We often assume, or pretend, that categories are there to be transcended, and perhaps some ought to be. Race and nation, both blood soaked, might be nice candidates for elimination. But without categories there would be nothing to help us sort out nature’s “blooming buzzing confusion,” as William James put it.
So how to slot Stravinsky, who spent the first 28 years of his life in Russia, the next 29 in Switzerland and France, and the last 32 in America?
The New York Philharmonic has no doubts. Its current festival is called The Russian Stravinsky, though it will include works composed in every country he inhabited. Its advertisements promise to “reveal how, even as he became the world’s most famous composer - emigrating to Paris, Hollywood and, finally, New York City’s Upper East Side - the colorful, passionate pulse of Stravinsky’s Russian heart never waned.”
Not everyone agreed with this while Stravinsky lived; and among the most vociferous dissenters was Stravinsky. Is the orchestra’s claim just hype, or is there some Russian essence that binds his career?
Not even Stravinsky could deny the Russianness of his first period. The young Stravinsky rode the crest of a craze for Russian music and scenic art as the protagonist of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.
Later, during World War I, which Stravinsky waited out in neutral Switzerland, homesickness brought on his most heartfelt bout of musical nationalism, producing “Les Noces,” the choral ballet that apotheosized a Russian peasant wedding.
But after the Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik coup, Stravinsky decided he would never go home. Convinced that he had to stop representing himself as Russian, he declared himself a composer of “pure music.”
After World War II Stravinsky embraced serialism, the most abstract method of composition available at the time. You couldn’t get less Russian than that, it seemed. And until relatively recently that was the verdict on the later Stravinsky. Being Russian was a matter of behavior, and we can change that. Can’t we?
But recent studies have thrown new light on his behavior. Current conceptions of Stravinsky’s music date from 1963, when the American composer Arthur Berger published an epochmaking article, “Problems of Pitch Organization in Stravinsky.” Taking as his starting point a theme from “Les Noces,” he laid out all of its notes as a scale, and a striking pattern emerged: they were spaced alternately a whole step and a half step apart. Because there were eight notes in the scale, Mr. Berger christened it “octatonic.”
He showed various ways in which harmonies could be derived from this scale: and lo and behold, the same harmonies turned up wherever he looked in the early works of Stravinsky.
The octatonic scale had a considerable history in Russia, where it was known as the Rimsky-Korsakov scale, named after Stravinsky’s teacher . (Earlier it had been used by Liszt, from whom Rimsky appropriated it, and by Schubert, from whom Liszt took it.)
So what makes a Russian a Russian? By citizenship, Stra vinsky was not Russian after 1918. But musically, he thought the way he was trained to think; and he was trained in Russia.
He went in directions nobody dreamed he’d go while he lived at home, but as he told a reporter for Komsomolskaya Pravda in Moscow in 1962, during an 80th-birthday visit to his homeland: “I have spoken Russian all my life. I think in Russian, my way of expressing myself is Russian. Perhaps this is not immediately apparent in my music, but it is latent there, a part of its hidden nature.”
By RICHARD TARUSKIN
ANDREA MOHIN/THE NEW YORK TIMES; BELOW, NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC ARCHIVES
“Les Noces,” above, as performed by Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montreal, expresses Igor Stravinsky’s Russianness. But the composer later renounced his homeland’s musical heritage.
