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Igor Stravinsky and Modern 20th Century Music
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Igor Stavinsky
"I know that the twelve notes in each octave and the variety of
rhythm offer me opportunities that all of human genius will never exhaust."
"The real composer thinks about his work the whole time; he is not
always conscious of this, but he is aware of it later when he suddenly knows
what he will do."
The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are
taught to have too much respect for music they should be taught to love it
instead.
In order to create there must be a dynamic force, and what force
is more potent than love?
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Born in 1882 in Oranienbaum, Russia, a city southwest of St. Petersburg,
Stravinsky was rooted in the nationalistic school that drew inspiration from
Russia's beautifully expressive folk music. His greatest musical influence was
his teacher, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov. The colorful, fantastic orchestration
that Stravinsky brought to his folk song-inspired melodies was clearly derived
from Rimsky-Korsakov. But the primitive, offbeat rhythmic drive he added was
entirely his own. The result was a music never before heard in a theater or
concert hall. This Russian period contained ballets most notably
Petrushka, Firebird, and Rite of Spring.
In 1939 he fled the war in Europe for the U.S. Over the years, Stravinsky
experimented with virtually every technique of 20th century music: tonal,
polytonal and 12-tone serialism. He reinvented and personalized each form while
adapting the melodic styles of earlier eras to the new times. In the end, his
own musical voice always prevailed. Stravinsky's audaciously innovative works
confirmed his status as the leading composer of the day, a position he hardly
relinquished until his death nearly 60 years later.
Stravinsky's compositions may be placed into one of the three stylistic periods:
A Russian period, a Neo-classic period looking back to Mozart and Bach and a
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Serial period influenced by the works of Arnold Schoenberg.
In 1951, Stravinsky began using the twelve-tone system which Arnold Schoenberg
had devised in his works. He used the new techniques over the final twenty
years of his life to write works that were briefer and of greater rhythmic,
harmonic, and textural complexity than his earlier music. Their intricacy
notwithstanding, these pieces share traits with all of Stravinsky's earlier
output; rhythmic energy, the construction of extended melodic ideas out of a
few cells comprising only two or three notes, and clarity of form,
instrumentation, and of utterance.
Stravinsky made orchestral inovations by introducing unique combinations of
instruments. For example, he used clarinet, bassoon, cornet, trombone, violin,
double bass and percussion, a very striking combination for 1918.
Another innovation of orchestral technique 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.
DH
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