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Igor Stravinsky

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                       Igor Stravinsky
   Игорь Стравинский
                   Background information
   Birth name    Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky
   Born          June 17, 1882, Oranienbaum (now Lomonosov, Russia)
   Died          April 6, 1971, New York City, NY, USA
   Occupation(s) Composer, Conductor, Pianist
                    Notable instrument(s)
   Orchestra
   Wind instruments

   Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (Russian: Игорь Фёдорович Стравинский,
   Igor' Fëdorovič Stravinskij) ( June 17, 1882 – April 6, 1971) was a
   Russian composer best known for three compositions from his earlier,
   Russian period: L'Oiseau de feu ("The Firebird") (1910), Petrushka
   (1911), and Le sacre du printemps ("The Rite of Spring") (1913).

   These daring and innovative ballets essentially reinvented the genre.
   Stravinsky also composed primitivist, neo-classical and serial works.
   He wrote ensembles in a broad spectrum of classical forms, ranging from
   opera and symphonies to piano miniatures and works for jazz band.

   Stravinsky achieved fame as a pianist and conductor, often at the
   premieres of his works. He was a writer and compiled, with the help of
   Alexis Roland-Manuel, a theoretical work entitled Poetics of Music, in
   which he famously claimed that music was incapable of "expressing
   anything but itself." Several interviews in which the composer spoke to
   Robert Craft were published as Conversations with Stravinsky. They
   collaborated on five further volumes over the following decade.

   A quintessentially cosmopolitan Russian, Stravinsky is considered by
   many in both the West and his native land to be the most influential
   composer of 20th-century music. Time magazine named him as one of the
   most influential people of the century.

Biography

   Stravinsky was born in Oranienbaum, Russia (in 1948 renamed Lomonosov)
   and brought up in Saint Petersburg. His early childhood, dominated by
   his father and elder brother, was a mix of experience that hinted
   little at the cosmopolitan artist he was to become. Although his father
   Fyodor Stravinsky was a bass singer at the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint
   Petersburg, Stravinsky originally studied to be a lawyer. He switched
   to composition later. In 1902, at the age of 20, Stravinsky became the
   pupil of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, probably the leading Russian composer
   of the time. A student effort of his, Feu d'artifice (Fireworks), was
   called to the attention of Sergei Diaghilev, who was impressed enough
   to commission Stravinsky, first for orchestrations, and then for a
   full-length ballet score, L'Oiseau de feu (The Firebird).

   Stravinsky left Russia for the first time in 1910, going to Paris to
   attend the premiere of The Firebird at Ballets Russes. During his stay
   in the city, he composed two further works for the Ballets Russes—
   Petrushka (1911) and Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) (
   1913). The ballets trace his stylistic development: from the L'oiseau
   de feu, whose style draws largely on Rimsky-Korsakov, to Petrushka's
   emphasis on bitonality, and finally to the savage polyphonic dissonance
   of Le Sacre du printemps. As Stravinsky noted about the premieres, his
   intention was "[to send] them all to hell". (He succeeded: The 1913
   première of Le sacre du printemps was probably the most famous riot in
   music history, with fistfights amongst audience members and a need for
   police supervision of the second act).

   Stravinsky displayed an inexhaustible desire to learn and explore art,
   literature, and life. This desire manifested itself in several of his
   Paris collaborations. Not only was he the principal composer for Sergei
   Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, but he also collaborated with Pablo Picasso
   ( Pulcinella, 1920), Jean Cocteau (Oedipus Rex, 1927) and George
   Balanchine (Apollon Musagete, 1928).
   Stravinsky and Pablo Picasso collaborated on Pulcinella in 1920.
   Picasso took the opportunity to make several sketches of the composer.
   Stravinsky and Pablo Picasso collaborated on Pulcinella in 1920.
   Picasso took the opportunity to make several sketches of the composer.

   Relatively short of stature and not conventionally handsome, Stravinsky
   was nevertheless photogenic, as many pictures show. He was still young
   when, on 23 January 1906, he married his cousin Katerina Nossenko, whom
   he had known since early childhood. Their marriage endured for 33
   years, but the true love of his life, and later his partner until his
   death, was his second wife Vera de Bosset (1888-1982). Although a
   notorious philanderer (even rumoured to have affairs with high-class
   partners such as Coco Chanel), Stravinsky was also a family man who
   devoted considerable amounts of his time and expenditure to his sons
   and daughters. One of his sons, Soulima Stravinsky, was also a
   composer, but is little known compared to his father.

   When Stravinsky met Vera in the early 1920s, she was married to the
   painter and stage designer Serge Sudeikin, but they soon began an
   affair which led to her leaving her husband. From then until Katerina's
   death from cancer in 1939, Stravinsky led a double life, spending some
   of his time with his first family and the rest with Vera. Katerina soon
   learned of the relationship and accepted it as inevitable and
   permanent. After Katerina's death, Stravinsky and Vera were married in
   Bedford, MA, USA, on 9 March 1940. They had gone to the USA from France
   (Stravinsky in 1939, Vera in 1940) to escape World War II.

   Patronage too was never far away. In the early 1920s, Leopold Stokowski
   was able to give Stravinsky regular support through a pseudonymous
   "benefactor". The composer was also able to attract commissions: most
   of his work from The Firebird onwards was written for specific
   occasions and paid for generously.

   Stravinsky proved adept at playing the part of "man of the world",
   acquiring a keen instinct for business matters and appearing relaxed
   and comfortable in many of the world's major cities. Paris, Venice,
   Berlin, London and New York City all hosted successful appearances as
   pianist and conductor. Most people who knew him through dealings
   connected with performances spoke of him as polite, courteous and
   helpful. For example, Otto Klemperer, who knew Arnold Schoenberg well,
   said that he always found Stravinsky much more co-operative and easy to
   deal with. At the same time, he had a marked disregard for those he
   perceived to be his social inferiors: Robert Craft was embarrassed by
   his habit of tapping a glass with a fork and loudly demanding attention
   in restaurants.

   Eventually Stravinsky's music was noticed by Serge Diaghilev, the
   director of the Ballets Russes in Paris. He commissioned Stravinsky to
   write a ballet for his theatre, and Stravinsky traveled to Paris in
   1911. That ballet ended up being the famous L'Oiseau de Feu. However,
   because of World War I, he moved to neutral Switzerland in 1914. He
   returned to Paris in 1920 to write more ballets, as well as many other
   works. He moved to the United States in 1939 and became a naturalized
   citizen in 1945. He continued to live in the United States until his
   death in 1971. Stravinsky had adapted to life in France, but moving to
   America at the age of 58 was a very different prospect. For a time, he
   preserved a ring of emigré Russian friends and contacts, but eventually
   realized that this would not sustain his intellectual and professional
   life in the US. When he planned to write an opera with W. H. Auden, the
   need to acquire more familiarity with the English-speaking world
   coincided with his meeting the conductor and musicologist Robert Craft.
   Craft lived with Stravinsky until his death, acting as interpreter,
   chronicler, assistant conductor and factotum for countless musical and
   social tasks. Another well-known musician that was constantly his
   understudy was Warren Zevon who was a regular visitor to Stravinsky's
   home where he, along with Craft, would study music.

   Stravinsky's taste in literature was wide, and reflected his constant
   desire for new discoveries. The texts and literary sources for his work
   began with a period of interest in Russian folklore, progressed to
   classical authors and the Latin liturgy, and moved on to contemporary
   France ( André Gide, in Persephone) and eventually English literature,
   including Auden, T. S. Eliot and medieval English verse. At the end of
   his life, he was even setting Hebrew scripture in Abraham and Isaac.

   In 1962, he accepted an invitation to return to Russia for a series of
   concerts, but remained an émigré firmly based in the West.
   Grave of Stravinsky in San Michele
   Enlarge
   Grave of Stravinsky in San Michele

   He died at the age of 88 in New York City and was buried in Venice on
   the cemetery island of San Michele. His grave is close to the tomb of
   his long-time collaborator Diaghilev. Stravinsky's life had encompassed
   most of the 20th century, including many of its modern classical music
   styles, and he influenced composers both during and after his lifetime.
   He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6340 Hollywood
   Boulevard.

Stylistic periods

   Most of Stravinsky's compositions may be placed into one of the three
   stylistic periods into which his career may be roughly divided.

The Russian period

   The first of Stravinsky's major stylistic periods (excluding some early
   minor works) was inaugurated by the three ballets he composed for
   Diaghilev. The ballets have several shared characteristics: They are
   scored for extremely large orchestras; they use Russian folk themes and
   motifs; and they bear the mark of Rimsky-Korsakov's imaginative scoring
   and instrumentation.

   The first of the ballets, L'Oiseau de feu, is notable for its unusual
   introduction (triplets in the low basses) and sweeping orchestration.
   Petrushka, too, is distinctively scored and the first of Stravinsky's
   ballets to draw on folk mythology. But it is the third ballet, The Rite
   of Spring, that is generally considered the apotheosis of Stravinsky's
   "Russian Period". Here, the composer draws on the brutalism of pagan
   Russia, reflecting these sentiments in roughly-drawn, stinging motifs
   that appear throughout the work. There are several famous passages in
   the work, but two are of particular note: the opening theme played on a
   bassoon with notes at the very top of its register, almost out of
   range; and the thumping, off-kilter eighth-note motif played by strings
   and accented by horn on off-rhythms (See Le sacre du printemps (The
   Rite of Spring) for a more detailed account of this work).

   Other pieces from this period include: Renard (1916), Histoire du
   soldat (A Soldier's Tale) (1918), and Les Noces (The Wedding) (1923).

The Neo-Classical period

   The next phase of Stravinsky's compositional style, slightly
   overlapping the first, is marked by two works: Pulcinella 1920 and the
   Octet (1923) for wind instruments. Both of these works feature what was
   to become a hallmark of this period; that is, Stravinsky's return, or
   "looking back", to the classical music of Mozart and Bach and their
   contemporaries. This " neo-classical" style involved the abandonment of
   the large orchestras demanded by the ballets. In these new works,
   written roughly between 1920 and 1950, Stravinsky turns largely to wind
   instruments, the piano, and choral and chamber works. The Symphonies of
   Wind Instruments and Symphony of Psalms are among the finest works ever
   composed for winds.

   Other works such as Oedipus Rex (1927), Apollon Musagete (1928) and the
   Dumbarton Oaks concerto continue this trend.

   Some larger works from this period are the three symphonies: the
   Symphonie des Psaumes (Symphony of Psalms) (1930), Symphony in C (1940)
   and Symphony in Three Movements (1945). Apollon, Persephone (1933) and
   Orpheus (1947) also mark Stravinsky's concern, during this period, of
   not only returning to Classic music but also returning to Classic
   themes: in these instances, the mythology of the ancient Greeks.

   The pinnacle of this period is the opera The Rake's Progress. It was
   completed in 1951 and, after stagings by the Metropolitan Opera in
   1953, was almost ignored. It was presented by the Santa Fe Opera in its
   first season in 1957 with Stravinsky in attendance, the beginning of
   his long association with the company. This opera, written to a
   libretto by Auden and based on the etchings of Hogarth, encapsulates
   everything that Stravinsky had perfected in the previous 20 years of
   his neo-classic period. The music is direct but quirky; it borrows from
   classic tonal harmony but also interjects surprising dissonances; it
   features Stravinsky's trademark off-rhythms; and it hearkens back to
   the operas and themes of Monteverdi, Gluck and Mozart.

   After the opera's completion, Stravinsky never wrote another
   neo-classic work but instead began writing the music that came to
   define his final stylistic change.

The Serial period

   Only after the death of Arnold Schoenberg in 1951 did Stravinsky begin
   using dodecaphony, the twelve-tone system which Schoenberg had devised,
   in his works. Stravinsky was aided in his understanding of, or even
   conversion to, the twelve-tone method by his confidant and colleague,
   Robert Craft, who had long been advocating the change. The next fifteen
   years were spent writing the works in this style.

   Stravinsky first began to experiment with the twelve-tone technique in
   smaller vocal works such as the Cantata (1952), Three Songs from
   Shakespeare (1953) and In Memoriam Dylan Thomas (1954). Canticum Sacrum
   (1955) is his first piece to contain a movement entirely based on a
   tone row. He later began expanding his use of dodecaphony in works
   often based on biblical texts, such as Threni (1958), A Sermon, a
   Narrative, and a Prayer (1961), and The Flood (1962).

   An important transitional composition of this period of Stravinsky's
   work was a return to the ballet: Agon, a work for twelve dancers
   written from 1954 to 1957. Some numbers of Agon recollect the
   "white-note" tonality of the neo-classic period, while others (the
   Bransle Gay, e.g.) display his unique re-interpretation of serial
   method. The ballet is thus like miniature encyclopedia of Stravinsky,
   containing many of the signatures to be found throughout his
   compositions, whether primitivist, neo-classic, or serial: rhythmic
   quirkiness and experimentation, harmonic ingenuity, and a deft ear for
   masterly orchestration. These characteristics are what make
   Stravinsky's work unique when compared with the work of contemporaneous
   serial composers.

Influence and innovation

   Stravinsky's work embraced multiple compositional styles,
   revolutionized orchestration, spanned several genres, practically
   reinvented ballet form and incorporated multiple cultures, languages
   and literatures. As a consequence, his influence on composers both
   during his lifetime and after his death was, and remains, considerable.

Compositional innovations

   Stravinsky began re-thinking his use of the motif and ostinato as early
   as The Firebird ballet, but his use of these elements reached its full
   flowering in The Rite of Spring.

   Motivic development, that is using a distinct musical phrase that is
   subsequently altered and developed throughout a piece of music, has its
   roots in the sonata form of Mozart's age. The first great innovator in
   this method was Beethoven; the famous "fate motif" which opens Fifth
   Symphony and reappears throughout the work in surprising and refreshing
   permutations is a classic example. However, Stravinsky's use of motivic
   development was unique in the way he permutated his motifs. In the
   "Rite of Spring" he introduces additive permutations, that is,
   subtracting or adding a note to a motif without regard to changes in
   meter.

   The same ballet is also notable for its relentless use of ostinati. The
   most famous passage, as noted above, is the eighth note ostinato of the
   strings accented by eight horn that occurs in the section Auguries of
   Spring (Dances of the Young Girls). This is perhaps the first instance
   in music of extended ostinato which is neither used for variation nor
   for accompaniment of melody. At various other times in the work
   Stravinsky also pits several ostinati against one another without
   regard to harmony or tempo, creating a pastiche, a sort of musical
   equivalent of a Cubist painting. These passages are notable not only
   for this pastiche-quality but also for their length: Stravinsky treats
   them as whole and complete musical sections.

   Such techniques foreshadowed by several decades the minimalist works of
   composers such as Terry Riley and Steve Reich.

Neoclassicism

   Stravinsky was not the first practitioner of the Neoclassical style; in
   fact, the German composer Richard Strauss might be its first and
   greatest example (he composed the Mozartian Der Rosenkavalier in 1910,
   as Stravinsky was just beginning the works of his Russian period).
   Others, such as Max Reger, were composing in the manner of Bach long
   before Stravinsky, but certainly the latter is a brilliant
   Neo-classical musician. The Neoclassical style would be later adopted
   by composers as diverse as Darius Milhaud and Aaron Copland. Sergei
   Prokofiev once chided Stravinsky for his Neoclassical mannerisms,
   though sympathetically, as Prokofiev had broken similar musical ground
   in his Symphony No. 1, "Classical" of 1916-17.

   Stravinsky announced his new style in 1923 with the stripped-down and
   delicately scored Octet for winds. The clear harmonies, looking back to
   the Classical music era of Mozart and Bach, and the simpler
   combinations of rhythm and melody were a direct response to the
   complexities of the Second Viennese School. Stravinsky may have been
   preceded in these devices by earlier composers such as Erik Satie, but
   no doubt when Copland was composing his Appalachian Spring ballet he
   was taking Stravinsky as his model.

   Certainly by the late 1920s and 1930s, Neoclassicism as an accepted
   modern genre was prevalent throughout art music circles around the
   world. Ironically, it was Stravinsky himself who announced the death of
   Neoclassicism, at least in his own work if not for the world, with the
   completion of his opera The Rake's Progress in 1951. A sort of final
   statement for the style, the opera was largely ridiculed as too
   "backward looking" even by those who had lauded the new style only
   three decades earlier.

Quotation and pastiche

   While the use of musical quotation was by no means new, Stravinsky
   composed pieces which distort individual works by earlier composers. An
   early example of this is his Pulcinella of 1920, in which he used the
   music of Giovanni Pergolesi as source material, at times quoting it
   directly and at other times reinventing it. He developed the technique
   further in the ballet The Fairy's Kiss of 1928, based on the
   music—mostly piano pieces—of Tchaikovsky.

   Later examples of distorted quotation include Stravinsky's use of
   Schubert in Circus Polka (1942) and "Happy Birthday to You" in Greeting
   Prelude (1955).

Use of folk material

   There were other composers in the early 20th century who collected and
   augmented their native folk music and used these themes in their work.
   Two notable examples are Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály. Yet in Le Sacre
   du Printemps we see Stravinsky again innovating in his use of folk
   themes. He strips these themes to their most basic outline, melody
   alone, and often contorts them beyond recognition with additive notes,
   inversions, diminutions, and other techniques. He did this so well, in
   fact, that only in recent scholarship, such as in Richard Taruskin's
   Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works Through
   Mavra ISBN 0-520-07099-2, have analysts uncovered the original source
   material for some of the music in The Rite.

Orchestral innovations

   The late 19th century and early 20th century was a time ripe with
   orchestral innovation. Composers such as Anton Bruckner and Gustav
   Mahler were well regarded for their skill at writing for the medium.
   They, in turn, were influenced by the expansion of the traditional
   classical orchestra by Richard Wagner through his use of large forces
   and unusual instruments.

   Stravinsky continued this Romantic trend of writing for huge orchestral
   forces, especially in the early ballets. But it was when he started to
   turn away from this tendency that he began to innovate by introducing
   unique combinations of instruments. For example, in L'Histoire du
   Soldat (A Soldier's Tale) the forces used are clarinet, bassoon,
   cornet, trombone, violin, double bass and percussion, a very striking
   combination for its time (1918). This combining of distinct timbres
   would become almost a cliché in post-World War II classical music.
   Stravinsky was the first composer to score for two contrabassoons (The
   Rite of Spring) amongst this work's vast orchestral pallet.

   Another notable innovation of orchestral technique that can be
   partially attributed to Stravinsky is the exploitation of the extreme
   ranges of instruments. The most famous passage is the opening of the
   Rite of Spring where Stravinsky uses the extreme reaches of the bassoon
   to simulate the symbolic "awakening" of a spring morning.

   It must also be noted that composers such as Anton Webern, Alban Berg
   and Arnold Schoenberg were also exploring some of these orchestral and
   instrumental techniques in the early 20th century. Yet their influence
   on succeeding generations of composers was equaled if not exceeded by
   that of Stravinsky.

Criticism

   Erik Satie wrote an article about Igor Stravinsky, that was published
   in Vanity Fair (1922). Satie had met Stravinsky for the first time in
   1910. Satie's attitude towards the Russian composer is marked by
   deference, as can be seen from the letters he wrote him in 1922,
   preparing for the Vanity Fair article. With a touch of irony he
   concluded one of these letters "I admire you: are you not the Great
   Stravinsky? I am but little Erik Satie." In the published article Satie
   argued that measuring the "greatness" of an artist by comparing him to
   other artists, as if speaking about some "truth", is illusory: every
   piece of music should be judged on its own merits, not by comparing it
   to the standards of other composers. That was exactly what Jean Cocteau
   had done, when commenting deprecatingly on Stravinsky in his 1918 Le
   Coq et l'Arlequin.

   "All the signs indicate a strong reaction against the nightmare of
   noise and eccentricity that was one of the legacies of the war.... What
   has become of the works that made up the program of the Stravinsky
   concert which created such a stir a few years ago? Practically the
   whole lot are already on the shelf, and they will remain there until a
   few jaded neurotics once more feel a desire to eat ashes and fill their
   belly with the east wind." (Musical Times, London, October 1923, quoted
   in: Slonimsky, 1953).

   Composer Constant Lambert (1936) described pieces such as L'Histoire du
   Soldat (A Soldier's Tale) as containing "essentially cold-blooded
   abstraction". He continues, saying that the "melodic fragments in
   L'Histoire du Soldat are completely meaningless themselves. They are
   merely successions of notes that can conveniently be divided into
   groups of three, five, and seven and set against other mathematical
   groups", and the cadenza for solo drums is "musical purity...achieved
   by a species of musical castration". He compares Stravinsky's choice of
   "the drabbest and least significant phrases" to Gertrude Stein's:
   "Everday they were gay there, they were regularly gay there everyday"
   ("Helen Furr and Georgine Skeene", 1922), "whose effect would be
   equally appreciated by someone with no knowledge of English
   whatsoever".

   In his book Philosophy of Modern Music (1948) Theodor Adorno calls
   Stravinsky an acrobat, a civil servant, a tailor's dummy, hebephrenic,
   psychotic, infantile, fascist, and devoted to making money. Part of the
   composer's error, in Adorno's view, was his neo-classicism, but more
   important was his music's "pseudomorphism of painting," playing off of
   le temps espace (space) rather than le temps durée (duration) of Henri
   Bergson. "One trick characterizes all of Stravinsky's formal endeavors:
   the effort of his music to portray time as in a circus tableau and to
   present time complexes as though they were spatial. This trick,
   however, soon exhausts itself." His "rhythmic procedures closely
   resemble the schema of catatonic conditions. In certain schizophrenics,
   the process by which the motor apparatus becomes independent leads to
   infinite repetition of gestures or words, following the decay of the
   ego."

List of works

   Although Stravinsky is best known for his stage works, in particular
   his ballets, his compositions cover a diverse range of musical forms.
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