Igor Stravinsky Two Prolific Serial Compositions:
Agon & In Memoriam Dylan Thomas
Elizabeth DeRoulet Kansas State University Fall Semester 2015
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Biographical Information on Igor Stravinsky
Igor Stravinsky(17 June 18826 April 1971) was the third son of Anna
Kholodovsky and Fyodor Stravinsky. Stravinsky’s mother was the daughter of a high ranking official in the Ministry of Estates in Kiev. She grew up with four sisters whom she would visited from time to time for summer vacation with her husband and family.
Anna was a good domestic singer and fluent pianist. She was a prude wife and strick mother with her three children. In 1874 Anna and Fyodor were married in Kiev when they were 19 and 30 years old, respectively. In the 1790s, the Stravinsky family migrated southwards from Poland to what is now SouthEastern Belarus. In Poland, the
Stravinsky’s held an extensive lineage as senators and landowners, but the partition of
Poland stripped them of their lands and former wealth. Fyodor Stravinsky’s career in music was quite unexpected. He was not raised in a particularly musical household; his mother being an amature vocalist and his father a drunk womanizer who eventually walked out on his family. Thus, there was little hope and ambition invested in the success of the young Fyodor. In the mid1860s, Fyodor was studying law in Odessa, Kiev when money started running out. It was during this time that Fyodor discovered his musical talent for singing and was awarded a scholarship to the Conservatory in St Petersburg.
Fyodor soon captivated the Russian operatic world as the greatest bassbaritone of his generation. Fyodor’s success in the musical world made significant contributions to the environment of the large secondfloor flat on the Kryukov Canal, where Igor Stravinsky grew up.
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Igor lived a comfortable life in his family home near Mariinsky and was often graced with the company of composers like RimskyKorsakov, Borodin, and Mussorgsky as well as other prominent conductors and music journalists. He, like his mother, was a skilled pianist and began taking lessons from her at the age of nine. Igor had a wealth of musical knowledge available in his home; from his mother’s piano skills, to his father’s acquaintances and music library, which included an extensive Russian repertoire as well as works by Bizet, Boito, Gounod, Meyerbeer, Mozart, Rossini, and Wagner. Influenced by these works and composers, Stravinsky began to form his own opinions on music composition. In a 1957 interview for NBC, Stravinsky tells American conductor, Robert
Craft about his earliest dabblings in composition:
“The man who makes, sings. I invented I remember, CDEG and the F came after the second beat. An uncle who was sitting beside me at the piano asked me, ‘What are you playing, you start so decently, but when you jump up...’ I said, My dear uncle, that is my invention, Let me alone." 1
Events such as this would become a reoccurring theme in response to Stravinsky’s music throughout his lifetime. Early in his studies, Stravinsky was especially enamoured by the works of Richard Wagner, particularly, Rienzi, Lohengrin, and Parsifal. Although Stravinsky may or may not have seen Wagner performed during his youth, the teen spent many of his father’s performances at a variety of operas in the family box at the opera house. As the son of Russia’s premier operatic bassbaritone vocalist, Igor surely witnessed many monumental performances that undoubtedly shaped his early compositional style, however, none of his work from before 1898 survives.
1 Robert Craft A Conversation with Igor Stravinsky.New York, NY: NBC Wisdom Series. Cambridge Educational. Meridian Education. 8 minutes, 30 seconds.
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In december of 1899, Stravinsky, who wanted a career in music, began taking piano lessons from Leokadiya Kashpervoa, a powerful and highly skilled student of
Anton Rubinstein. One year later, in November of 1901, Stravinsky began harmony and counterpoint lessons, first with Fedir Akimenko and three months later with Vasily
Kalafaty, both former pupils of RimskyKorsakov. It is speculated that Igor’s music lessons with Kashpervoa, Akimenko, and Kalafaty were given with the understanding that he would study law so that he would have a secure, foolproof, and financially stable career to fall back on.2 In the autumn of 1902, following the death of his eldest brother in
1897 and his father’s battle with cancer, Stravinsky began his studies as a law student at
St Petersburg University despite his desire to pursue music.
Through a friendship developed while at university, Stravinsky came to present
RimskyKorsakov with a portfolio of miniatures and sketches. Rimsky was so intrigued with Igor’s work that he advised Stravinsky to continue music lessons, but wait to enrol as a music student to avoid being discouraged from his lack of formal training.
RimskyKorsakov also offered to take Stravinsky on as his student to which Stravinsky followed up on and began lessons a year later. Much to his mother’s protest, he quickly grew from his studies with RimskyKorsakov through experiences like attending rehearsals and performances of the Philharmonic orchestra, Russian Symphony Concerts, and concerts by the Russian Music Society. This exposure accompanied by evening meetings with composition intellectuals was a stimulating time for Stravinsky that helped
2Stephen Walsh, Igor Stravinsky, Grove Music Online. Oxford Online. University Press.
4 to define his modern sound and unique orchestration. Following the death of his beloved teacher, RimskyKorsakov, Stravinsky’s work began to gain more recognition via a string of public premiers and a petition for publication by the house of Jürgenson.
Because of this recognition and previous success with commissioned works,
Stravinsky received a telegram from Diaghilev commissioning a piece to compliment a ballet that was met with negative criticism. Firebird was the work that Diaghilev commissioned and it was an exotic tale that both enamoured and enraged audiences.
Firebird changed Stravinsky’s life and altered the course of 20th century music by the very sounding of its premier. Audiences were put on edge by the complexity of this production in part because of its deliberate and constant dissonance,“If an interesting construction exists in The Firebird it will be found in the treatment of intervals, for example in the major and minor thirds in the Berceuse,in the Introduction, and in the Kastchei music.”3
3 David Smyth, Stravinsky’s Second Crisis: Reading the Early Serial Sketches, Perspectives of New Music, 2nd edition, vol. 32, peer reviewed (1 July 1999). p.119
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Figure 1Berceuse from “Firebird Suite”, measures 9164
Stravinsky went on to complete more Diaghilev ballet commissions and through studying these scores it became apparent that music he was releasing was composed with a specific formula in mind. The piano score of Firebird was completed between March 21st and April 3rd, the orchestral score on May 18th and the first performance of the 45 minute ballet took place on June 25th at the Opéra in Paris. The orchestration rhythmic texture that emerged from Firebird would be later noted as iconically Stravinskian:
“It was true that, at orchestral rehearsals, Stravinsky had to explain the music to the bewildered players, and that, at the first rehearsal, the sonorities were so unexpected that dancers missed their entrances. As for the music, Stravinsky had borrowed the old RimskyKorsakov idea of depicting evil or magic in structured chromatics, good or human in diatonics or folksong. ”5
4 Igor Stravinsky, In Memoriam Dylan Thomas, p.3. 5 Walsh, Stephen. “Stravinsky, Igor.” Grove Music Online. Oxford Online. University Press.
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Stravinsky’s influence from and on other composers who worked for Diaghilev stretched the bounds of 20th century music. The work that Diaghilev commissioned evolved into a genre that is know as Ballet Russes(Russian Ballet) and featured commissions from progressive contemporary composers such as Ravel(Daphinis Et Chloe), Stravinsky(Firebird, Petrushka, The Rite of Spring, Strauss(Josephslegende), and Debussy(Jeux).6 Stravinsky’s sudden fame after Firebird acted as a campaign for recognition from Ravel, Debussy, and Saite and helped to solidify him as a prolific 20th century composer.
In 1914 Stravinsky felt that he had expended the artistic potential of Russia and was also disheartened by harsh reviews of another work of his, The Rite of Spring. So after he had fallen ill with typhoid fever, his wife first wife,Katya with tuberculosis, and the newly opened Free Theatre was a flop, the Stravinsky’s moved to Leysin in the high east Alps of Lake Geneva. Igor would return once more to his home in Ustilug to collect a few belongings as well as material for a new ballet in the works. During his exile in
Switzerland, Stravinsky began to expand of his style of thickly layered counterpoint, shifting the natural accents of speech, rhythmic tiers, and mixed instrumentation.
6 Michael Kennedy. “Ballet” The Oxford Dictionary of Music, 2nd ed., Oxford University Press.
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Figure 2 The Rite of Spring, measures 81887
His compositional output during this time was performed with the atmosphere of a traveling theatre troupe and reflected the quest for modern and contemporary art amidst the war that was ongoing. The war was not kind to the Stravinsky family. Igor continued to compose, but was not paid for any of his work with the exception of the Polignac commission which was dedicated to Eugenia Errazuriz, a former Chilean Patroness of
Picasso. His works continued to go unnoticed by the public, but the were essential to his personal development. The pieces composed during this time allowed Stravinsky to merge artful Russian dances with modern parodies and was a distraction from his
7 Igor Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring, p.12.
8 family’s deplorable financial situation. Soon after the war ended, Stravinsky picked up a new commission from Diaghilev; some scholars view this partnership as Diaghilev’s way of sidetracking Stravinsky from the payment contract drafted for his earlier work. After stabilizing himself in France, Stravinsky became restless, yet again and set off for his first tour in the United States in 1935. Stravinsky concertized from coasttocoast: “in which he either conducted or accompanied Dushkin in (among other cities) New York, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles (where he visited Hollywood studios), Minneapolis, Chicago, St Louis, Fort Worth, and Washington DC.”8
Stravinsky would return to the United States on three occasions for more cross country tours. His fourth tour was taken with a heavy heart as he mourned the loss of his first wife, Katya, his 29 year old daughter, Lyudmila (both to tuberculosis) and his 84 year old mother. Stravinsky made this final trip without his two surviving children. Serialism, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky
In 1940, Vera Sudeyknia, Stravinsky’s European mistress, arrived in the United
States and the two were married in March. During the summer of 1940, Vera and Igor filed for US citizenship through Mexico and were accepted as such in 1945. The couple settled in a primarily Russian community in California where Stravinsky would be hard pressed to met an American counterpart. The area that the lived in was a popular spot for other European artists to settle, but it lacked the sophistication of Paris and Switzerland.
Stravinsky’s first few months as a citizen of the United States were a very financially straining time. The royalties he earned from his compositions in Europe were dwindling and he was not receiving any new income from American commissions.
8 Stephen Walsh, Igor Stravinsky, Grove Music Online. Oxford Online. University Press.
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Audiences in the United States found his work to be overwhelmingly modern, but moving to California was a phase just like any other that served as the inspiration for a new compositional period, his second crisis:
“It is both astonishing and perfectly normal that Igor Stravinsky passed nearly half of his mature life here [California]. Astonishing, given the distance, both geographic and spiritual, from the St. Petersburg of his youth and the Paris of his first fame; normal, when we place the path of his composing career alongside this lowlying, nearendless tide of urban Southern California.Los Angeles, after all, is where Julia Jean Mildred Turner became Lana and a part of history. When asked, this city acts as a shower bath, washing away an old life with the turn of a handle and asking no questions about the new clothes acquired afterward. Stravinsky changed musical identities at least four times, his nationality twice.”9
Stravinsky described his first crisis as the loss of the Russian language and music due to the turmoil of World War I. The second crisis did not occur until after composing The Rake’s Progress, which inspired him to begin making drastic adjustments to his compositional style. What delivered him to this style turnaround stems from two instances. The first was an acquaintance that he met and befriended in Europe in the
1912, Arnold Schoenberg. Stravinsky and Schoenberg attended each other's rehearsals and performances, and were strong influences on one another, but had a falling out that left them to be life long enemies. It was through Schoenberg, who spearheaded atonal music using serial composition, that Stravinsky came to know serialism and first began integrating: “an esoteric technique that has attracted composers since the late Middle
10 Ages." T he Second instance that changed the course of Stravinsky’s compositional
9 Bernard Holland. "A composer in California, at ease if not at home; Stravinsky, a rare bird amid the palms." New York Times. Academic OneFile. 11 Mar. 2001. 10 C handler Carter. “The Rake’s Progress and Stravinsky’s Return: The Composer’s Evolving Approach to Setting Text.” Journal of the American Musicological Society. Vol. 63, No. 3. University of California Press:Fall 2010
10 career is marked by the completion of The Rake's Progress, which took him three years to compose and was completed in 1951. Stravinsky premiered the threeact opera in
Venice before traveling to Germany where he listened to new recordings of Webern and
Schoenberg’s work. Stravinsky was disheartened by the European youth’s lack of interest in his music and fell out of his daily habit of composing for six months:
“The Rake's Progress has been criticized as musically too predictable, too much the grand master's summatory neoclassical masterpiece, with its recipe of arias and recitatives (with harpsichord – though a piano was used in the first production)...It has been argued that Stravinsky was too tolerant of a scenario which, while it certainly dealt with the cyclic theme of death and rebirth so dear to his theatrical heart, imported too much generic and sentimental detail.”11
Following this brief hiatus, Stravinsky quickly wrote the Cantata Cantus Cancrizans. This piece is most notable for the accents on unstressed syllables in speech, and stylized melismas: "Even as the setting of “Tomorrow shall be my dancing day” entails a more complex procedure than mere metrical displacement, it clearly builds on Stravinsky’s forty years of placing and displacing accents."12
11 Walsh, Stephen. “Stravinsky, Igor.” Grove Music Online. Oxford Online. University Press. 12 ibid
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Figure 3 Cantata Cantus Cancrizans, measure 2913
Although Stravinsky had done experimental work of this nature throughout his career, it was never to the extent that is seen in his compositional output from 1950 onward.
In the 1920s, Arnold Schoenberg began composing works that diverged from the path of tonal music. Audiences found it difficult to understand and digest the atonal music they were hearing. Schoenberg’s technique, Serialism, stripped notes from a scale classification(do,re, mi.etc.) and instead provided a stringent structure that dictated how the composer should attend to melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic lines:
“[Serialism is] A method of composition in which a fixed permutation, or series, of elements is referential (i.e. the handling of those elements in the composition is governed, to some extent and in some manner, by the series) Most commonly the elements arranged in the series are the 12 notes of the equaltempered scale.”14
After the creation of this process, Schoenberg utilized the technique in all subsequent compositions. More composers began to work in this style, the pallet for serialism began
13 Paul Griffiths. "Serialism." Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press. 14 ibid
12 to expand in every direction beyond pitch, note duration, dynamics, and timbre. The first composers besides Schoenberg to use this concept regularly were Berg and Webern, two of Schoenberg’s understudies. None however, were as notable as Stravinsky. Stravinsky began manipulating the tone rows to create a work with more depth:
“serialism cannot be described as constituting by itself a system of composition, still less a style. Nor is serialism of some sort incompatible with tonality. The basic convention in serial composition is that the pitch successions in any portion of the music should be the whole or part of one or more statements of a series. This leaves undefined the registers at which the pitch classes are presented (and questions of change in register from one serial statement to another), what part of the series is projected linearly and what part vertically, how many statements of the series are made concurrently.”15
Stravinsky’s musical thumbprint was always changing, but stagnant at the same time; changing due to the many teachers and academics he studied with, but stagnant because he always managed to preserve the basic elements of timbre and texture that were so recognizable, even at first listen. This is due in part to Stravinsky’s lifelong “devotion to strings, cycles, and chains of intervals, his fascinations with palindromic constructions, and his infatuation with musical ciphers constitute related strands.”16 Stravinsky's style is characterized by his constantly changing approach to music, but consistently unique timbre and texture.
15 Paul Griffiths. "Serialism." Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press. 16 ibid
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Agon
In 1954, Stravinsky began the composition of his final ballet, Agon but was interrupted to write In Memoriam: Dylan Thomas. The ballet was completed just two months before his 75th birthday on April 27th 1957 and was premiered on the occasion in
Royce Hall, UCLA, Los Angeles. Stravinsky was partial to driving the creative decisions involved with all of his scores and Agon is his most complete realization of this preference. Every movement, with the exception of the prelude, interludes, and
PasdeDeux, are headed with stage directions for the dancers.
Figure 4 Agon: Ballet for Twelve Dancers, I. PasdeQuatre, measure (pick up)317
17 Igor Stravinsky. Agon: Ballet for Twelve Dancers, I. PasdeQuatre. p.1.
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It is a plotless ballet, art for art's sake some would say, and Stravinsky’s first work ever to use a twelvetone series, and also incorporates a variety of serial motives such as tetrachords, hexachords and their permutations; imitation; chromaticism; and variations. For instance, Stravinsky uses three tetrachords (Eb D E F, C B Db Bb, and Ab
A G Gb) and the twenty four possible permutations in the second movement of the ballet,
Double PasdeQuatre.
Figure 5 Agon: Ballet for Twelve Dancers, II. Double PasdeQuatre, measure 1218
18 Igor Stravinsky, Agon: Ballet for Twelve Dancers, II. Double PasdeQuatre. p. 9.
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One aspect of Stravinsky’s music that was maintained throughout his lifetime was his adherence to detail. Agon challenged him to exercise his interest in using the full possibilities of atonal palette by planning:“the precise pitches of his melodies and motives, as well as the exact distances and directions his lines traverse.”19 Each movement in the ballet has different instrumentation with the exception of the first and last piece,which are the same, and the prelude and two interludes, also the same, but with different instrumentation.
In Memoriam: Dylan Thomas
In Memoriam Dylan Thomas is Stravinsky’s first completely serial work and is based on a 5 tone row. The work was originally commissioned for Stravinsky to compose the music and Dylan Thomas to write the poem. Dylan Wrote “Don’t go Gentle into that
Good Night” was written for the funeral of Dylan Thomas’s father. The poem is written using an iambic pentameter rhyme scheme that reflects the significance of five in In Memoriam: Dylan Thomas.
19 David Smyth, Stravinsky’s Second Crisis: Reading the Early Serial Sketches, Perspectives of New Music, 2nd edition, vol. 32, peer reviewed (1 July 1999). p.119
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Figure 6 In Memoriam: Dylan Thomasforward material20
The poem is considered to be his best work. Due Thomas’s sudden death, Stravinsky hastily finished the Memoriam, which he referred to as a dirgecanon because the piece is both sullen and grave like a dirge and includes multiple canons within the piece. The piece(which was performed twice on the program) was premiered in a memorial concert for Dylan Thomas on September 20, 1954. In the premier of this piece, there are a few deviations from the 5 tone row because Stravinsky felt that his ear was more qualified than a row chart to discern what harmony needed to occur.
20 Igor Stravinsky. In Memoriam: Dylan Thomas. p. ii.
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Figure 7 In Memoriam: Dylan Thomas, measure 242721
In its final published version, In Memoriam Dylan Thomas contains no deviations from the serial plan.
The construction of the piece harmonically is based off of the 5 tone row, but the significance of 5 is integrated into many structural elements such as meter and phrase length. In the Prelude, Stravinsky alternates between 25 beat cannons in 5/4 and 16 beat ritornellos in an alternating 3/2 2/2 pattern. This type of structure is applied to the entire piece and can even be seen in the relationship between movements: “The proportion of total duration of the canons in the prelude and the canons in the postlude is 3:2. The proportion of total duration of the ritornellos in the prelude and postlude is the opposite,
2:3.” 22 One way that Stravinsky seems to break this pattern by overlapping the last notes of the second and fourth canons with the first two beats of the ritornell. He also shifts the
21 Igor Stravinsky. In Memoriam: Dylan Thomas. p.7. 22 Chandler Carter. “The Rake’s Progress and Stravinsky’s Return: The Composer’s Evolving Approach to Setting Text.” Journal of the American Musicological Society. Vol. 63, No. 3. University of California Press:Fall 2010
18 pattern in the final cannon by beginning on an off beat, which resulted in his decision to begin the final ritornello two beats before the downbeat to adjust for the discrepancy. In the postlude, this structure is reversed as well as the roles of the instrumentation.
Figure 7In Memoriam Dylan Thomas, Dirge Canons, measures 51023
Conclusion
Igor Stravinsky’s entire compositional output was essential to the development of 20th century music in Europe, Russia, and the United States. Although not formally trained until later in his life, Stravinsky created unique music that was both rhythmically and harmonically complex. His early work demonstrates a sophistication that would not be understood by the majority of audiences and composers alike, but he continued to evolve
23 Igor Stravinsky, In Memoriam Dylan Thomas, p.3.
19 despite those who were in opposition to his work. The intriguing, sometimes otherworldly quality of his music amounted to a significant contribution to ballet and theatre repertoire that carried over into his work in the United States. This well established and timetested medium of composition would be perfectly infused with
Schoenberg’s technique of Serialism.