certain historical irony in this when one considers that only four years earlier Leonard Bernstein had begun his `Young Peoples' Concerts' on TV, including one in 1958 with the title `What does music meanT. The Stravinskyian ideal continues today, one might surmise from Michael Talbot's interesting monograph on The finale in Western instrumental music,14 which hardly mentions Stravinsky, and not once the surely important historical issue of endings in Stravinsky's music and their influence on later

twentiethcentury composers.

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Directly confronting this myth, Straus opens his chapter with the sentence, `Stravinsky is known as an anti-expressive composer' (Straus, p.182). He goes on to suggest that the idea that expression might be a 'problem' (Straus, p.183) comes from the tortured ideologies of scholars and ultimately from Stravinsky himself, rather than from listeners, and that it is not really a problem and simply needs somebody to clear the air of the sound of ideological sabre-rattling. Whether it is this simple is not so simple a matter, but Straus is clear in his exposition.

Straus labels and describes some paradigmatic instances of a number of topics with which, he proposes, Stravinsky's serial works can be interpreted for their expressive content: `From Grief (E) to Transcendence of Death (D)'; 'A as Love's Garden'; 'F as Emblem of Death'; 'Bells'; `Chorales, Hymns, and "Chordal Dirges"'; 'Canon'; `Diatonic and Chromatic'; `Melodic-Rhythmic Stutter'; 'Silence'; and 'Coda' (Straus, pp. 186-87). Varying from the more public type of utterance to the more private (Straus, p.185), many of Straus's examples come from The rake's progress or from pre- and half-serial works like the Septet (Straus, pp.237-42). But there is a rich ground here awaiting the fertilisation of further and deeper cultural grounding and a more subtle control of the relation between theory and analysis, and there is great potential for a thick cultural reading of the twentieth century through these and other similar topics.

One of Straus's greatest contributions to Stravinsky studies is the surprisingly large list of `serial mistakes' he has unearthed in the music (Straus, pp.71-80, 158 n.17, 165 n.22, 246). `Revealing his vulnerabilities', Straus writes, these `bring us closer to the composer' (Straus, p.80) and highlight a reassuringly mortal humanity Stravinsky's mistakes cover a multitude of sins, from mis-- transpositions and mistakes with clefs to omissions and misreadings. Most seem to have arisen in the domain of harmony when Stravinsky was reading the 'verticals' of his arrays (Chapter 4).

One of the potential consequences of this strand of Straus's research might be - though I'm probably being idealistic - a change in the texts used for performances, and hence

recordings; Crafts recent recording of Movements, for example, with Chris Oldfather at the piano, took advantage of Straus's research. Straus himself mentions in passing the need for accurate critical editions (Straus, p.77 n.61). This, however, means confronting the issue of what counts as Authentic Serial Stravinsky, whether it is the scores as they were printed and have been performed, warts and all, or whether it should be the serially correct texts that can be constructed with Straus's help. Even listening habits might slowly begin to develop, for Straus's discoveries ought to lead us to rehear the music and to rethink how we hear it, particularly in terms of the expressive rhetoric embodied in its serial structure (the occurrence of cadential gestures, for example). This would be especially interesting in a work like the Introitus, in the codetta of which only two of the nine chords are errorfree and for which Straus provides some musically quite different 'error'-free alternatives. His own discussion of the work (Straus, pp.158-64) is fascinating, especially these hypothetical recompositions - sideshadowings - of chords, because, touching on such empirical realities of the score, it moves analytically at least indirectly towards the act of listening, noting (with what sounds like resignation) that `Nonetheless, despite all of these [derivational and notational] problems, the nine-- chord progression [ending the work] has a certain musical logic, and makes interesting connections that would be lost if the errors were corrected' (Straus, p.161).

(Ironically, having said all this, there are several typos in Straus's own book: trivial printing slips, inconsistencies, and errors of fact. Only a couple of the errors are serious, and ought to be mentioned. In ex.3.24a (Straus, p.134), the square bracket over A#-D#-E-C should be over the first four notes of the series, C#-A#-D#-E, in order to represent Straus's point about the transpositional equivalence of row segments. And in ex.5.25 (Straus, p.230) only the third chord (F-B-C-F#) is inversionally symmetrical at I11; the others are all internally inversionally symmetrical at I7 (rather than I11,), and the relation between chords 1 and 2 and between chords 4 and 5 is I1 (rather than I5).)

Whether or not listening habits will change is probably related to the nature of the style of Stravinsky's serial music. According to Straus, Stravinsky's late music has `intrinsic power' (Straus, p.xvi):

These works pose intrinsic difficulties for both performers and listeners, owing both to their serial idiom and their striking originality. They are structurally complex and hermetic in some ways, and thus create the problems of comprehensibility and accessibility shared by many of the products of musical modernism (Straus, p.5).

If this is true, then it is ironic that many of Straus's assessments tend to compromise the freedom of the listener's activity (Straus, p.107), confusing means with ends and assuming that `Stravinsky's compositional style' (Straus, p.xiii) was unproblematically the same as his musical style. A prime example of this is Straus's discussion of the procedures Stravinsky toyed with in the mid-1950s for composing out the rows through the musical texture; statements like, `when segments of a series are simply and literally verticalised [as in the "Surge, aquilo" from Canticum sacrum...] the harmony problem is simply turned on its side: now the chords make serial sense and the melodic lines do not'

(Straus, pp.148; 150), are true from the perspective of the composer - and a constructional perspective at that - but seem far from grasping the sense which the listener makes of the passage. In response to the accurate statement that 'It [Requiem canticles Postlude] is also immensely effective in musical terms' (Straus, p.243), I want to remark, `That's good, then'.

If an inquisitive listener were to ask, `Does Straus view form as a "task"?', the reply would have to be that from the perspective of Stravinsky's own compositional process he does, and in a very literal, mechanical manner (witness the layouts of chapters 2 and 3). However, from the perspective of the listener he doesn't, and leaves the listener stuck with the unenviable, if not simply impossible, task of experiencing the form of the music as if it were a kind of compositional prosthetic limb.

OF the three authors, Charles Joseph offers the richest picture of the artist formerly known as Stravinsky. His book manifestly isn't a life or works survey but a collection of studies of hitherto under-appreciated aspects of the composer's musical activities focused almost entirely on his life in America. In eight chapters and hundreds of fascinating asides and lengthy footnotes, Joseph paints a colourful portrait of the composer's very full and very long life, and sheds much light on his personality, beliefs, and friendships. He paints views of most sides of the man from his pragmatism to his idealism (fewer of the music), and is admirably open-minded about some of his less pleasant characteristics and actions, what has been editorially referred to as `The dark side of modern music'.15 Much of Joseph's material will be new to his readers, and it is consistently engrossing, ranging from (to give two randomly interesting examples) Stravinsky's response - `Touched by your Agon inspired verses' - to a poem a fan sent him (quoted in Joseph, p.207), to his jealousy of Leonard Bernstein, whose popularity as a `matinee idol' threatened to eclipse his own (Joseph, p.228). There is only one encounter that Joseph recounts, without reference to further sources, which I find hard to believe as it stands: that, according to Soulima Stravinsky, his father had visited SaintSaens and discussed his newest work with the older composer (Joseph, p.70).

One of Joseph's central preoccupations is the peculiar nature of the composer's image; why it has become, as we say, 'a household name'. Attempting to glimpse beyond the footlights, he is interested in the forgotten Stravinsky, in those aspects of the composer which have often been lost in translation from deed to document - and almost always on purpose when Stravinsky himself was involved. Peering through the immense amount of documentation surrounding the composer, his subject, he tells us, is Stravinsky the human being, and proceeds from the assumption (stated on the final page as a conclusion) that `the human condition is fraught with frailties' joseph, p.270). In so far as they have ever made it into documentation at all, many of Stravinsky's frailties are now kept under lock and key in the mostly unpublished labyrinthine archive in Basle, and it is to a long and intensive sifting through and reflecting upon the significance (sometimes even the veracity) of the composer's materials letters, telegrams, films, and so on - that this book testifies (and another on Stravinsky and Balanchine is on its way, we are told on the dust jacket). In a phrase that well describes the object of his own

attention, Joseph describes the subtle relationship between the filmed encounter between Suzanne Farrell and Stravinsky (during a rehearsal with Balanchine for Variations) and the account of the same meeting in the ballerina's autobiography as a `romancing of the story' (Joseph, p.186). How a gap, sometimes abyss, has arisen - been created - between `the glitzy image of a master showman [and] the interior struggle of a solemn artist' (Joseph, p.268) is central to Joseph's consideration of the 'romancing' of Stravinsky and for him the all-too-frequent discounting of the composer's personal traits in assessments of his art and cultural significance.

Quite rightly, then, Joseph feels a need to demythologise the image of Stravinsky, which is based to a tremendous extent on 'myths' (Joseph, pp.ix, xi, 40, 194), 'illusions' (Joseph, pp.34, 45, 101), and sometimes downright 'fictions' Joseph, p.45). All too often, `history is the victim of a distortion - one of many the composer did nothing to clarify' joseph, p.39). All too often it veers towards 'hagiography' (Joseph, p. 166). Yet `history's business is the questioning of such memories, the purging of fictions' (Joseph, p.33) and the `separating [of] truth from illusion' (Joseph, p.34), and `the sooner we deal with what Stravinsky actually said and did, the better our chances of cutting through the mythology that often misrepresents him' (Joseph, p.232). Hill is alive to this, too, writing of the infamous 'legend' (Hill, p.3) of The rite's conception that, `Partly because it was so controversial, the Rite is surrounded by anecdote, myth and hearsay through which the historian must sift, aware that much is contradictory or otherwise unreliable' (Hill, p.vii). And for Stravinsky himself, one of the paradoxes was his need both to play on his lingering - increasingly canonical - status as an 'exotic' Russian Joseph, pp.40, 61, 69, 104, 107, 108-09, 117), and yet also to deny, negate, escape, and generally transcend this accurate but limited image in further artistic activities. He needed to show the public at large that `the old fox was still turning heads, still eager, still capable of igniting controversy (Joseph, p.165), and that `He may have slowed a little physically [by 1965], but he still had fangs' (Joseph, p.175). Yet, as Joseph concludes chapter 6, `History deserves to draw its own conclusions based not only on what has been said and seen, but, perhaps more important, what has been edited and snipped' from, for example, the many documentary films made about the composer (Joseph, pp.195, 33). Yet although this is certainly true, it is worth asking who this 'history' is, and whether it is not always explicitly and individually personified and owned (as the very reception of Joseph's own book by Craft illustrates [Joseph, p.xx]). In a similar move, Joseph's last chapter, 'Boswellising an icon', seems to read too great a dose of fate into the intersection of Stravinsky's and Crafts lives: `By his own description, [Craft] felt "paralysed" in trying to make sense of the star-crossed forces that placed Stravinsky in his life and him in Stravinsky's' (Joseph, p.265). A fair assessment of Craft surely ought to allow him - and indeed Stravinsky - some measure of choice, of freedom. Only in this way will they both be understood for the degree of responsibility they assumed in their dealings with others and with the world at large, especially since, as scholars like Walsh, Taruskin, and Tom Gordon have already begun to discover,16 Craft clearly played an active (some would say creative) editorial role behind the scenes in presenting (constructing) Stravinsky's public, outdoor image (Joseph, p.258). This was not the

inexorable tragedy of Romeo and Juliet.

Joseph takes a broadly psychoanalytic tack, simultaneously creating and probing an image of Stravinsky's `min& and trying to locate the causes of the composer's behaviours and attitudes. A frequent turn of phrase is that Stravinsky `wanted, perhaps even needed' to act or respond to a situation in this or that particular way (Joseph, p.268). This approach may have arisen indirectly out of the closer-to-home needs of chapter 3, which, considering the relations between Soulima and his father, is something of a personal confession for Joseph, who studied piano with Stravinsky fils in the 1960s. Occasionally, though, it again goes a little too far, turning in on itself and transferring the onus of responsibility personal and social away from Stravinsky into his psycho-biography, reliant upon the notion that the composer's `selfimage may never have recovered from a difficult and not particularly nurtured childhood, despite his efforts to cast aside whatever ghosts haunted him' (Joseph, p.34).

Some of Joseph's conclusions may be `incendiary', as he himself admits (Joseph, p.xii), for they show, often in no uncertain terms, just how the popular image of Stravinsky has differed from the prosaic reality of his life and activities. The challenge, perhaps greater for the average listener than for scholars (who enjoy this quasi-- masochistic kind of thing), comes from the fact that the gap between Stravinskyian image and reality concerns less the music than the nature of the personality apparently 'behind' it: Stravinsky the man. Joseph writes at length about the composer's private character and why it was so strongly motivated to control its public face. Stravinsky was a real `media personality' in the sense that this phrase has more recently come to assume, a real superstar and `natural thespian' (Joseph, p.178): `funny, droll, quick, eccentric, quirky, controversial, contentious, yet still [in the 1950s and 60s] pedestaled as the epitome of the not-tobe-deterred rebellious hero so many admire& (Joseph, p.165). Like Bernstein, and like a younger generation of film stars of the magnitude of Marlon Brando and James Dean, Stravinsky was forever young. 'Yet', as Joseph writes, `in addition to Stravinsky's many humane qualities, his perspicacious manner, his acerbic wit, his bottomless thirst for learning, he was quite capable of vindictiveness, duplicity, and contemptible behaviour, even in his treatment of friends'. Indeed, when he was not composing (and, in fact, arguably then, too), Stravinsky spent an inordinate amount of time and effort covering up his frailties, hiding his vulnerabilities, masking his fears, and projecting in a conscious and often aggressive manner a particular alter ego for public consumption. This manufactured image was and is quite different to the persona behind it - according to a particularly frank letter to one of the composer's editors, much less human (quoted in Joseph, p.259) - so much so, in fact, that Taruskin's provocative chapter title, `Stravinsky and the subhuman'17 seems like a fair response to the Stravinsky phenomenon. But in answer to his own question, `Should such personal traits be discounted?' (Joseph, p.xii), Joseph, like Taruskin before him, responds firmly and with admirable conviction, 'No'.

As far as his public image was concerned, Stravinsky was 'a contrarian by nature' (Joseph, p. 126), and played on the 'elusiveness' Joseph, pp.267-68) often expected of

great artists. `He liked keeping all parties baffled' (Joseph, p.151) and `wanted, perhaps even needed, to be seen as the "other"' (Joseph, p. 1). The real Igor Stravinsky never stood up, having learnt how to avoid doing so early in his career, as Adolph Bolm rued: 'I cannot help having a feeling that [the Ballets Russes] made a supreme effort in order to be different' (quoted in Joseph, p.62). Straus tows a similar, if historiographically more conventional, line:

Beyond that, however, [his serial mistakes] show him as a man unwilling to play it safe by writing again what he had written before. Instead, they reveal the restless, questing nature of his musical intellect, his willingness to break with the neoclassical conventions of his earlier music, to seek ever new modes of expression within the serial language, and to accept the inevitability of mistakes attendant upon so bold an enterprise (Straus, p.80).

Stravinsky himself clearly enjoyed, or publicly professed to enjoy, this very bold, public role, and `was quite proud of the ruckus he was creating' in The rite (Joseph, p.69), and `His mischievous delight in baffling others led him to champion the most outrageous positions imaginable' (Joseph, p.95).

He thrived on exposure, turning it to his advantage in a consistent barrage of `self-promotion' (Joseph, pp.2, 4) and commodification (Joseph, pp.32-33). He had, again, learnt how to '[sell] himself' (Joseph, p.198) at the feet of the Ballets Russes: Although `The uproar at the [Rites] premiere took the company by surprise, [...] Diaghilev took the offensive, ensuring support for the new ballet with a generous distribution of free tickets' (Hill, pp.29-30); indeed, `The audience', wrote Jean Cocteau in a now familiar Stravinskyian phrase, `played the role that was written for it' (quoted in Hill, p.30). Nevertheless, despite his almost continuous public presence, Stravinsky was, as Boris de Schloezer put it in 1932, `an enigma' (quoted in Joseph, p.1) and his work contained multiple 'paradoxes' (Hill, pp.vii, viii). Stravinsky himself once remarked that 'I am pleased to be free to create things which are always an exception' (quoted in Joseph, p.19).

The sheer enigmatic force of what Jacques Maritain once described as Stravinsky's `sacred egoism of the creative spirit' (quoted in Joseph, p.246) had its `dark side' (Joseph, pp.xii, 14). Like many creative people, Stravinsky was `selfabsorbed' (Joseph, pp.71, 73) and `embraced his fame vengefully' (Joseph, 6), `freely [mingling] his own blend of insecurity, rage, obsession, anguish, depression, cynicism' (Joseph, p.10). In fact, his own son Soulima `couldn't make sense of the blurry line that sometimes separates villainy from heroism - and on which side of that line his father stood' (Joseph, p.68), and `There is little evidence, in fact, that Stravinsky felt any social responsibility as a "giant of the arts"' (Joseph, p.159), as is fairly clear from consideration of Stravinsky's relation to figures like Mussolini and of the background to his concertising in Germany during the 1930s. The overall picture that Craft confronted as Stravinsky's editor both before and even more so after 1971 must have seemed somewhat 'toxic'

(Joseph, p.258).

Hiding from his public a fundamental 'vulnerability' and 'susceptibility' (Joseph, p.254, 157; Straus, p.80) at the heart of his personality, Stravinsky's dark side and `general mistrust of others' (Joseph, p.113) manifested itself in the extreme degree of `control' he attempted to exercise over both his life and his music, making free play with the 'sovereign' (Joseph, p.26) `license and leverage' (Joseph, p.12) he knew his position lent him (Joseph, pp.9, 42) to retreat up his own loophole. `Psychologically there was an embedded imperative to permit nothing to pass beyond his immediate control' (Joseph, pp.113; 131), and he impatiently expected a great deal - often too much - of others (Joseph, p.27): he controlled performances of his music (Joseph, p.220), recordings of it Joseph, p.183), documentaries about himself (Joseph, chapter 6), his biography (Joseph, p.40), even his posthumous legacy Joseph, pp.268-69). Nothing here is at all unusual for an artist, of course - except the absolute intensity of his paranoia about what others did with his music and how they responded to his actions. Indeed, `There was no indifference in Stravinsky's life, no middle ground. He felt strongly about everything' (Joseph, p.5). With his `all-or-nothing threats' (Joseph, p. 11), `churlish either/or tone' (Joseph, p.198), and propensity to make "`take it or leave it" ultimatum[s]' (Joseph, p.108), it is clear that `The composer could not be bridled by the demands of compromise' (Joseph, p.113); hence his lack of success in TV and Hollywood.

Stravinsky surrounded himself with friends and acolytes of a similar nature, as Joseph notes about George Balanchine's similar 'contrariness' (Joseph, p.160), Aldous Huxley's similarly `nonnegotiable certainty' about his own critical eye (Joseph, p.124), and about his (Joseph's) own one-time teacher, Nadia Boulanger: `There was no middle ground in Mlle Boulanger's studio, no room for negotiation when it came to taste' (Joseph, p.77). Hence the (at best) fabrications of the truth he peddled about his activities, '[perpetuating] certain myths by permitting indisputable facts to evaporate' (Joseph, p.40), as in, for example, his deteriorating opinion of Vaslav Nijinsky in the years following The rite's stormy premiere (Hill, p.105) and the 'discrepancies' between his and Nikolai Roerich's accounts of its conception (Hill, p.6). Each calculated untruth `was just one of many black holes into which Stravinsky's memories conveniently vanished in an effort to protect his image' (Joseph, p.118) (Taruskin calls them `Orwellian memory holes'18). As Craft has observed, `Stravinsky perfectly fits Freud's description of the anal personality' (Craft, quoted in Straus, p.43) - and, I might add, that of Dostoevsky's Underground Man.

WHAT will happen to Stravinsky the triangular - man, music, myth when, in the wake of books like these three, his motivations and machinery have been exposed? Pairs of worries arise. Will there be anything left for Stravinsky or his music to stand contrary to? What will motivate performers and listeners, let alone scholars, now that the golden idol - the `integral man'19 has been demolished, or at least cast into doubt? `Will Stravinsky survive Postmodernism?', as one of the foremost Stravinsky analysts recently polemicised?20 Will we?

Arguably, in the cases of many other composers, knowing 'more' about the music or about the composer figure is not a problem; further and better knowledge can be assimilated into the musical experience, following the rhetoric of the music appreciation racket and the (faulty) heuristic equation of `listener = composer'. But the point of `The Stravinsky experience' as intended by the composer, and followed by several performers - think both of Maurizio Pollini's scintillatingly Stravinskian recording of the Three movements from 'Petrushka' and of his scintillatingly Stravinskyian recording of... Debussy's Preludes and a whole legion of theoretically minded analysts aboard the bandwagon of `structural listening',21 is that the listener knows nothing and thinks nothing while listening to the `heterogeneous play of movements and volumes'22 and the `unhampered play of its functions [by which] a work is revealed and justified'.23 The music's authoritarian loopholes were meant to prevent such flights of imaginative fancy and to maintain the mystery they shrouded. Now, though, we are becoming aware of the machinations of Stravinsky's aesthetic (read: moral) machinery. With Schoenberg in mind, he once quipped facetiously, 'I detest modern music. [...] My music is not modern music nor is it music of the future. It is the music of today' (quoted in Straus, p.9 n.18). If this ever was or is now true, and given the lines of thought which some claim to have led to The end of history,24 where do we go from here? Can his own boastful comment about a once infamous passage in Movements - `No theorist could determine the spelling of the note order in [...] the flute solo near the beginning [...] simply by knowing the original order [of the series]' (quoted in Straus, p.65 n.45) - seem anything but sharply ironic now?

FOR A START, Stravinsky's aestheticisation of the aural imperative confronting the listener needs to be continually resisted. Of course, being a trajectory of his aesthetic, it has never actually governed how listeners respond in practice; the `non-identical' (Adorno's term) was never entirely expunged. Nevertheless, his iconic, mythic status has taken many uncritically down the formalist road, and generations of listeners have tried to make themselves listen as he bade them. Hill observes that The rite has '[dominated] the twentieth century as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony did the nineteenth' (Hill, pp.viii, 138); and what Joseph says of TV's most famous anchorman has been as true of Stravinsky thus far: `If Walter Cronkite said it was so ... then it was so' (Joseph, pp.139 [ellipses original], 137, 266). In this respect the revisionist thought embodied in works like Stravinsky inside out can only be a good thing, for it helps us care for Stravinsky - by standing up to him

[Sidebar]A listing of undergraduate music courses will be included in the Autumn 2002 issue. Please e-mail all relevant information to The Editor at mustimes@aol.com by 1 July.

[Footnote]

Notes 1. Stephen Walsh: Stravinsky: a creative spring - Russia and France 1882-1934 (London, 1999). 2. Richard Taruskin: Stravinsky and the Russian traditions: a biography of the works through Mavra (Oxford, 1996); idem: Defining Russia musically: historical and hermeneutical essays (Princeton, 1997). 3. Glenn Watkins: Pyramids at the Louvre: music, culture and collage from Stravinsky to the postmodernists (Cambridge, Mass., 1994). 4. Louis Andriessen & Elmer Schonberger: The Apollonian clockwork: on Stravinsky, trans.

[Footnote]Jeff Hamburg (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989); Robin Holloway: `Customised goods', in The Musical Times 138/1856-58 (Oct-Dec 1997), pp.21-25, 25-28, 21-25. 5. Jonathan Cross: The Stravinsky legacy (Cambridge, 1998).

[Footnote]6. Angelo Cantoni: La reference a Bach dans les oeuvres nto-classiques de Stravinsky (Hildesheim & Zurich, 1998). 7. Eric Walter White: Stravinsky: the composer and his works (London, 1966 & 1979). 8. Joseph: Stravinsky and the piano (Ann Arbor, 1983). 9. Stravinsky: Poetics of music (Cambridge, Mass., repr. 1970]), p.55. 10. Ibid., p.51. 11. Robert Fink: "Rigoroso (quaver = 126)": The rite of spring and

[Footnote]the forging of a modernist performing style', in JAMS 52/2 (1999), pp.299-362. 12. David Smyth: `Stravinsky as serialist: the sketches for Threni', in Music Theory Spectrum 22/2 (Spring 2000), pp.205-24, atp.224 n.28.

[Footnote]13. Joseph N. Straus: `The myth of serial "tyranny" in the 1950s and 1960s', in The Musical Quarterly 83/3 (Fall 1999), pp.301-43; idem: `Babbitt and Stravinsky under the serial "regime"', in Perspectives of New Music 35/2 (Summer 1997), pp.17-32. 14. Michael Talbot: The finale in western instrumental music (Oxford, 2001).

[Footnote]15. Richard Taruskin: `The dark side of modem music', in The New Republic (5 September 1988), pp.28-34.

[Footnote]

16. Walsh: Stravinsky,`Introduction'; Taruskin: Stravinsky and the Russian traditions, 'Introduction'; Tom Gordon: `Stravinsky and C.-E Ramuz: a primitive classicism', in Canadian University Music Review 4 (1983), pp.218-44, at pp.232-33.

[Footnote]17. Taruskin: Defining Russia musically, pp.360-467.

[Footnote]18. Taruskin: Stravinsky and the Russian traditions, p.1.

[Footnote]19. Stravinsky: Poetics of music, p.27.

[Footnote]20. Pieter Van den Toorn: `Will Stravinsky survive Postmodernism?', in Music Theory Spectrum 22/1 (Fall 2000), pp. 104-21. 21. Rose Rosengard Subotnik: `Toward a deconstruction of structural listening: a critique of Schoenberg, Adorno, and Stravinsky', in her Deconstructive variations: music and reason in western society (Minneapolis, 1996), pp.148-76. 22. Stravinsky, `Some ideas about my Octuor', repr. in White: Stravinsky, pp.574-77 at p.575. 23. Stravinsky: Poetics of music, p.49. 24. Francis Fukuyama: The end of history and the last man (London, 1992).