Stravinsky’s Ikons: The Influence of Seventeenth-Century Russian Polyphonic Chant on Stravinsky’s Sacred Oeuvre

A Thesis Submitted to the

Division of Graduate Studies and Research of the University of Cincinnati

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Music

in the Division of Composition, Musicology, and Theory of the College-Conservatory of Music

2008

by

Eric Thomas Johnson

B.M. Vanderbilt University, 2005

Committee Chair: Dr. David Carson Berry

ABSTRACT

This study examines the influence of early seventeenth-century Russian polyphonic chant on Stravinsky’s Ave Maria, Symphony of Psalms, and Mass. While some scholars have suggested the possible influence of Russian Orthodox Church music on the composer’s Slavonic liturgical works (i.e., the three Russian Sacred Choruses) this study suggests Russian Orthodox musical influence in Stravinsky’s Latin and Catholic liturgical works.

This Russian Church musical style is characterized by a unique form of polyphony that features irregularity of meter, free use of dissonance, and unusual voice leading (compared to the principles of voice leading codified by Fux). Sonorities from this style are rich in harmonic seconds, fifths, and sevenths, which generate trichords commonly found in Stravinsky’s harmonic palette. These trichords function in significant ways in Stavinsky’s sacred works, marking a differentiation between Western Catholic and Eastern Orthodox influences.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. David Berry, for his guidance and crucial adjustments; he was invaluable to the success of this argument, acting both as advisor and source for theoretical information. I would also like to thank Dr. Robert Zierolf and Dr. Mary Sue

Morrow for their suggestions for revisions. Though not listed at the front of this document, Dr.

Catherine Losada was a tremendous source of help to refine much of the argument as well as to broaden the amount of research necessary for this topic. Finally, the most influential source of inspiration for this entire project was my wife, Amanda, who without her positive encouragement, this project would have never been completed.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………..1

Chapter One: The Dichotomy of Stravinsky’s Faith…………………………………………………14

Chapter Two: An Outline History of Russian Church Music………………………………………..25

Chapter Three: Characteristics of Early Russian Orthodox Polyphony……………………………….39

Chapter Four: Analysis of “Bogoroditse dievo” and “Ave Maria”…………………………………..53

Chapter Five: Analysis of Symphony of Psalms……………………………………………………..67

Chapter Six: Analysis of Stravinsky’s Mass………………………………………………………..78

Chapter Seven: Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………94

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………..98

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Introduction

[H]is religious outlook is . . . ready to see the characteristic traditions of the Eastern and Western Christian Churches brought together under the banner of catholic universality.1 Roman Vlad

Igor Stravinsky was one of the most prolific composers of the twentieth century, with works embracing many of the period’s major movements, including neoclassicism and serialism.

Accordingly, his music has received attention in many areas of scholarship, both theoretical and musicological. However, research on the composer’s religious nature and sacred works seems to have been undertaken much less often than research on his Russian-era and neoclassical works.

A few scholars have probed the former topics, but usually with the intent of demonstrating the presence and profundity of his religious devotion, rather than of exploring specific theological or musical ramifications.

Stravinsky’s Mass (1944-48), for example, is a sacred work that should be explored in terms of style, influence, and liturgical practice. As a devout member of the Russian Orthodox

Church, the composer’s intention behind composing a piece designed for liturgical use in the

Catholic Church is not immediately apparent. Comments made about the Mass by Stravinsky, as well as by his devoted assistant, Robert Craft, reveal stylistic influences from another age and practice. This is not surprising, as the piece was written near the end of Stravinsky’s neoclassical period, in which past influences were a sine qua non. One might assume that the composer’s intention would include influences from other Catholic masses from different periods; but there are aspects of the composer’s Mass that do not seem to stem from Western traditions. Turning instead to Russian musical traditions, there is a wealth of sacred material that existed before any

1 Roman Vlad, Stravinsky, trans. Frederick and Ann Fuller (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), 153.

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Western influence. Specifically, early polyphony from the seventeenth century seems to share many things in common with Stravinsky’s own compositional practice, not only in the Mass but also—and especially—in his Russian Sacred Choruses.2 While some scholars have attempted to show certain general influences on Stravinsky, from the Catholic musical tradition, perhaps no one has attempted to find correlations between this indigenous Russian Orthodox polyphonic chant and his sacred works; indeed, I did not find such research when preparing the present argument.

I propose that there were influences from seventeenth-century Russian polyphonic chant not only on the Russian Sacred Choruses (which were intended by Stravinsky to be used liturgically in the Russian Orthodox Church), but also on some of the composer’s other sacred works, especially the Mass. These influences stem from the musical activity in the Russian

Orthodox Church during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. During this period, a unique form of polyphony developed that is based upon chant. It is characterized primarily by irregularity of meter, free use of dissonance, and unusual voice-leading (that is, with respect to

Western norms, such as those codified by Fux in his 1725 treatise, Gradus ad Parnassum). In fact, while tertian harmonies are not lacking in this stylistic period, sonorities rich in harmonic seconds, fifths, and sevenths abound in the scores. These are all characteristics that can be found in Stravinsky’s sacred works. (The same characteristics may be found in certain non-sacred works as well, but this point will be addressed later, in Chapter Seven.)

2 These consist of “Otche nash” [Our Father] (1926), “Bogoroditse dievo” [Blessed Virgin] (1934), and “Simvol verї” [Symbol of Faith] (1932); all three were revised in 1949, reset in Latin, and retitled (respectively) “Pater noster,” “Ave Maria,” and “Credo.”

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Review of Prior Literature

Research on indigenous Russian Orthodox Church music began in the late nineteenth century in Russia and gained Western appeal in the twentieth century. There were four original histories of Russian Orthodox Church music written prior to the Soviet Revolution.3 Of these, D.

V. Razumovsky’s marks the earliest significant contribution to the scholarly study of early

Russian church music. In addition to these four early works, the general research and scholarship of Stepan Smolenskii should not be overlooked. Some of the leading scholars in Russian chant studies post-revolution, whose work is still considered valuable today, include Alfred Swan,4

Johann von Gardner,5 and Vladimir Morosan.6 These three—and especially the latter two— helped synthesize the previous scholarship into comprehensive texts that are appropriate for contemporary theoretical uses, as they make use of contemporary terminology and notation.

Morosan’s work was especially fruitful in building upon von Gardner’s research and providing resources for Westerners after the fall of the Soviet Union (as Morosan pointed out, during the period of Communism, sources on the history of Russian Orthodox music were generally unavailable to Westerners).7 Also during the Soviet era, there were three other scholars important

3 Johann von Gardner, Russian Church Singing Vol. 1: Orthodox Worship and Hymnography, translated by Vladimir Morosan (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1980), 135. The four early histories are as follows: (1) D. V. Razumovsky, Church singing in Russia, 3 vols. (Moscow: 1867-1869); (2) V. M. Metallov, Essay on the history of Orthodox church singing in Russia (Moscow: 1893); (3) A. A. Ignat’ev, The liturgical singing of the Orthodox Russian Church from the end of the sixteenth to the beginning of the eighteenth century (Kazan: 1916); and (4) D. Allemanov, A course of history of Russian church singing, Vol. 1 (Moscow: 1912) and Vol. 2 (Moscow: 1914).

4 Alfred J. Swan, Russian Music and its Sources in Chant and Folk-Song (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1973); and idem, “The Znamenny Chant of the Russian Church – Part I,” The Musical Quarterly 26, no. 2 (Apr. 1940): 232-43; “…Part II,” 26, no. 3 (Jul. 1940): 365-80; and “…Part III,” 26, no. 4 (Oct. 1940): 529-45.

5 von Gardner, vol. 1; and idem, Russian Church Singing, Vol 2: History from the Origins to the Mid- Seventeenth Century, translated and edited by Vladimir Morosan (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000).

6 Vladimir Morosan, “One Thousand Years of Russian Church Music,” Monuments of Russian Sacred Music: One Thousand Years of Russian Church Music, Series I, Vol. 1 (Washington D.C.: Musica Russica, 1991), xliii-lvi; and idem, Choral Performance in Pre-Revolutionary Russia, (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1986).

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to the field of Russian chant studies: Nikolai Findeisen,8 Maksim Brazhnikov,9 and Nikolai

Uspensky.10 The main sources used in the present research include those by Swan, von Gardner, and Morosan.

Some scholars have examined the religious nature of Stravinsky and his works. Of these,

Gilbert Amy11 and Robert Copeland12 are notable for the articles they have contributed. Both examined Stravinsky’s own statements of faith and on sacred music: Amy analyzed particular pieces in more detail, and Copeland demonstrated the specific parts of Stravinsky’s nature that made him Orthodox. Among the other scholars that have discussed the religious nature of

Stravinsky and his music are Robert Craft,13 Roman Vlad14 (a biographer who included a whole chapter on the religious nature of the composer), and Richard Taruskin.15 Indeed, Taruskin has directed much attention to Russian influences in Stravinsky’s music, and has provided evidence

7 Morosan, Choral Performance, xx.

8 Nikolai Findeisen, Ocherki po istorii muzyki v Rossii s drevneishikh vremen do kontsa XVIII veka (Essays on the History of Russian Music from Earliest Times to the End of the Eighteenth-Century), 1928. (publisher unknown).

9 Maksim Brazhnikov, Mnogogolosie znamennykh partitur (Polyphonic znamenny scores) (dissertation, institution unknown, 1940).

10 Nikolai Uspensky, Drevnerusskoe pevcheskoe iskusstvo (The art of ancient Russian chant), 2nd ed. (Moscow, 1971).

11 Gilbert Amy, “Aspects of the Religious Music of Igor Stravinsky,” Confronting Stravinsky, ed. Jann Pasler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986): 195-206.

12 Robert Copeland, “The Christian Message of Igor Stravinsky,” The Musical Quarterly 68, no. 4 (Oct. 1982): 563-79.

13 Craft has published many books with or about Stravinsky, most of which include the personal correspondence of the composer, most notably Robert Craft, Stravinsky: Selected Correspondence, vol. 1 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), vol. 2 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), and vol. 3 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985).

14 Vlad, Stravinsky.

15 Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 2 Volumes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); and idem, “Stravinsky and the Subhuman,” Defining Russia Musically (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997): 360-467.

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of Stravinsky’s interest in both the folk music and ancient church music of Russia (although

Taruskin’s attention to Stravinsky’s interest in ancient church music is limited to the Russian

Sacred Choruses). Two additional scholars have published theoretical and stylistic analyses of the composer’s Mass, which have been useful as a prerequisite in my own analysis: Elena

Malysheva16 and Kofi Awagu.17 Agawu’s analysis is based upon Schenkerian principles, and though it is grounded in a theory very foreign to the one I propose, Agawu acknowledged and examined many puzzling parts of the Mass that I intend to clarify in view of Russian Orthodox influences. Finally, Stravinsky’s own writings about his music, faith, and influences constitute a foundation of this research. Without his own testimony of faith and reasons for composition, it would have been difficult to even begin to understand the meaning, style, and message of his sacred output.

The last statement notwithstanding, Stravinsky’s own correspondence and books were not used without some reservations concerning both their frequent lack of consistency and the extent of his authorship. Laurence Davies has pointed out many of the problems with reading

Stravinsky’s autobiographical works:

No one reading the complete autobiographical works can fail to be struck by the contrasting interpretations occasionally put upon the same events; the radical amendments in the portrayal of certain individuals; the many reversed musical judgments; and most of all, the impression of subtle personality-changes having taken place in the author himself.18

In part, these problems stem from multiple authors for different works. For example, Poétique musicale (Poetics of Music) and Chroniques de ma vie (Chronicle of My Life, later titled An

16 Elena Malysheva, “On the Georgian Sources of the Mass,” Sovetskaia musyka no. 7 (1982): 92-4.

17 Kofi Agawu, “Stravinsky’s Mass and Stravinsky Analysis,” Music Theory Spectrum, xi (1989): 139-63.

18 Laurence Davies, “Stravinsky as Littérateur,” Music & Letters 49/2 (1968): 137.

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Autobiography) were ghost-written in various degrees.19 Indeed, Stravinsky later acknowledged the misattribution: “My autobiography and Poetics of Music, both written through other people, incidentally—Walter Nouvel and Roland-Manuel, respectively—are much less like me, in all my faults, than my ‘conversations’ [books]; or so I think.”20 Stravinsky chose Roland-Manuel to write the Harvard lectures for him (which evolved into Poétique musicale) because he was a professional musician and could speak French; Pierre Suvchinsky served as advisor on music in the Soviet Union and Russian translator for Stravinsky’s notes.21 According to Craft, Stravinsky had about 1,500 words in “verbal note-form,” but no actual prose appears in Poétique musicale that can be truly attributed to the composer.22 In Stravinsky’s prior quotation, he acknowledges the true authors of Poétique musicale and his autobiography, but he implies that the

“Conversations” books (credited to him and Craft) are more his own. This assertion was also supported by Craft himself, who insisted that the books were written mostly by the composer.23

However, Davies questions the authenticity of Stravinsky’s words, noting that “the impression left by the ‘Conversations’ is that most of the questions and answers have been studiously rehearsed beforehand.”24 In sum, although it may at times be difficult to discern Stravinsky’s

“own” views according to “his” writings, these important books were consulted and considered provisionally valid for the present arguments.

19 Robert Craft, Stravinsky: Glimpses of a Life (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992): 61.

20 Davies, 137.

21 Robert Craft, “Roland-Manuel and the ‘Poetics of Music,’” Perspectives of New Music 21/1,2 (1982-83): 489.

22 Craft, “Roland-Manuel,” 487.

23 Craft, Stravinsky: Glimpses…, 61.

24 Davies, 136.

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An Underexamined Issue

In my view, a problem with the existing scholarship on Stravinsky’s religiosity is the lack of attention paid to his works in terms of Russian Orthodoxy. Given that Stravinsky was raised

Orthodox—and chose later in life to become Orthodox again—it is difficult to understand why he chose to compose several works in Latin (one of which, the Mass, was liturgical), as well to adapt later editions of the Russian Sacred Choruses into Latin. Craft, who worked directly with

Stravinsky during the production of the Mass, asked pertinent questions regarding Stravinsky’s influences and reasons for composing in the Catholic tradition. The reason Stravinsky gave for composing a (Catholic) mass instead of its Orthodox counterpart (i.e., the Divine Liturgy), is the nature of the texture: a mass has a choral and instrumental texture, whereas instruments are forbidden in Orthodox services.25 Additionally, in his autobiography, Stravinsky gives an apologia for his usage of Latin (versus Slavonic, the liturgical language of the Russian Orthodox

Church). His defense was connected to the idea that Latin is a “dead” language—no longer spoken by a culture—whose words and phrases carry no modern connotations. This freed him to use the text for “purely phonetic material,” which allows the composer to “dissect it at will and concentrate all his attention on its primary constituent element—that is to say, on the syllable.”26

This focus on the syllable is part of a greater aspect of Stravinsky scholarship, notably, his notorious method of text setting. Explaining the composer’s method, Taruskin wrote, “No prosody is accepted anymore as a linguistic ‘given’; instead, the words are subjected to a searching process of experimental mauling until a shape is found that accords with Stravinsky’s

25 Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Expositions and Developments (London: Faber and Faber, 1959), 77.

26 Igor Stravinsky, Stravinsky: an Autobiography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1936), 128.

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musical intuitions.”27 The composer received a lot of criticism for his disregard for the natural stresses of a text, choosing instead to mold the words to his music.28 Perhaps the composer best explained his text-setting methods in the following:

In music, which is ordered time and sound, as opposite to the chaos of sound that exists in nature, there is always the syllable. Between it and the generalized sense—the mood that bathes the work—there is the word, which channels scattered thought and shores up rational meaning. Yet words, far from helping, constitute for the musician a burdensome intermediary. All I want [are] . . . syllables, fine strong syllables.29

While text setting is not the primary topic of the present argument, it is worthwhile to acknowledge the issue.30

Taruskin, in Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, acknowledges Russian Orthodox influences in the Russian Sacred Choruses; but he refutes a claim by Malysheva, in her article of

1982, that there were also Russian Orthodox musical influences in Stravinsky’s Mass. His objection is based upon the materials Stravinsky had in his personal library in the United States; he argues that Stravinsky had no Russian Orthodox musical materials available to consult while composing the Mass.31

Library content aside, there is enough evidence in Stravinsky’s writings (both prose and musical composition) and education to support the idea that he was knowledgeable about ancient

27 Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 1230.

28 Nicolas Slonimsky, Music Since 1900 (New York: Schirmer, 1994): 291.

29 Eric Walter White, Stravinsky: the Composer and His Works (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979): 534.

30 There are two other texts that were consulted and should be mentioned as part of this discussion: (1) Richard Taruskin, “Stravinsky’s ‘Rejoicing Discovery’ and What It Meant: In Defense of His Notorious Text Setting,” Stravinsky Retrospectives, ed. Ethan Haimo and Paul Johnson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987): 162-200; and (2) Ruth Zinar, “Stravinsky and His Latin Texts,” College Music Symposium 18/2 (1978): 17688.

31 Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 1621-23.

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Russian Orthodox music. In Themes and Conclusions, he admits a limited knowledge of Russian

Church music, and then goes on to write about the Russian Sacred Choruses: “I hoped to find deeper roots than those of the Russian Church composers who had merely tried to continue the

Venetian (Galuppi) style from Bortniansky.”32 In this passage he refers to a period of music in the eighteenth century, when the Italian composer, Baldassare Galuppi, had traveled to Russia and helped incorporate the Western European tonal tradition into the indigenous musical style.

This suggests that Stravinsky intended to “find deeper roots” in somewhat earlier music, perhaps the period of polyphonic development in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In addition to this statement by the composer, there is an important account by Carolyn Dunlop of activities and specific musicians at the Russian Court Chapel over the past several centuries that describes

Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov’s (Stravinsky’s teacher) position on Russian Church music.33

Dunlop’s book examined Rimsky-Korsakov’s role at the Court Chapel and found that he actively sought to reform the musical practices in the Russian Orthodox Church and to return to an earlier style pre-dating Western European influence. It is possible that his philosophy on church music and this earlier stylistic period of Russian polyphony were passed on to his pupil, Stravinsky.34

Description of Approach

To demonstrate the binary religious influences (Catholic and Orthodox) in Stravinsky’s sacred oeuvre, I will first discuss Stravinsky’s own approach to his faith and his early instruction

32 Igor Stravinsky, Themes and Conclusions (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 40.

33 Carolyn Dunlop, The Russian Court Chapel Choir 1796 – 1917 (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 2000).

34 The influence Rimsky-Korsakov had on Stravinsky’s compositional practice has been examined in Pieter van den Toorn, The Music of Igor Stravinsky (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983); and Richard Taruskin, “Chez Petrouchka: Harmony and Tonality chez Stravinsky,” 19th-Century Music X/3 (Spring 1987): 265-86.

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(both musical and religious). It is important to note that Stravinsky was not merely a passive member of the Orthodox faith. After a long absence he returned to the Russian Church in 1925 as a regular communicant, and (by his own assertion) remained Orthodox for the rest of his life.35

There are a few important milestones relevant for discussion in this argument. First, early in Stravinsky’s life, he had contact with Rimsky-Korsakov and (as stated above) it is possible that he acquired some of his tastes and philosophies regarding church music from him. Second,

Stravinsky chose to return to the Orthodox faith in a very bold and public way, and there are many source documents, including letters and interviews, to demonstrate the profound impact this had on his life, and on the subsequent composition of the Russian Sacred Choruses (his first liturgical works). Finally, beginning with Symphony of Psalms (1930), Stravinsky seems to have shifted his interest towards Catholicism and sacred works in that tradition (although Judaic influences are apparent in later sacred works). The crucial years of interest for the present argument are the late 1940s, when he not only composed the Mass, which I propose contains musical influences from the Russian Orthodox tradition, but he also revised and translated the

Russian Sacred Choruses into Latin liturgical versions. The musical decisions he made during this period suggest an interest in both the Catholic and Orthodox traditions.

Because seventeenth-century Russian Orthodox polyphonic chant is not part of our classic Western canon, I will provide a brief background of history and style of this repertoire. It is necessary for the analysis portion of the argument to demonstrate that this tradition was independent of the Western tradition and that its compositional practices were highly

35 Stravinsky, Themes and Conclusions, 40.

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“unorthodox” vis-à-vis the polyphonic traditions of the Catholic Church.36 To understand

Stravinsky’s own statement about finding “deeper roots,” this repertoire must be examined and presented as a tradition that was essentially phased out in the eighteenth century, only to be revived by Stravinsky’s predecessors, including Rimsky-Korsakov. I will provide musical examples from seventeenth-century Russian polyphonic chant and basic theoretical observations about voice-leading and meter.

I will then analyze three of Stravinsky’s own sacred works: “Bogoroditse dievo” (one of the Russian Sacred Choruses), Symphony of Psalms, and the Mass. As Russian Orthodox influences on the Russian Sacred Choruses have been acknowledged by Stravinsky as well as

Taruskin, I will begin with “Bogoroditse dievo” and demonstrate techniques similar to the polyphonic practices in seventeenth-century Russian polyphonic chant. Afterward, I will compare this analysis with the Latin version, “Ave Maria,” which is not merely a textual translation but a subtle re-composition of the original. The Latin version includes meter changes, embellishments (diminutions) in the part-writing, re-grouping of the vocal parts in the score, and a keyboard reduction for rehearsal (a part lacking in the original 1934 Slavonic version, as there are no instruments used in the Orthodox Church). It is my intention to show that Stravinsky was not merely thinking in terms of language, but that he actually conceptualized the two “Hail

Mary’s” in stylistically different ways.37 By pointing out these subtle differences I can

36 Other scholars have examined the history and development of Russian chant, especially in relation to its independent development from Western, Gregorian chant (pre-seventeenth century). Russian chant developed from three primary influences: Byzantine chant from the Greek Orthodox Church, Russian folk song (especially polyphonic folk song), and Western influence from Poland in the early seventeenth century. See Marina Ritzarev, “Chant and Polyphony in Russia: Historical Aspects, in Chant and Polyphonie,” Musical Life in Collegiate Churches in the Low Countries and Europe, The Di Martinelli Music Collection (Leuven: University Archives, 2000): 357-368; and Alfred Swan, Russian Music and its Sources in Chant and Folk-Song (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1973).

37 Taruskin briefly examines the Russian Orthodox musical influence in the “Bogoroditse dievo” in his Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 1619.

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demonstrate these stylistic nuances in other works, including the Symphony of Psalms and the

Mass.

Some segments of the Symphony of Psalms also exhibit some of these stylistic nuances.

In fact, there is evidence that Stravinsky originally intended the work to be in Slavonic, not

Latin.38 I will show parts of the work that are based upon Catholic influence as well as parts that seem to contradict this Western influence.

Finally, the most important analysis involves the Mass. I postulate that this piece contains both traditional Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox musical influences. I will first point out the clear examples of traditional sixteenth-century Catholic musical features, such as the priest’s intonation of the Credo, and some passages of species counterpoint (with some liberties taken in the use of consonance and dissonance). I will then demonstrate passages that deviate from this tradition (through unresolved dissonances, dense harmonic texture, unusual rhythm and meter, etc.) and show how they can be perceived in the context of seventeenth-century Russian polyphonic chant. In the analysis of all these works I will rely on elements of set theory to calculate pitch collections and sonorities. Other aspects of seventeenth-century Russian polyphony will require more general observations, such as similarities in melodic contour and metric groupings. The analysis of the Western influences is derived from traditional sixteenth- century species counterpoint instruction, particularly as codified by Johann Joseph Fux in

Gradus ad Parnassum (1725).

In sum, I aim to demonstrate three things in the chapters that follow. First, that Stravinsky was interested in both Catholic and Orthodox musical traditions, and that he had access to both—

38 Vlad, 157.

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and especially the latter, through his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov. Second, that Stravinsky sought to write in the spirit of early Russian sacred polyphony in the Russian Sacred Choruses and then sought a more Western-Catholic tradition in the Latin revisions from 1949. Third and finally, that he incorporated influences from both of these traditions in the Mass, as well as perhaps in some of his other sacred works

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Chapter One

The Dichotomy of Stravinsky’s Faith

Economy, clarity, objectivity, and exclusion of “personal” emotion are the hallmarks of Igor Stravinsky’s style. . . . The religious aspects of Stravinsky’s art are essentially non-representational, but not by any means abstract—far from it. In his religious music, Stravinsky re-establishes links with a distant past and at the same time breaks new ground.1 Gilbert Amy

Stravinsky, the twentieth-century cosmopolitan composer often thought to be most open to different styles and methods of composition, could be just as eclectic in his religious practices and beliefs. The resulting confluence of Eastern and Western Church traditions is the topic of the present chapter.

Stravinsky’s Church Affiliation and Beliefs

Although many statements made by the composer suggest his belief in Christianity, the particular church with which he associated was sometimes not as clear. Stravinsky’s eclecticism regarding his faith confused even some of his associates, a situation compounded by the fact that many Westerners have a limited knowledge of the Orthodox faith. Even his assistant and close friend, Robert Craft, mistook Stravinsky’s religious identity. Craft wrote, “He is by birth and education Greek Orthodox”; and later, “Stravinsky is predominantly Roman Catholic.”2 There are two things wrong with these statements. First, Stravinsky was a member of the Russian

1 Gilbert Amy, “Aspects of the Religious Music of Igor Stravinsky,” Confronting Stravinsky, ed. Jann Pasler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 195.

2 Robert Craft, “Stravinsky’s Mass: a Notebook,” in Igor Stravinsky, ed. Edwin Corle (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, distributors, 1949), 205.

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Orthodox Church (and there are differences between the types of Orthodox churches even greater than the various branches of the Catholic Church); and second, he never became a communicant in the Catholic Church.

Though Igor Stravinsky’s immediate family was Russian Orthodox, this was not true of prior generations. The Stravinskys were originally a noble family in Poland, aristocratic and

Catholic, but at some point the family emigrated east.3 Even before the composer was born, the question of religion had been raised in generations past. This family-historical connection to the

Catholic Church perhaps played a role in the composer’s funeral, which, while administered in an Orthodox manner, was held in a Catholic Church (though this is the primary branch of the

Christian church in Venice).4 Although the fact that the family was once Polish may seem inconsequential, as the next chapter will demonstrate, the influence that the Catholic Poles had on Russia in the seventeenth century played a huge role in the course of Russian church music.

Essentially, Russian church music was untouched by Western Catholics until the Polish invasion at the turn of the seventeenth century; at that point, Western music theory and all that accompanied it (staff notation rather than staffless notation, rules of voice-leading, etc.) largely supplanted the indigenous music. Stravinsky’s use of indigenous Russian church music in

Catholic genres could be viewed as a reversal of the prior invasion.

In addition to the composer’s upbringing in a traditional Russian Orthodox family and church (where he would have heard the sacred music of the Russian Orthodox tradition), he was the son of a popular opera baritone, and thus Stravinsky was able to experience music firsthand—especially Russian music, which included the operas of Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov

3 Roman Vlad, Stravinsky, trans. Frederick and Ann Fuller (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), 2-3.

4 Robert Copeland, “The Christian Message of Igor Stravinsky,” The Musical Quarterly 68, no. 4 (Oct. 1982), 564, n4.

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(1844–1908). Stravinsky had the opportunity to study composition with Rimsky-Korsakov; the young composer first contacted the old master in 1902, while studying law, and at some point afterward studied privately with him, until Rimsky-Korsakov’s death in 1908. While Stravinsky may not have studied composition in the conventional modern sense, he did study orchestration and musical form.5 It is uncertain whether Rimsky-Korsakov had any direct influence on

Stravinsky’s views of church music. However, the former was one of the directors of the

Imperial Court Chapel and was quite influential in the return to ancient, indigenous chants in liturgical services.6 Given his important role in the Russian Church, it seems plausible that he would have passed down some opinions of sacred music to his pupils. In fact, statements made by both composers resonate in sentiment as well as in their references. Rimsky-Korsakov wrote,

“I’m preparing several pieces for publication. As pure music I think that they are suitable and that I capture true Orthodox Church style: not foreign (like Bortnyansky).”7 Compare this statement to the following made by Stravinsky, in reference to the Russian Sacred Choruses: “I knew nothing of the traditions of Russian Church music at that time . . . but instinctively I sought older roots than Bortniansky, our classic composer in the genre, who, after his long stay with

Galuppi in Venice had been wholly converted to the Italian style.”8 The two statements share not only a sense of importance concerning traditional church music, but also a negative sentiment regarding foreign influence—and especially for the composer Bortniansky (who will be covered

5 Copeland, 2-3.

6 Vladimir Morosan, Choral Performance in Pre-Revolutionary Russia (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1986), 96.

7 Carolyn Dunlop, The Russian Court Chapel Choir 1796—1917 (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 2000), 120; italics mine.

8 Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Themes and Episodes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), 31; italics mine.

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in the next chapter). Thus, it seems entirely plausible that the young Stravinsky learned more than craft from the aging Russian nationalist.

Though raised in the church, Stravinsky was not a devout Orthodox Christian for much of his early adult life. This changed, however, on April 9, 1926, when he took communion for the first time in two decades. It was at this point in 1926 that he took an interest in religious music for liturgical use.9 When asked if one must be a believer (in Christianity) to compose in the musical forms of the Church, he replied, “Certainly, and not merely a believer in ‘symbolic figures,’ but in the Person of the Lord, the Person of the Devil, and the Miracles of the

Church.”10 His religious fervor remained very strong after he rejoined the Orthodox Church, as demonstrated by his interest in sacred music, as well as in literature and art. In a letter dated 15

August 1928 to Diaghilev, who had made a trip to Mount Athos (the “Holy Mountain” and

Orthodox spiritual center), Stravinsky wrote, “I would like you to bring several icons

(oleographs) for me, and a wooden cross, and to have them blessed at the same place. Since I know your main reason for going to Athos is to search for books, I would also be grateful if you would bring me a catalogue of every book for sale there in Russian and Slavonic.”11

Knowledge of and Influence by Russian Sacred Music

In the Stravinsky archive,12 Taruskin found manuscripts in the composer’s hand of sixteen polyphonic Georgian folk songs. Stravinsky knew of this music because of Dmitriy

9 Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions Volume 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 1618-19.

10 Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky (London: Faber and Faber, 1959), 25.

11 Robert Craft, ed., Stravinsky: Selected Correspondence, Vol. 2 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 45.

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Arakchiyev’s phonographic publications of indigenous Georgian folk and religious music.13 This music Stravinsky studied is very similar in character to the seventeenth-century Russian polyphonic chant (see Examples 4.1 and 4.2 in Chapter Four for a comparison of these two styles). Although Stravinsky once claimed to know “nothing of the traditions of Russian Church music,” he also admitted that “My pieces [the Russian Sacred Choruses] probably fuse early memories of church music in Kiev and Poltava with the conscious aim to adhere to a simple and severe harmonic style, a ‘classical’ style but with pre-classical cadences.”14 Thus, while the composer never admitted any direct influence from ancient Russian sacred music, there is circumstantial evidence to support his knowledge of it, including knowledge of styles very similar to those in Arakchiyev’s publications.

Though he had at least some knowledge (either acquired through his upbringing or learned as an adult) of traditional Russian sacred music, Stravinsky certainly took an interest in the musical traditions of the Catholic Church. Some of Jacques Handschin’s letters to the composer discuss Gregorian chant, and one even includes examples of medieval melodies.15

Stravinsky’s first piece set in Latin was the Symphony of Psalms (1930), written during his neoclassical period. He also composed the Mass, a Latin choral work intended for liturgical use, during this period. The Mass reflects an even greater interest in the Catholic Church, as it is not merely a sacred work in Latin, but a work intended primarily for the worship service rather than

12 This archive of the composer’s estate is located in Basel, Switzerland and was acquired by the Paul Sacher Foundation in 1983. At the time Taruskin was using the archive, it was located at the New York City Public Library. In the future, if I refer to “the Stravinsky archive,” I mean this one held by the Sacher Foundation.

13 Richard Taruskin, “Stravinsky and the Subhuman,” Defining Russia Musically (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 428.

14 Stravinsky, Themes and Episodes, 31.

15 Craft, Stravinsky: Selected Correspondence, Vol. 3, 133-38.

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the concert hall. In fact, the Mass was performed liturgically on 8 December 1949 in both Essen

(Germany) and Los Angeles.16

As stated in the introduction to the present document, the composer’s reasons for writing the Mass were practical: instruments are allowed in liturgical functions in the Catholic (but not in the Orthodox) Church.17 But Stravinsky’s musical intentions went a little deeper than choice of venue; in various correspondences he suggests either Catholic or Orthodox references. In a letter to Ernest Ansermet in 1948, Stravinsky suggests Catholic influence in that the Mass was

“conceived in the modest tradition of Flemish motets.”18 This is the only statement of direct influence that he ascribes to the Mass, though he did give some indication of his intentions in two letters to his publisher, Boosey and Hawkes. In one of these, he stresses his preference for the inclusion of the priest’s intonation of the Credo before the chorus enters.19 This intonation20 is based upon one of the original Gregorian (Catholic) chant settings of the Nicene Creed. In the second letter, Stravinsky wrote:

If you speak in your letter [Boosey and Hawkes to Stravinsky] of a transcription of the Mass for organ, you can have it done, but naturally you did not think of adding an organ part to my instrumentation to facilitate its performance, God forbid, or it will turn out á la Bach-Stokowski.21

16 Craft, Stravinsky: Selected Correspondence, Vol. 3, 331.

17 Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Expositions and Developments (London: Faber and Faber, 1959), 77.

18 Craft, Stravinsky: Selected Correspondence, Vol. 1, 232.

19 Craft, Stravinsky: Selected Correspondence, Vol. 3, 328.

20 Essentially, the first line of the text (Credo in unum Deum) is sung by the celebrant to orient the choir in the right key/mode and piece.

21 Craft, Stravinsky: Selected Correspondence, Vol. 3, 318. Leopold Stokowski arranged many of Bach’s works for orchestra—specifically, the instrumentation of the nineteenth-century, late-romantic orchestra. The possibilities for expression, dynamics, and timbre in Stokowski’s orchestral versions of Bach’s works are more varied than their original transcriptions. As these arrangements are anachronistic, perhaps Stravinsky worried that transcribing an organ part from the original woodwinds would take away from the composer’s original expressive intent.

19

His outright resistance to the use of organ in the Mass is more in line with Orthodox rather than

Catholic practice (a patriarch of the Orthodox Church in the late sixteenth-century addressed this same concern).22 Even the juxtaposition of the three sacred (Slavonic) choruses with the Mass on concert programs and recordings suggests a “mixed message” of Catholic and Orthodox usage.

In a letter to Craft discussing the program for the premiere, Stravinsky wrote that the three choruses would precede the Mass.23 In a letter to Craft a few months later, Stravinsky wrote,

“But what can I put on the sixth side [of the album recording]? Mr. Mohr suggests one or two of my a capella choruses. . . . By the way, in what language will it be sung? It is my feeling that the original Russian text must be used.”24 He specifies the choice of language for the sacred choruses, as he had just adapted them to Latin versions; therefore, it is noteworthy that he still preferred the Russian (actually Slavonic) versions even when paired with the Latin Mass on the recording.

Language and Faith

Even though Stravinsky became a devout member of the Russian Orthodox Church in

1926 and remained so the rest of his life, he was very interested in the traditions of the Catholic

Church. It seems that much of his attachment to both traditions was based on language. Laurence

Davies wrote that Stravinsky’s “decision to re-enter the Russian Orthodox Church seems to have been undertaken with linguistic rather than theological reasons uppermost in his mind. There is

22 Morosan, Choral Performance, 40.

23 Robert Craft, “’Dear Bob[sky]’ (Stravinsky’s Letters to Robert Craft, 1944-1949),” The Musical Quarterly, 65, no. 3 (Jul. 1979), 411.

24 Craft, “’Dear Bob[sky]’…”, 419.

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even the paradox that he afterwards wrote a Roman Catholic Mass.”25 Stravinsky affirmed the importance he placed on language in his faith:

Perhaps the strongest factor in my decision to re-enter the Russian Church rather than convert to the Roman [Catholic Church] was linguistic. The Slavonic language of the Russian liturgy has always been the language of prayer for me, in my childhood as now. I was a regular communicant of the Orthodox Church from 1926 to 1939, and again later, in America.26

Although Slavonic seems to have had religious connotations for Stravinsky, he was certainly enamored with Latin in its own right:

What a joy it is to compose music to a language of convention, almost of ritual, the very nature of which imposes a lofty dignity! One no longer feels dominated by the phrase, the literal meaning of the words. Cast in an immutable mold which adequately expresses their value, they do not require any further commentary. The text thus becomes purely phonetic material for the composer. He can dissect it at will and concentrate all his attention on its primary constituent element—that is to say, on the syllable. Was not this method of treating the text that of the old masters of the austere style? This, too, has for centuries been the Church’s attitude towards music, and has prevented it from falling into sentimentalism, and consequently into individualism.27

He is referring to the Catholic Church, but the expressed attitude and philosophy also echo sentiments of the Russian Orthodox Church. An anonymous reviewer of Russian choral music wrote concerning the soloist’s role in church music:

The more austerely and dispassionately the solo is performed, the more the work will benefit, since to concern oneself with “expression” in the commonly accepted sense of the term is entirely inappropriate: what is required is the mood of an inspired prophet who has renounced everything earthly and sees the heavens opening before him.28

25 Laurence Davies, “Stravinsky as Littérateur,” Music & Letters, 49, no. 2 (Apr. 1968): 143.

26 Stravinsky, Expositions and Developments, 76.

27 Igor Stravinsky, Stravinsky, an Autobiography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1936), 128; italics mine.

28 Morosan, Choral Performance, 298; italics mine.

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In each quotation, the words and phrases that seem to match in the intended message have been italicized; even Stravinsky’s attitudes concerning the performance of music in worship are infused with his fundamental beliefs in Orthodox and Catholic traditions.

His interest in the languages of both the Russian and Catholic Churches can be traced to his decisions in composing vocal sacred music. Although Symphony of Psalms was his first sacred work in Latin, he had first started working on a Slavonic version of the Psalms, and only later changed to the Latin Vulgate. It was not merely a change in language, however, as part of the text of the last movement changed drastically. Stravinsky wrote:

The rest of the slow-tempo introduction, the Laudate Dominum, was originally composed to the words of the Gospodi Pomiluy. This section is a prayer to the Russian image of the infant Christ with orb and sceptre. I decided to end the work with this music, too, as an apotheosis of the sort that had become a pattern in my music since the epithalamium at the end of Les Noces.29

As with his many statements of faith that lean toward either Orthodoxy or Catholicism, he originally leaned toward a Slavonic version of Symphony of Psalms before deciding on the final

Latin version.

Acceptance of Ecumenicalism, Condemnation of Modern Practices

Just as the World Council of Churches was formed in 1948 and the Orthodox Church joined discussions of the globalization of religion in the 1950s,30 Stravinsky was equally concerned with the universal use of his sacred music. In a letter to Nadia Boulanger in 1949, he showed his optimism for cross-denominational usage of his Russian Sacred Choruses: “I have

29 Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Dialogues and a Diary (London: Faber, 1968), 78.

30 Priest-Monk (Rachon) Irénée, Paul Ladouceur, and Monique Vallée, Living Orthodoxy, trans. Paul Ladouceur, Fr. Deacon Geoffrey Korz, and Mother Sophia (Montreal: Alexander Press, 2003), 30.

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arranged this version for use by a Catholic group [the Latin version], but it is to be hoped that

Protestant churches will use it as well.”31 Two of the choruses, the “Creed” and “Our Father,” have an interesting musical history in the Russian Orthodox Church. The Creed was traditionally spoken by the congregation. However, about the middle of the sixteenth century the “Creed” was sometimes sung, as was “Our Father.” This practice originated in Pskov, an active trade center with the West; therefore, it is possible that the practice of singing the “Creed” and “Our Father” came from Western influence.32 In each piece—the Russian Sacred Choruses, Symphony of

Psalms, and Mass—there seems to be a confluence of traditions from both the Eastern and

Western Churches.

It is important to note that Stravinsky made many statements about music and faith, some of which contradict one another. Davies noted that when “asked what role religion has played in his life and music, Stravinsky confesse[d] to the many puzzling divagations which his critics have noticed in his attitudes to the Church.”33 Nevertheless, he was consistent in his belief that sacred music should be hallowed and revered: “We commit fewer musical sins in church—it [is] rich in musical forms. . . . I say, simply, that without the Church, ‘left to our own devices,’ we are poorer by many musical forms.”34 His despair at the current state of sacred music can be felt in the following statement:

Liturgical music has practically disappeared, except, of course, the third rate academic kind. The tradition has been lost. Look at the Victorian hymnology which compressed into four-squares and brutally harmonized the most beautiful

31 Craft, Stravinsky: Selected Correspondence, Vol. 1, 245-46.

32 Johann von Gardner, Russian Church Singing, Vol 2: History from the Origins to the Mid-Seventeenth Century, translated and edited by Vladimir Morosan (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000), 258-59.

33 Davies, 143.

34 Stravinsky, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky, 123-24.

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plainsongs. In Los Angeles, one hears anything in church, Rachmaninoff, [Wagner’s] Tristan and Isolde.35

Once again, this statement echoes that of an earlier time, specifically that of Stepan Smolensky, who was a strong adherent to the traditions of the ancient Russian liturgy and music; he taught that Western rules of harmony and counterpoint were inappropriate for harmonizing Russian chant.36 Perhaps Stravinsky’s most direct statement of purpose for composing sacred music is as follows: “My artistic goal is to make an object, clearly, and with a natural apportioning in it of my own self. I create the object because God makes me create it, just as he has created me.”37

Given this clear and unambiguous profession, one can go forth to analysis with an open mind towards multiple influences from both the Orthodox and Catholic faiths and traditions.

35 Craft, Mass: a Notebook, 201-2.

36 Morosan, Choral Performance, 231.

37 Vera Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), 193.

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Chapter Two

An Outline History of Russian Church Music

I am convinced that [the history of Russian Church music] lies in the idealization of authentic church melodies, the transformation of them into something musically elevated, mighty in its expressiveness and near to the Russian heart in its typically national quality. Possibly our church music will express itself in sequences of simple harmonies strange to the contemporary ear, rejecting the uninterpreted quartet. . . . I should like to have music which could be heard nowhere except in a church, and which would be as distinct from secular music as the church vestments are from the dress of the laity. 1 A. Kastalsky

In this chapter I will survey the historical blending of Catholicism and Orthodoxy in

Russia, in the centuries preceding and coinciding with Stravinsky’s youth. Accordingly, I will establish the context for better understanding Stravinsky’s own eclectic musical style in his sacred works.

Independence of the Russian Church

It is well known that the history of Western music owes its early development to the Catholic Church, as this institution fostered not only the composition of many melodies and polyphonic settings, but also the creation of early notation and theory. Western musicians often take for granted that religion once played a major role not only in politics but in art; yet the development of Western music is unique to the West because of its initial supervision by the

Catholic Church. Though not so removed geographically, the Greeks and their Orthodox Church managed (for the most part) to develop musical style and theory independent of Catholic influence. However, the Russian Church (which was also Orthodox, due to early Greek missionaries in the Slavic lands) developed musical style and theory independent of both the

1 A. Kastalsky and S. W. Pring, “My Musical Career and My Thoughts on Church Music,” The Musical Quarterly 11, no. 2 (Apr., 1925), 245.

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Catholic and Greek Orthodox Churches, as it was geographically close to neither Rome nor

Constantinople. The most important event for the Russian Church was its independence and status of autocephaly2 from the Greek Church in the mid-fifteenth century, after the Turks overthrew the Byzantine Empire. Russian chant had always developed apart from the Greek tradition, but this independence of the Russian Church marked an even greater isolation from both the Greeks and the Catholics; this independence took place before the development of polyphony in the Orthodox Church.3

Though the Russians had inherited Greek chant and music theory centuries before, major changes had taken place even before the independence of the Russian Church. By the mid- fifteenth century, the notation of the Russians and the Greeks differed greatly.4 These notational differences became greater as the Russian Church now supervised itself, no longer requiring the guidance of the Mother Church in Constantinople. By the mid-sixteenth century, neumes represented specific pitches on a standardized gamut, so we are able to trace with greater accuracy the changes that had taken place between the original Greek chant, the contemporary

(sixteenth-century) Greek chant, and Russian chant.5 Essentially, the beginning of the sixteenth century marked the era of Russian polyphony that began to be notated in staffless notation. All

2 Autocephaly, which literally means “self-headed,” refers to the status of the Russian Church as an independent authority, apart from the Greek Orthodox Church. In other words, the head bishop of the Russian Church does not report to a higher-ranking bishop in the Greek Church. This is different from the Catholic Church, in which the Pope is the head of all branches of the Church.

3 Johann von Gardner, Russian Church Singing Vol. 2: History from the Origins to the Mid-Seventeenth Century, translated and edited by Vladimir Morosan (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000), 205-6.

4 von Gardner, Vol. 2, 211.

5 Vladimir Morosan, “One Thousand Years of Russian Church Music,” Monuments of Russian Sacred Music: One Thousand Years of Russian Church Music, Series I, Vol. 1 (Washington D.C.: Musica Russica, 1991), xliv.

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early Russian polyphony pre-dating Western influence (discussed later) was scored with staffless notation.6

Early Development of Polyphony

Scholars have attempted to trace the development of Russian polyphony to its earliest origins. Extant manuscript evidence dates from the early sixteenth century, and it is reasonable to assume that an oral tradition existed in the fifteenth century.7 In fact, there are symbols in an earlier manuscript from the fifteenth century that suggest polyphonic performance. Tsar Ivan IV,

“The Terrible” (1533–84), established the Council of a Hundred Chapters (Stoglavїy sobor) in

1551. In one of the council’s pronouncements, sacred polyphony was officially permitted.8

Viktor Beliaev has suggested that polyphonic performance practice most certainly existed before any evidence of notation. The most likely type was an “ison,” a drone under the chant (perhaps similar to early organum in the Catholic tradition). He also suggested that sometimes skilled soloists would improvise heterophonic variations of the chant at the same time the chant was sung.9

Von Gardner has suggested that two types of chant developed simultaneously during the period of early polyphonic development:

Evidently, at least two parallel types of liturgical singing coexisted: unison znamenny chant according to the Eight Tones, which was fixed in the neumatic notation, and another type of singing known as “demestvo,” which perhaps

6 von Gardner, Vol. 2, 251.

7 Morosan, “One Thousand Years… ,” xlvi.

8 Morosan, “One Thousand Years… , xliv.

9 von Gardner, Vol. 2, 230-31.

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consisted of heterophonic variations (countervoices) of the znamenny melodies, but for which no satisfactory means of notation had yet been developed.10

Von Gardner found that the second half of the sixteenth century was rife with manuscripts intended for “non-unison” performance, and that the seventeenth century witnessed the

“appearance of staffless scores of as many as four lines [or four voices].”11 While this period of early polyphonic development occurred independent of any known influence from the Greeks or the Catholics, Morosan deems it noteworthy “that the earliest surviving evidence of notated polyphony stems from Novgorod, a city with abundant avenues of communication with Western

Europe.”12 Morosan’s claim is based upon the fact that Westerners were living in Novgorod in the fifteenth century (the city had a foreign quarter just for them), and they had their own

Catholic Church, which would have been incorporating contemporary Western polyphony.13

While Morosan has suggested at least an indirect influence from the West over even the earliest notated polyphony in Russia, Alfred Swan has maintained a different perspective. He argues for indigenous folk music as the influence behind early sacred polyphony: “A certain kinship is traceable between patterns found in the folk-song and the znamenny chants. This kinship is limited to a succession of intervals and fragments of melody and excludes rhythmic values.”14 While not denying the relationship between folk music and early sacred polyphony, von Gardner has argued for the reverse influence: that early sacred polyphony influenced the

10 von Gardner, Vol. 2, 235.

11 von Gardner, Vol. 2, 255.

12 Vladimir Morosan, Choral Performance in Pre-Revolutionary Russia (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1986), 26.

13 Morosan, Choral Performance, 17.

14 Alfred Swan, “The Znamenny Chant of the Russian Church – Part II,” 26, no. 3 (Jul. 1940), 365.

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development of folk music.15 Essentially, there is no concrete evidence to support any notion of the origins of early Russian polyphonic chant. While some scholars (like Swan and von Gardner) have looked to folk music as a source or target of influence, others (like Morosan) have attempted to show that even the earliest development of polyphony could have stemmed from

Western influence. This second claim is relevant to present purposes, as it negates the opinions of later-generation church musicians such as Rimsky-Korsakov (and subsequently Stravinsky), who maintained that there was a period of polyphonic church music pre-dating Western influence.

Influence from the West

Undisputed, however, is the impact of Western influence at the beginning of the seventeenth century, which marked the death of Tsar Boris Godunov (1551–1605) and the Polish invasion. This unstable period16 (1605-1613) included a conflict between Catholic Poles and the

Orthodox Russians, which led to the musical influences from the Catholic Church later in the century.17 Nevertheless, the indigenous music of the Russians held strong against foreign influence until Raskol (Russian for “schism”), which was the mid-seventeenth-century division that resulted in the “Old Believers” breaking off from the Russian Orthodox Church. This caused the Russian musical heritage of centuries to lose its place in the church, and to be replaced by

Western polyphonic forms, namely part-singing.18 Raskol occurred during the period of

15 von Gardner, Vol. 2, 280.

16 This period is also known as the “Time of Troubles” in Russia, which is sometimes marked as 1598– 1613, beginning with the death of Tsar Ivanovich.

17 von Gardner, Vol. 2, 254.

18 Morosan, Choral Performance, 38.

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Westernization of Russia under Peter the Great (1672–1725). The dissenters that broke off from the Mother Church—the “Old Believers,” which still exist today—rejected (and still reject) the use of polyphony in liturgy.19 In spite of the internal strife in the Russian Church, it was primarily Western influence from the Poles that changed sacred music forever. Morosan has stated there is no evidence of “indigenous cultural forces strong enough to have transformed a

Byzantine tradition of soloistic monody into a tradition of choral singing” before 1650; this changed after 1650 due to strong influence from the West.20 While the change appeared to be ushered in from the Polish invasion, Marina Ritzarev maintains that the indigenous music in

Russia was a very strong influence, so much so that the Russian Orthodox Church originally had placed a ban on polyphony. Because polyphony was a very distinct and common texture in early

Russian folk music, native singers were always looking for a reason to incorporate polyphony into the Church—even before any Western influence.21

Part-singing—that is, polyphony read from individual part books in the Western style— became popular in the mid-to-late seventeenth century. While not officially adopted until 1668, part-singing developed alongside traditional Russian polyphony. Opposition to this Western influence was motivated in great measure by its perceived lack of concern for the text, in contrast to traditional Russian chants, which were completely linked to the text. This lack of concern can be interpreted as the subservience of the rhythmic stresses in the text to the metrical implications of the part-songs. These part-songs were called Kanty, and they originally came from the

19 Morosan, “One Thousand Years… ,” xlv.

20 Morosan, Choral Performance, 36.

21 Marina Ritzarev, “Chant and Polyphony in Russia: Historical Aspects, in Chant and Polyphonie,” Musical Life in Collegiate Churches in the Low Countries and Europe, The Di Martinelli Music Collection (Leuven: University Archives, 2000), 358.

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Catholic Poles.22 According to Olga Dolskaya, who has studied seventeenth-century sacred part- songs in detail, the Kanty are not purely Western in content; they include “chant, folk music,

‘byliny’ (epic songs) and Western (Polish) dance rhythms.”23 The sacred Kanty influenced composers’ treatment of polyphonic composition into the eighteenth century. Beginning in the early seventeenth century, Russian chants can be found that have been “harmonized” by traditional, homophonic, Western techniques; that is, with the chant in the tenor, the upper voices ornamenting the chant, and the bass providing harmonic support. These harmonized chants were comprised of consonant triadic harmony.24

The Advent of Staff Notation and Freely Composed Pieces

All traditional, indigenous Russian sacred music was rendered in staffless notation until the mid-seventeenth century.25 Staff notation was introduced in the Russian Church in 1652, around the same time that the European style of part-singing began its popularity in Russia.

Thereafter, the indigenous polyphonic practice fell out of use.26 With the implementation of staff notation and the popularity of Kanty, virtually all composers eventually converted to the Western style. As Morosan has written:

Composers eventually embraced foreign polyphony in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the new usage did not sever ties with tradition but was simply grafted onto a pre-existing indigenous idiom. With time, the ancient melodies of the original eight church modes (or Tones) of the Russian znamenny

22 Morosan, “One Thousand Years… ,” xlvi-xlvii.

23 Olga Dolskaya, Spiritual Songs in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 1996), xxx.

24 Morosan, “One Thousand Years… ,” xlvii.

25 As Morosan (Choral Performance, 40) has pointed out, however, evidence of usage of staff notation dates back to 1601, as a surviving manuscript is notated in the five-line Western staff.

26 von Gardner, Vol. 2, 251.

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chant emerged in an enhanced, decoratively harmonized choral style; the austere sound of unison liturgical recitative became transformed into a majestic, undulating sonority of a mixed choral ensemble.27

In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, some churches had different groups of singers: one group would perform in the newer European polyphonic style, while the other group would sing the traditional chants. European-based part-singing carried with it aesthetic considerations, while the chant tradition remained “[un]concerned with beauty or technical refinement.”28 As a result, the chants (vs. freely composed sacred works) were simply harmonized in chorale style in the eighteenth century. The technical and aesthetic development of church music took place primarily in the “secularized environment of the Imperial court” in

St. Petersburg.29 The European-based part-singing led to Partesny concertos, which were freely composed vocal concertos that did not take the text as a precompositional mandate. As Nikolai

Diletsky wrote in A Musical Grammar (1675), “When a fantasy comes to you, write it down without text and preserve it for future use in concertos; if it doesn’t fit one text, it will fit another.”30 This approach to text-setting was not practiced in Russia (nor the West) in prior periods. This new approach is characterized by “fragmenting and repeating sections of the text in sequences, imitation, or rhythmic variation” and “text-painting, dramatic punctuation by rests, and the affective use of harmony.”31

The Italian Influence and Bortniansky

27 Morosan, “One Thousand Years… ,” xliii; tense changed from present to past for narrative consistency.

28 Morosan, Choral Performance, 55-57.

29 Morosan, Choral Performance, 56-57.

30 Morosan, “One Thousand Years… ,” xlviii.

31 Morosan, “One Thousand Years… ,” xlviii.

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While the initial Western influence came primarily from the Catholic Church in Poland,

Italy became the primary influence in the eighteenth century. Ritzarev made special mention of the fact that indigenous Russian polyphonic practice did not resemble Italian imitative polyphonic practice, so the advent of the Italian influence is of great importance.32 The Imperial

Court in St. Petersburg began to hold staged operas in 1737, and this resulted in a steady stream of Italian musicians coming to Russia.33 In particular, two very important Italian composers traveled to Russia and drastically changed its musical style. Baldassare Galuppi (cited by

Stravinsky), visited Russia from 1765 to 1768; and Giuseppe Sarti was in Russia from 1784 to

1802. This Italian influence represents the greatest change to Russian Orthodox music; the old traditional polyphony phased out completely during this time. Musical form dominated the text, causing dense, imitative contrapuntal passages and gratuitous text repetition.34

The new Italian style was favored by Catherine the Great (who reigned 1762–96), and she was disappointed that it could not be used even more in church. She wanted certain Italian works that included instruments to be performed in church, but instruments were forbidden. She was responsible for reorganizing the Court Choir into the Imperial Court Chapel in 1763. While

Poltoratsky was made the first Director of the Court Chapel, Catherine gave Galuppi the role of artistic supervision, which greatly influenced the future direction of Russian Orthodox music as it encouraged a commingling between the secular and the sacred. In 1782, for example,

Catherine made mandatory the Imperial Court Chapel’s participation in opera and secular

32 Ritzarev, 359.

33 Morosan, Choral Performance, 59. In fact, Francesco Araja (an Italian composer) was the first responsible for bringing Italian opera to the Russian stage; during the period of 1735-38 and later, 1744-59, he served as the Kapellmeister of the St. Petersburg court.

34 Morosan, “One Thousand Years… ,” xlix.

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concerts. The influence Catherine had on Russian music cannot be overemphasized.35 As

Metallov, one of the great historians of Russian Orthodox music, has written:

Upon the [operatic] stage the technical aspects of the vocal art were developed, various subtleties of vocal performance were studied, practical methods of voice training were mastered, . . . accompanied by a loss of taste and attraction for the indigenous national style of singing that had been passed along from generation to generation.36

Perhaps one of the most famous (and infamous) figures in the history of Russian church music is Dmitri Bortniansky (cited by both Rimsky-Korsakov and Stravinsky). He not only studied with Galuppi, but worked in the Imperial Court Chapel under both Catherine the Great

(who favored the Italian style) and her son Paul I (who reigned 1796–1801 and sought church- music reform).37 This ability to work under both of these monarchs is a testament to

Bortniansky’s political intelligence and diplomacy. While Rimsky-Korsakov and Stravinsky both attacked Bortniansky’s foreign influence, according to Morosan, the eighteenth-century composer had a deep reverence for Russian church music:

What distinguished him from his Italian predecessors and their provincial Russian imitators was an attitude of reverence for the Orthodox liturgy and sensitivity to the bounds of good taste that should not be exceeded in church under any circumstances.38

Bortniansky’s discretion over church music extended both into the past and the future, as an

1816 decree gave him ultimate authority over music written for church use:

The Emperor, on discovering that many churches use [manuscript] scores . . . that do not correspond to the sort of singing that is acceptable in churches, has supremely decreed: that henceforth the use of manuscript notebooks . . . is strictly

35 Morosan, Choral Performance, 60-61.

36 Vasily Metallov, “Sinodal’nye, byvshie patriarshie pevchie,” Russkaia muzykal’naia gazeta 10 (1898): col. 1048.

37 Morosan, Choral Performance, 69-70.

38 Morosan, Choral Performance, 70.

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forbidden, and everything sung in churches from [sheet] music must be in printed form, and must consist either of the personal compositions of the Director of the [Imperial] Choir, . . . Bortniansky, or the compositions of other famous composers, but the compositions of the latter may only be printed with the approval of Bortniansky.39

This decree allowed Bortniansky to shape history in both directions to his own tastes, which— while he revered the Russian Orthodox liturgy—were grounded in Western training and traditions.

The “New Russian Sacred Choral School”

Many years followed Bortniansky’s tenure before any serious discussion of church-music reform was engaged. Von Gardner described the period of the late nineteenth century as belonging to the Moscow School:

This period was characterized by the search for new ways of liberating Russian liturgical singing from foreign influences and borrowings that strongly manifested themselves during the preceding three periods of the second epoch [after the mid seventeenth century].40

Morosan called it the “New Russian Sacred Choral School.” According to him, it had three guidelines: the return of Russian church music to a more indigenous, national character; the return of church music to the vanguard of musical creativity in Russia; and a search for a musical expression most appropriate to the Russian Orthodox liturgy.41 One of the first to bring back an interest in early church music, which had not survived from the last century of Westernization, was the musicologist Dmitry Razumovsky (1818–89). He was appointed Chair of Russian

39 Morosan, Choral Performance, 71.

40 von Gardner, Vol. 1, 146.

41 Morosan, “One Thousand Years…,” lv. This movement in choral music was part of a larger movement of Russian nationalism that included “The Five”—a group of Russian composers that lead this movement. Of the “five,” Mily Balakirev and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov were most influential in what Morosan labels as the “New Russian Sacred Choral School.”

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Church Music History at the Moscow Conservatory, when it was founded in 1866;42 and he was responsible for the first written history of Russian church music, as was indicated in the introduction to the present document.

Two other important figures in church music reform were Mily Balakirev (1837–1910) and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908), who were appointed as the superintendents of the

Imperial Court Chapel. With their appointments many anticipated a return to the ancient indigenous chants of the Church pre-dating Western influence.43 The latter half of the nineteenth century experienced a revival of interest in the original znamenny chants, particularly with a paper submitted in 1878 advocating the restoration of ancient chants that were no longer in use.44

A priority in this period was not only the restoration of ancient chant, but the abolition of

Western influences. For example, Stepan Smolensky taught that Western rules of harmony and counterpoint were inappropriate for harmonizing Russian chant. He believed the counterpoint should be based on indigenous folk polyphony and the melodic style of the chant itself.45 In 1888 he wrote: “We, Russians, do not have to seek models for our writing in the church modes of

Palestrina, Orlando, and Allegri, or other famous masters.”46 In fact, many composers of the late nineteenth century (including Rimsky-Korsakov) composed polyphonic sacred works using

42 Morosan, Choral Performance, 86.

43 Morosan, Choral Performance, 96.

44 Carolyn Dunlop, The Russian Court Chapel Choir 1796—1917 (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 2000), 65-78.

45 Morosan, Choral Performance, 231.

46 Alfred J. Swan, Russian Music and its Sources in Chant and Folk-Song (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1973), 45.

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ancient unison chants. The compositional technique was “counter-voiced heterophony,” which is found in Russian folk-song (as discussed above).47

Summary

The preceding historical overview is necessary to understand Stravinsky’s previously quoted remark: “I hoped to find deeper roots than those of the Russian Church composers who had merely tried to continue the Venetian (Galuppi) style from Bortniansky.”48 Stravinsky certainly understood enough of Russian church history to know that the Italian style dominated

Russia during Bortniansky’s tenure, and that an indigenous style pre-dated such foreign influences. It is possible that the young student-composer learned some of this history from his very knowledgeable master, Rimsky-Korsakov. Stravinsky might also have heard some of this older, indigenous Russian music as a boy. Regarding the latter possibility, consider Smolensky’s comments on the Moscow Synodal Choir:

The historical concerts were the Synodal Choir’s first serious debut, for these concerts displayed the Choir’s ability to perform works of all styles and periods as well as its considerable choral technique; some works were included in the program specifically with the view of demonstrating the Choir’s easy conquest over all technical difficulties. The historical concerts stimulated interest towards the Synodal Choir in St. Petersburg; that is the only way to explain the Choir’s trip there for a concert in Pobedonostsev’s hall, which took place 7 March 1896.49

Note that the date (1896) and the city (St. Petersburg) coincide with Stravinsky’s time and place as a youth. Based on the historical concerts of 1902–03 that Kastalsky organized, the repertoire spanned a wide range (Kastalsky selected pieces from the fifteenth century to include on the

47 Morosan, “One Thousand Years… ,” lv.

48 Igor Stravinsky, Themes and Conclusions (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 40.

49 Stepan Smolensky “Vospominaniia,” vol. 2, MS, Golovanov Collection, no. 527-28, Glinka State Museum of Musical Culture, Moscow, 75-77.

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programs).50 Not only might Stravinsky have had the opportunity to hear this older music first- hand, but some in Western Europe might also have experienced it. In 1911, the Moscow Synodal

Choir completed a European tour of three programs, the first of which was organized chronologically through the major periods beginning with early Russian polyphony. There was one three-voiced, seventeenth-century work performed, entitled “Na verbe posrede eia.”51

Though the indigenous style of Russian polyphonic chant was phased out over the course of the seventeenth century, the late nineteenth-century nationalists—who sought to return to the earlier styles of the Russian Church—brought it back. This created the possibility for Stravinsky to have heard these reformists’ arguments as a boy. He also might have heard this indigenous music in historical concerts growing up in St. Petersburg; and he possibly absorbed the attitudes and opinions of his music teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov. Given the prevalent culture-blending of

Catholicism and Orthodoxy in Russia during the prior centuries, it is probably no coincidence that Stravinsky enacted his own religious “blending,” demonstrating dual influences in his sacred works.

50 Kastalsky, 241.

51 Morosan, Choral Performance, 115.

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Chapter Three

Characteristics of Early Russian Orthodox Polyphony

The emotional aspect of the musical element certainly has a good deal of significance in Orthodox worship, but in a manner different from churches that employ purely instrumental music in their services [such as the Catholic Church’s use of the organ without voices]. If one takes the music by itself, devoid of words, one realizes that instrumental music can create only a certain mood or atmosphere, which can be characterized by the general terms: … sadness, majesty, joyfulness, etc. But these terms have no concrete ideas connected with them. Why is a piece of music sad or majestic? Only when the musical element becomes linked with the verbal is it possible to say why a given emotion arose as a result of the music and to explain by what concrete verbal ideas it was evoked.1

Johann von Gardner

In this chapter I will explore musical characteristics of early Russian Orthodox polyphony, with a focus on harmonic, rhythmic, textural, and textual attributes. In doing so, I will establish a context for understanding how the musical language evinced in Stravinsky’s sacred works was highly indebted to these established traditions.

Notation of Early Chant

When one compares the music of the Russian Orthodox Church in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with the music of the Catholic Church, even before differences in style may be discerned, one encounters a clear technical difference: the notation. While staff notation had existed for some time in the West, the Russians continued to use staffless notation until influences from Western Europe infiltrated the indigenous musical forms. This staffless notation leaves the scholar with two methods of deciphering the precise pitch content of the music.

According to Vladimir Morosan, the first method is called counterpart transcription; in it, Greek

1 Johann von Gardner, Russian Church Singing Vol. 1: Orthodox Worship and Hymnography, translated by Vladimir Morosan (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1980), 23.

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notation of similar chants is compared to the Slavic notation to determine more precise pitches.

The second method is called retrospective transcription; in it, one compares the staff notation of later chant editions with their staffless predecessors.2

Russian chants were originally derived from Greek chants. The Byzantine type of notated neume was known as “Coislin,” and it was responsible for the birth of the Russian neumes used in znamenny or stolp notation.3 According to Morosan, these neumes came to specify pitches in three ways; by

(1) red cinnabar marks (kinovarnїye pometї) ascribed to a certain Ivan Shagdurov (c. 1600)—a system of letters written next to the neumes, which fixed more clearly the pitch level at which the neume was executed; (2) the priznáki, or small black tails attached to the neumes, introduced by Aleksandr Mezenets in his treatise of 1668; and (3) the so-called Kievan or square notes, which became increasingly widespread toward the end of the century.4

This last method is similar to the contemporaneous staff notation in the West. After giving these methods, Morosan adds: “It is through these transcriptions that we are able to come into contact with the actual sound of the music, and to appreciate the enormous variety of musical styles that existed in this period.”5 The “actual sound of the music,” however, is not as simply discovered as it seems. When transcribing this staffless notation to modern staff notation, one of the greatest challenges is the alignment of the sonorities and rhythms. Sometimes one voice will contain greater or fewer durations than another voice, making alignment problematic.6 Alfred Swan

2 Vladimir Morosan, “One Thousand Years of Russian Church Music,” Monuments of Russian Sacred Music: One Thousand Years of Russian Church Music, Series I, Vol. 1 (Washington D.C.: Musica Russica, 1991), xliii.

3 Morosan, “One Thousand Years… ,” xliii.

4 Morosan, “One Thousand Years… ,” xlv.

5 Morosan, “One Thousand Years… ,” xlv; italics mine.

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maintained that because the polyphony of Russian folk-song was created by heterophony, the interpretation of the old notation was also created by heterophony. In his opinion, this makes transcription to modern notation imprecise.7 Specifically, von Gardner identified four unresolved issues in transcription of early polyphony in staffless notation:

(1) the mensural significance of the musical neumes within a given system of staffless notation and the rhythmic coordination of the adjacent lines; (2) the pitch levels signified by cinnabar marks attached to neumes in adjacent voice parts and the vertical coordination of the pitches; (3) the principles of voice leading and other compositional techniques in polyphonic works; and (4) the relationship of textures in early Russian polyphony to Western Medieval church polyphony of the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries.8

The third unresolved issue (voice leading and compositional technique) is important. It is because of this issue and the scope of the present endeavor that this chapter is titled

“Characteristics of … Polyphony” rather than “Theory of … Polyphony” All of these problems result in a heavy dependence on the editor of the transcription, and with the exception of Alfred

Swan, most scholars agree that an accurate transcription to modern notation is at least possible.

These transcriptions yield interesting voice-leading practices that are foreign to Western musicians.

The Lack of a Modal System and Kanty

It is important to note, first of all, that simply labeling early Russian polyphony as

“modal” is not entirely accurate. The eight modes (or Tones) of the Russian Church were based on melodic formulae rather than on collections of pitches arranged intervallically in a scale, such

6 Johann von Gardner, Russian Church Singing, Vol. 2: History from the Origins to the Mid-Seventeenth Century, translated and edited by Vladimir Morosan (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000), 304.

7 Alfred J. Swan, Russian Music and its Sources in Chant and Folk-Song (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1973), 46.

8 von Gardner, Vol. 2, 317; italics mine.

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as the modes in the Byzantine and Gregorian systems.9 Because of this difference, no emphasis is placed here on a particular mode or all-inclusive collection of pitches, except for the important fact that all of these early chants are diatonic.

More important than modes are the types of chanting executed by the singers. There are three: recitation-psalmody, Ekphonesis, and singing. Von Gardner defined recitation-psalmody as consisting of a “constant level of pitch; mensurably indeterminable duration of individual syllables; slight elongation of vowels; deviations from the basic pitch only at the ends of phrases or texts; lack of clear rhythm; [and] virtually no variation in dynamic level.”10 Ekphonesis he defined as consisting of a

constant level of pitch with likely deviations at the beginnings and especially the ends of phrases and texts; level of median pitch somewhat higher than in psalmody; more extensive elongation of vowels but still without a clearly distinguishable rhythm; small changes in dynamics possible; [and] occasional short melismas, especially at ends of phrases.11

And finally, singing is defined as consisting of “varying levels of pitch over individual syllables; clearly distinguishable intervals; variable duration of pitches that can be more or less precisely determined; more frequent melismas; clearly discernible rhythm; tempo and dynamic level can exhibit marked changes.”12

In both recitation-psalmody and Ekphonesis, rhythm is indeterminate. In Russian

Orthodox sacred music, the rhythm and meter are completely dependent upon the text. There is no regularity of “beats” or “measures” at all. Any type of regularity is a sign of Western

9 Morosan, “One Thousand Years… ,” xliv.

10 von Gardner, Vol. 1, 57.

11 von Gardner, Vol. 1, 57. Ekphonesis in Greek literally means “to call out,” though von Gardner applied his own usage of the word.

12 von Gardner, Vol. 1, 57.

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influence.13 In fact, the regular periodic and proportional rhythm and meter from the West was entirely new to Russian church singers in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.14 It is possible that singing, as defined by von Gardner as having a “clearly discernible rhythm” (which may account for the simplicity in transcription to modern Western notation), is actually found more in Kanty than in polyphonic chant. Olga Dolskaya described seventeenth-century Kanty as consisting of “intertwined ribbon-like movement between the upper voices, parallel motion and major/minor fluctuation.”15 An example of seventeenth-century Kanty, edited by Dolskaya, is shown in Example 3.1.

Example 3.1: Example of seventeenth-century Kanty, found in Dolskaya, 12.

Notice that some features are akin to those found in Western music, including homophony, defined meter, and the specifics of voice leading. For example, note the second system above, in which the lowest voice moves generally in root motion by fifth (similar to the bass voice in

13 Vladimir Morosan, Choral Performance in Pre-Revolutionary Russia (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1986), 260.

14 Morosan, Choral Performance, 49.

15 Olga Dolskaya, Spiritual Songs in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 1996), xxxiii.

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Western music); the upper two voices move in parallel thirds, which—considering this movement with the lowest voice—breaks no rules of traditional Western counterpoint; and (half- way through the second system) a suspension is created between the upper two voices, which is a cadential figure reminiscent of what is found in the perfect cadences of the West.

Voice leading and Vertical Sonorities

While the above example demonstrates voice-leading techniques nearly identical to those of Western practice, the music indigenous to the Russian Church contains voice leading, textures, and metrical structure very different from the conventions of the West. In 1966,

Brajnikov wrote, “The notations of znamenny polyphony require a special approach to their transcription; but when correctly read the music of the ‘scores’ abounds in harsh sonorities in the form of extended parallel seconds and fifths.”16 The preceding italicized comment represents the major difference in voice-leading conventions between the Russian Orthodox and Catholic traditions. Uspensky’s analysis of this early polyphonic chant expounds upon Brajnikov’s assessment: “The voices enter at the interval of the second and, within a short period of time, four more vertical intervals of the second appear in a row. In the process, the voices cross. Later in the piece, the interval of a second appears once again, ‘resolving to a fourth.’”17 From this analysis one gathers that the voices are relatively independent and voice crossing happens frequently; vertical intervals do not follow the precepts of consonance versus dissonance as per

Western music; and cadences do not discharge tension upon a perfect consonance (instead they may “resolv[e] to a fourth”).

16 Cited in Swan, Russian Music, 45; italics mine.

17 von Gardner, Vol. 2, 316; italics mine.

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Example 3.2: Example of seventeenth-century Russian polyphony provided by Brajnikov, found in Swan, Russian Music, 47.

45

Example 3.3: Example of seventeenth-century Russian polyphony, provided by von Gardner, Vol. 2, 299.

46

Example 3.3, continued.

Swan provided a small excerpt of this polyphonic chant (from Brajnikov) in modern staff notation (see Example 3.2 above); but von Gardner provided a complete chant transcription in his text, with a description of its contents:

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From this example [Example 3.3 above it is clear that the texture, the voice leading and the sonority of this piece of music are fundamentally different from those of Western polyphonic compositions of the seventeenth century. Particularly noteworthy is the abundance of dissonant combinations and the distinctiveness of the asymmetrical rhythm.18

Von Gardner sums up the primary differences between the Russian Orthodox and Catholic conventions in this statement, with a major emphasis on “dissonant combinations” and

“asymmetrical rhythm.” Morosan also provided a few examples of Russian seventeenth-century polyphonic chant, with an example of a Cherubic Hymn (reproduced in Example 3.4).

3-10 3-7 3-7 3-7 3-7

3-10 3-9

Example 3.4: Cherubic Hymn from the seventeenth-century. I have labeled the sonorities that would be considered dissonant in traditional Western sixteenth-century practice. These are the most common dissonant sonorities used in this period. Taken from Morosan, One Thousand Years, 91.

In each of the preceding examples, some of the non-tertian sonorities have been labeled, using the nomenclature of pitch-class sets. All of these non-tertian (i.e., non-third-based)

18 von Gardner, Vol. 2, 298; italics mine.

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sonorities—“non-structural” from the perspective of Western tonal tradition—are trichords (due to the prevalence of three-voice chant settings in this period). They are generated out of linear independence rather than from any a priori sense of “harmonic progression;” thus, any sense of

“tonal process” is coincidental. Morosan labeled this type of early polyphony as “linear,” defined by the voices contrasting rhythmically.19 It is true that the polyphonic practice of the Western

Renaissance is also characterized by the rhythmic independence of voices, but its results are not comparable to those stemming from the freer contrapuntal practices of these Russian polyphonic pieces.

Dissolution and Revival of Ancient Chants

The printing of staffless neumes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries allowed for this freedom in contrapuntal practice, but the imprecise methods of deciphering the staffless notation was problematic until the advent of staff notation from the West. The disappearance of staffless notation coincided with the dissolution of the indigenous compositional style seen in the examples above. The printing of staffless notation was revived in the nineteenth century, however, along with the major reforms of church music.20 Because of this revived access to earlier techniques, “unison and two- and three-voiced textures reminiscent of early polyphony were used; traditional liturgical modes of performance (such as solos with refrains, etc.) were reintroduced; [and] the liturgical text was restored to its role as a central form-determining element.”21 Smolensky, in an effort to revive the ancient chants and encourage new composition

19 Morosan, “One Thousand Years… ,” xlvi.

20 von Gardner, Vol. 2, 330.

21 Morosan, “One Thousand Years… ,” lv.

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with the older, indigenous techniques, created four general guidelines in his Kontrapunktika for composing in a distinctively Russian style. There could be

(1) The admissibility of parallel voice leading (in fifths, fourths, and octaves); (2) A constantly changing number of voices in the texture, expanding from the usual four to as many as eight and contracting to only two or a unison; (3) The possibility of a single melodic line with a drone (the texture of chant with an ison [the sustained drone pitch] used in the Byzantine Church); [and] (4) Formal structures that are word-related rather than determined by purely musical relationships of periods and phrases.22

These guidelines match the characteristics of the music found in the examples above.

Harmony, Rhythm, and Texture

For the purposes of the present discussion, a few characteristics of this style should be highlighted. First, perhaps the most noticeable difference between the contemporaneous sacred music of the Catholic and Russian Orthodox Churches, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is in the harmonic style that results from linear interaction. While the Catholic tradition was rooted in tertian consonant harmony, even when the primary focus was on counterpoint and voice leading, the Russian Orthodox tradition did not attach particular significance to the resulting sonorities, to the point that the final sonority of polyphonic chant frequently ends on a non-tertian harmony.23 Some of the resulting non-tertian harmonies recur quite often in this

Russian polyphony, and I have identified some of these below (Figure 3.5). Their usage is a principal characteristic shared between this early Russian church music and Stravinsky’s sacred works, and thus these harmonies have been extracted and labeled to provide a framework for

22 Morosan, Choral Performance, 231.

23 Examples of non-tertian final sonorities can be heard in the Stikharion, mode 6 (Track 1), (026) sonority; Ode 1 (Track 5), (027) sonority; and Ode 3 (Track 7), (027) sonority on St. John Damascene, Russian Easter, The Russian Patriarchate Choir, Anatoly Grindenko, Opus 111 compact disc OPS 30-145.

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comparison between the two bodies of work. The appearance of major and minor triads has been ignored on the grounds that they are common to both Catholic and Russian church styles, and therefore they cannot argue for a specifically Western or Eastern influence in Stravinsky’s works.

Figure 3.5: Common sonorities found in seventeenth-century Russian polyphonic chant.

Second, the sense of rhythm and meter is not regular in the way that Western compositions of the same period are. With von Gardner’s definitions of recitation-psalmody and

Ekphonesis, the chants of this period seem to follow the rhythmic stress of the text rather than a priori hierarchical metrical structures. (That is, in sixteenth-century Western polyphony, meter governs where the strong and weak accents of the text may occur.) This aspect of text setting does not match Stravinsky’s own text-setting procedures, as he actually rebelled against both considerations of text either as the determinant of the rhythm or as a matching of strong and weak beats in a set meter.24

Third, the vocal style and simplicity of these Russian chants are not comparable with the virtuosic singing style popular in early-Baroque Europe. As an anonymous reviewer of Russian choral music wrote concerning the soloist’s role:

The more austerely and dispassionately the solo is performed, the more the work will benefit, since to concern oneself with “expression” in the commonly accepted sense of the term is entirely inappropriate: what is required is the mood of an

24 See Richard Taruskin, “Stravinsky’s ‘Rejoicing Discovery’ and What It Meant: In Defense of His Notorious Text Setting,” Stravinsky Retrospectives, ed. Ethan Haimo and Paul Johnson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987): 162-200; and Ruth Zinar, “Stravinsky and His Latin Texts,” College Music Symposium 18/2 (1978): 176-88.

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inspired prophet who has renounced everything earthly and sees the heavens opening before him.25

These three traits—the non-tertian harmonic language; the text-dominant rhythmic structure; and the simple, unadorned texture—created a style of composition that had been wholly forgotten as a national Russian style, and that was accordingly fresh and original to the

Russian nationalist composers of the late nineteenth century. In the analyses of the following chapters, these traits (primarily harmony and texture) are demonstrated to exist also in the sacred works of Stravinsky, who, even when choosing a Catholic genre like the Mass, could not escape the indigenous music of his religious roots.

25 Morosan, Choral Performance, 298.

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Chapter Four

Analysis of “Bogoroditse dievo” and “Ave Maria”

The tendency [in Stravinsky analysis] nowadays is to find consistency, not conflicts.1 Kofi Agawu

Stravinsky’s three unaccompanied Russian Sacred Choruses (hereafter, RSC) are the only pieces he wrote that are both in Slavonic and intended for liturgical use. These brief pieces are also the only works in which Stravinsky admitted an influence from early Russian church music:

I knew nothing of the traditions of Russian Church music at that time (or now), but instinctively I sought older roots than Borniansky, our classic composer in the genre, who, after his long stay with Galuppi in Venice had been wholly converted to the Italian style. . . . My pieces probably fuse early memories of church music in Kiev and Poltava with the conscious aim to adhere to a simple and severe harmonic style, a ‘classical’ style but with pre-classical cadences.2

Here he admits a “conscious aim” to write in an “older” style. He refers to one that pre-dates

Bortniansky, which I take to mean one that pre-dates Western influences, as he focuses on the fact that Bortniansky “had been wholly converted to the Italian style.” If the RSC can be understood as an example of Stravinsky’s conscious effort to compose in the style of early indigenous Russian polyphony, the compositional techniques used in these choruses may be found in his other sacred works, and this could suggest the influence of this indigenous style on these works.

Before discussing some of the traits of early Russian polyphony in one of the composer’s

RSC movements, “Bogoroditse dievo,” Taruskin had discussed traits of early Russian polyphony when comparing Georgian religious music (see Example 4.1) to some of Stravinsky’s works:

1 Kofi Agawu, “Stravinsky’s Mass and Stravinsky Analysis,” Music Theory Spectrum, xi (1989), 162.

2 Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Themes and Episodes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), 31; italics mine.

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Comparison [of Stravinsky’s transcription of Georgian songs] with Arakchiyev’s [phonographic] publications [of Georgian folk and sacred songs, which Stravinsky knew], particularly the group of religious songs published under the title “Georgian Canticles for the Liturgy of St. John of Damascus in Folk Harmonization,” will show the source of certain devices of harmony and voice- leading—parallel triads, upward resolving sevenths—that crop up now and again in Stravinsky’s score [of the transcribed songs], and will also provide an ethnographic validation for some of his “anhemitonic consonances” (chords in which seconds and fourths are treated as stable).3

Notice that these “devices” indicated by Taruskin—“parallel triads, upward resolving sevenths”—can also be found in early Russian (and not just Georgian) polyphony; see Examples

4.1 and 4.2. Parallel triads can be found in Example 4.1d, and also in Example 4.2 at the end of the first system and beginning of the second system. Upward resolving sevenths can be found in

Example 4.1e, as the second measure leads into the third, and in Example 4.2 from the third to the fourth labeled sonorities. Finally, “chords in which seconds and fourths are treated as stable” can be found in Example 4.1f, in the first two measures, and in Example 4.2 in the fifth and sixth labeled sonorities.

3 Richard Taruskin, “Stravinsky and the Subhuman,” Defining Russia Musically (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 428.

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Example 4.1: Selected passages from D. I. Arakchiyev, Gruzinskiye pesnopeniya na liturgiyu sv. Ioanna Zlatoustogo v narodnoy garmonizatsii, in Taruskin, “Stravinsky and the Subhuman,” 429.

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Example 4.2: Cherubic Hymn from the seventeenth century. I have labeled the sonorities that would by considered dissonant in traditional Western sixteenth-century practice. These are the most common dissonant sonorities used in this period. While major and minor triads do exist (and even complete this excerpt), some of the sonorities labeled above are longer note values that seem to form events of brief musical repose. While the triad is a stable entity, some of the dissonant sonorities labeled can also be stable. Taken from Morosan, One Thousand Years, 91.

According to Taruskin, Stravinsky definitely knew of these indigenous Georgian religious pieces, so it is reasonable to assume that he also would have had at least some knowledge of his own country’s indigenous religious music. In fact, Taruskin did find examples of Russian chant in Stravinsky’s RSC. For example, the soprano part of his setting of the “Our Father” is modeled after an original Orthodox chant.4 Taruskin also found an unfinished chorus by Stravinsky (in

4 Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, Volume 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 1619.

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addition to the three finished choruses) entitled “Izhe Kheruvimi” (“Cherubic Hymn”), in which a traditional chant was employed and placed in the alto voice.5

In sum, there are at least three reasons to believe that the RSC may have been influenced by early Russian polyphony: 1) Stravinsky admitted to using a style that pre-dates Bortniansky and thus (implicitly) one that pre-dates Western influences; 2) he had transcribed indigenous

Georgian religious music that contained traits similar to those of early Russian polyphony; and 3) there are at least two cases where traditional Orthodox chants were employed in his RSC.

Turning now to “Bogoroditse dievo,” in the first four measures there are several characteristics of early Russian polyphonic chant, as described in Chapter 3. First, in Example

4.3, the meter is highly irregular. The rhythms employed are not strange or complex in themselves (they are quarter and eighth notes), but their succession does not follow a grouping that will fit into a regular meter. Taking the soprano part and removing the bar lines, the rhythms themselves do not suggest any consistent grouping (nor do the pitches). The meter that

Stravinsky chose for the opening (2/4) does not remain constant, and in fact changes every measure. Because of the irregularity of both the rhythm and meter, there is no sense of strong and weak beats.

Regarding the balance and roles played by the voices, each seems related to the other three voices. The rhythms are very similar; in fact, all four voices share the same rhythm in the opening two measures. The pitch content is also very similar, with a focus primarily around the

Bb–D–F triad. While the texture is mostly homophonic, it is not a texture of melody plus accompaniment. If we compare the soprano voice to the other three, there is no reason that it must be the melody part. Instead, all four voices seem to move in tandem with no more

5 Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian, Vol. 2, 1619-21.

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importance given to one part than to another. This is especially true of the bass, which does not show the same kind of movement that a part-song (Kanty) from the seventeenth century would show. It is possible to switch the places of the soprano and bass without destroying the equal- voice balance. In three-voiced early Russian polyphonic chant, no particular voice is more important than another with the exception of the middle voice, which carries the actual chant melody. The fact that the middle voice is given the chant indicates that it is to be enclosed in the texture, not floating above an accompaniment, isolated from the other voices. Although there is no evidence of a particular chant being employed in Stravinsky’s piece, as with Russian polyphonic chant its soprano lacks the distinction that would isolate it from the other three.

It is of little use to explain the voice leading and succession of sonorities in standard tonal terms. Although the key signature consists of B-flat, it is not in F major or D minor; and indeed, the opening sonority is (essentially) a B-flat major triad. Some of the sonorities are not triads at all. Non-tertian sonorities are, of course, permitted in the Western tradition of voice leading, but they usually do not pervade the content. In contrast, in just mm. 3–4 there are many sonorities that are not tertian. Various trichords have been identified in Example 4.3 to show their relationship to three-voice chant from seventeenth-century Russia. Notice that every trichord includes interval-classes (ics) 2 and 5. These are “chords in which seconds and fourths are treated as stable” (to use Taruskin’s words),6 and they are also the same trichords that are found in early Russian polyphonic chant. It does not seem coincidental that Stravinsky used these same sonorities, given his explicit statement about seeking an earlier style.

The profusion of dissonant trichords alongside conventional triads does pose a problem, however: Taruskin’s words aside, how do we determine which sonorities in this early Russian

6 Taruskin, “Stravinsky and the Subhuman,” 428.

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style are to be regarded stable? If, for example, the B-flat major triad is interpreted as the stable chord, then the surrounding trichords would be heard as contextually dissonant. But if they are dissonant, how can they can be interpreted as sonorities used (later) by Stravinsky in self- standing ways? In an informal personal communication to the author, David Carson Berry offered a response to this apparent dilemma. He noted that pieces in this early Russian polyphonic style may be interpreted as embellishing referential triadic sonorities at their core, but perhaps “with greater freedoms than in the Western traditions, through contrapuntal displacements (i.e., diagonal alignments) and simultaneous embellishments.” Over time, certain embellishments may “become referential themselves, in that their composite sonorities [may be used] frequently in the repertory.” This may occur through a gradual assimilation process. “That is, just as the seventh was once a passing dissonance [in Western music], and then later it became incorporated into a self-standing chord, perhaps these [Russian trichordal] sonorities—though starting as embellishments—eventually gained semi-autonomous status too.”7 When Stravinsky adopted them for his own music, he arguably changed their status to fully autonomous.

Now let us turn our attention to the version of “Bogoroditse dievo” that Stravinsky adapted in 1949, with a Latin text: “Ave Maria.” This did not involve just a translation of the text, from the original Slavonic, but changes in notation as well as in pitches and rhythms. First, in Example 4.4, a piano part doubling the voices has been added “for rehearsal only.” The reason for this addition (or, conversely, for the lack of it in the original 1934 version) is simple: instruments are not allowed in the Orthodox Church; therefore, rehearsal with an instrument would have been impossible. Another noticeable change is in the scoring; in the original version, the soprano and alto parts were paired, as were the tenor and bass parts. In the Latin version all four voices have been braced as a choir, which is the usual format in Western choral music.

7 David Carson Berry, email message to the author, July 9, 2008.

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There is no obvious precedent to the former in early Russian chant, but it is possible that

Stravinsky did not want the piece to be considered as a four-voice piece per se, but instead as a piece for two two-voice combinations. (Most polyphonic chants from the seventeenth-century are three-voiced; there are some that are four-voiced, but these are rare and could indicate

Western influence.) Another, smaller difference between the two versions is the tempo marking.

In the 1949 version Stravinsky removed the descriptive marking (“Lento”) and replaced it with a metronome marking. Once again, this might indicate Western influence, as the metronome was a

Western innovation (although Stravinsky was especially conscious of tempo in general). Of course, metronome markings are not used exclusively by Western composers.8

The most significant changes have to do with rhythm, text, and pitch. Unlike the Slavonic version, the Latin version has simplified the meter, resulting in fewer metric changes. The former had sixteen meter changes in twenty measures (80%), whereas the latter has only twelve changes in thirty-five measures (34.3%). There is but one change in meter in the first four measures of the

Latin version. Notice the first beat in the original version has been dropped, leaving an anacrusis to the new first beat. The rhythm has also been altered slightly in places. For example, the second measure of the Latin version has been elongated from the original third measure by one beat.

This was probably done to accommodate the simpler metric structure. The Latin version is also longer due to a greater use of melismas. The Slavonic version contains only one melisma, in m.

14. The Latin version, on the other hand, contains melismas in mm. 1–2, 4, 13–14, 19–20, and

22–23. Whether or not melismas can be considered a Western phenomenon is difficult to prove, and certainly there are some very melismatic chants in the Russian church. What is important here is Stravinsky’s possible intent to evoke the sound of early Russian polyphony. The Slavonic

8 There is no evidence to support that anyone other than Stravinsky made these editorial changes. It is assumed that the composer indicated the metronome marking.

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version exhibits a texture that mostly sets one syllable for each beat, whereas the Latin version emphasizes certain words by extending them over several notes.

The pitch content of the two versions is also different, with the major difference being the repetition of material in the “Ave Maria”: a recapitulation of the opening material occurs m. 19 through the end. This is a major shift in form from “Bogoroditse dievo,” in which the material is stated only once. This was probably due to the extended melismas in “Ave Maria” that are not present in “Bogoroditse dievo” and the syllabic differences between the Slavonic and Latin texts.

In order to fit the Latin text to the pre-existing musical material, Stravinsky had to repeat a section of music to avoid writing new original material.

Stravinsky added a few ornaments where none existed before. For example, in m. 10 of the Latin version, on the third beat the alto has a quick diminution of two sixteenth notes and an eighth note. Compared to m. 11 in the Slavonic version, which has static motion in the alto, this

Latin version draws attention to the alto voice. Finally, the addition of the “Amen” at the end of the Latin version carries with it a new musical ending. The original version ends on a D-minor chord, and one would expect—due to the transposition of the Latin version—that the final chord in “Ave Maria” would be E minor. Indeed, this is the final chord on the word “nostrae,” but

Stravinsky added “Amen” over an A-major chord. Certainly this marks a shift in tone and affect, as well as tonal orientation. All of these differences in adapting the work from a Slavonic to a

Latin version reveal considerations other than just language.

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Example 4.3: Igor Stravinsky, Ave Maria, Slavonic Church Version (London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1934)

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Example 4.4: Igor Stravinsky, Ave Maria, New Version with Latin Text by Igor Stravinsky (London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1949).

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Chapter Five

Analysis of Symphony of Psalms

The intrinsic significance and the scope of these works within the framework of his music as a whole seem to justify the view that a study of these religious works is the key to Stravinsky’s real self and to the logic of his entire development.1 Roman Vlad

In Chapter 4, Stravinsky’s “Bogoroditse dievo” and its Latin counterpart, “Ave Maria,” were examined in order to discern which of their compositional attributes corresponded to early

Russian Orthodox polyphonic chant. After finding correspondences between actual chant and

“Bogoroditse dievo,” the latter was compared to “Ave Maria” to discover what Stravinsky removed or altered. The “missing” elements, taken to be characteristics associated specifically with the Slavonic version, are inappropriate for the Latin version. Similarly, in this and the following chapter, two other Latin works by Stravinsky (Symphony of Psalms and Mass) will be compared to discern which chant-influenced compositional techniques were employed by the composer.

Beginning with Symphony of Psalms, the first passage to consider is actually an example of traditional Western imitative counterpoint. Example 5.1 shows R7–R8 (i.e., rehearsal numbers

7 through 8) in the second movement. The first two voices have already entered in the exposition of a fugal texture in this passage. The rhythm of the passage is conventional and follows strict patterns determined by the subject of the fugue. The presence of quicker rhythms (sixteenth notes) denotes ornamental figures; for example, in R7+3 (i.e., the third measure after R7), in the alto there is a small diminution on the syllable “-xau.” Rhythmic ornamentation, while used in some unison chants, was not used as often in polyphonic chants, as it placed too much emphasis

1 Roman Vlad, Stravinsky, trans. Frederick and Ann Fuller (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), 155.

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on one voice part. In the same measure, notice also the way the three voices set the text: each is at a different place in the setting, causing the text to be unclear to the listeners. This is virtually necessary in imitative textures, which is why the Russian Orthodox chants avoided such textures, placing greater importance upon the words. Metrically, this is also very regular and proportional.

There are no meter changes in this passage; in fact, there are no meter changes until R13. The regularity of strong and weak beats acts pre-compositionally, causing the music and the text to conform to the meter. This would have been entirely out of place in seventeenth-century indigenous Russian chant.

Example 5.1: R7–R8 from Igor Stravinsky, Symphony of Psalms, Vocal Reduction of the 1948 revision by Soulima Stravinsky (London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1948), 12-13.

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Example 5.1, continued.

The use of consonance and dissonance is also Western-influenced. I stress “influenced,” because Stravinsky did not adhere strictly to precepts for consonance and dissonance as per traditional contrapuntal theory. Nonetheless, there are clear examples of traditional voice leading. Consider again R7+3, in which the alto resolves the A-flat to G-flat, against the tenor’s

B-flat, before proceeding upward; this is a typical resolution of a seventh, as the A-flat in the alto was suspended from the previous measure. The suspended E-flat in the soprano in the third beat

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is also resolved to D-flat in the last beat over the tenor’s F-natural. Such examples of traditional

(Western) voice leading are not conventional to seventeenth-century Russian music theory (See

Example 5.2).

Example 5.2: Example of seventeenth-century Russian polyphony provided by Brajnikov, found in Swan, Russian Music, 47.

The next passage uses a similar imitative subject, but with a usage of consonance and dissonance that is less conventional (in Western terms). In Example 5.4, which shows R10–R11 of the second movement, the first three voices enter at the distance of ic5 from one another, forming the trichord 3-9 (027). This trichord is also generated harmonically on the downbeat of the entrances of the tenor and bass. This occurrence is very different from those of the last example, as the static nature of the subject-head does not allow for an explanation of resolution of dissonances; after the descending fourth in the subject-head, the subject remains steady on the same note for at least three beats. In the last example, dissonant sonorities were generally resolved, but in this example the opening sonorities are left unresolved and function as stable chords in their own right. At R11 the tenor voice moves to A-flat, a seventh above the bass’s B- flat. Based on the conventional Western voice-leading techniques previously employed in

Example 5.1, one would expect the A-flat to resolve downward by step, but instead it evades

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resolution in the next measure and moves upward, by step, to C-flat—a clear departure from conventional Western voice leading. To quote Taruskin once again, “upward-resolving sevenths” is one of Stravinsky’s trademark compositional devices, as well as a feature of indigenous religious music (Georgian in this particular case, see Example 5.3, mm. 2–3).2

Example 5.3: Selected passage from D. I. Arakchiyev, Gruzinskiye pesnopeniya na liturgiyu sv. Ioanna Zlatoustogo v narodnoy garmonizatsii, in Taruskin, “Stravinsky and the Subhuman,” 429.

Finally, the rhythms are much simpler in this passage as opposed to that of R7–R8.

Although there are a few written-out ornaments, most of the parts have been simplified, often to a mere repetition of one note, as in the soprano following R11; this contrasts the florid counterpoint often found in Western polyphony from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The text is still fractured by the imitative texture, but this passage is merely an example of a predominantly Western style infused with seventeenth-century Russian chant characteristics; in other words, this example is not as “pure” in its influences as is the “Bogoroditse dievo.”

2 Richard Taruskin, “Stravinsky and the Subhuman,” Defining Russia Musically (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 428.

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Example 5.4: R10–R11 from Symphony of Psalms, 14-15.

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Example 5.4, continued.

In the opening four measures of the third movement, the sonorities are certainly not traditional tertian triads, as illustrated by the downbeat of m. 2 by the orchestra. This sonority, except for the A-natural (which anticipates the entrance of the choir and whose explanation is forthcoming), is a member of 4-23 (0257), which contains two common trichords from the chant literature: 3-7 (025) and 3-9 (027). In fact, through inversion 3-7 and 3-9 each appear twice within 4-23. Stravinsky used 4-23 often, in many works3, and Agawu has focused particularly on its implementation in Mass.4 The interval vector of 4-23 is <021030>, which reveals the high- level concentration of ics 2 and 5, two very common intervals in early Russian polyphony, especially when used in combination. In fact, 4-23 can be generated by stacking perfect fifths in succession. This sustained sonority is followed by the entrance of the choir in m. 2, where the first two chords (on the fourth beat of m. 2) form 4-22 (0247), which now includes the A-natural

3 One particular example from his secular oeuvre is the melody of the “Mystic Circle of the Young Girls” in The Rite of Spring. It features the 4-23 tetrachord.

4 Kofi Agawu, “Stravinsky’s Mass and Stravinsky Analysis,” Music Theory Spectrum, xi (1989), 145.

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that was anticipated by the orchestra in m. 1. Like 4-23, this chord also includes 3-7 and 3-9 as well as 3-6 (another important trichord in early Russian polyphony) and of course 3-11 (the major triad). The next chord, on the downbeat of m. 3, is 3-10 (036)—the diminished triad— which is used quite often in indigenous Russian polyphony. Including the orchestra’s C-natural

(in the bass), the final chord in m. 4 is 4-26 (0358), which embeds 3-7 twice (including in inversion). In tonal parlance, this “minor-seventh chord” does not have a functional identity. Its root, C-natural, makes sense within the key signature as a tonic, but the presence of the seventh,

B-flat, destroys its tonicity. In sum, all of the sonorities in these opening measures are in accord with the high level of harmonic dissonance (compared to the level of consonance/dissonance in the Western tradition) found in seventeenth-century Russian polyphonic chant.

Example 5.5: Opening measures of the third movement from Symphony of Psalms, 18.

Finally, perhaps the clearest example of Russian Orthodox influence occurs in R22–R23 of the last movement. The rhythmic structure is very simple, utilizing longer note values

(quarter, half, and whole notes). The meter is regular, but there is not the same sense of strong versus weak beats observable in the first example of imitative counterpoint above (Example 5.1).

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In fact, in R24, the meter is disrupted by the rhythm. The measures of R22–R23 seem to flow with indifference to the meter due to the hemiola created in the bass parts of the orchestra. The pitch content of the chorus is very simple, with no ornamentation and very small ranges

(excluding the octave transfers in the bass). The opening sonority in the chorus is again 4-22

(0247), which suggests the inclusion (i.e., embedding) of multiple trichords. The simple melodic motion is certainly reminiscent of early Russian chant, where there is no climatic goal, but rather a sense of timelessness and equal emphasis on the entire text. The initial sonority by the orchestra is 5-35 (02479), the pentatonic set, which includes all three trichords mentioned above:

3-6, 3-7, and 3-9. The ostinato bass by the orchestra (including the pitches E-flat, B-flat, and F- natural) forms the trichord 3-9 (027). Although it might be tempting to interpret this bass as expressing traditional tonal motion by fifths, none of the three pitch classes are given priority as a tonal center. Finally, the text in this passage is set homophonically, unlike the first two examples, which feature imitative counterpoint. Here the text is clearly understood by the listener, and melismas have been avoided, so that the text is not unnecessarily manipulated rhythmically by the music. This simple setting of the text breaks away from Stravinsky’s more daring distortions of textual accents and marks a possible influence from early Russian Orthodox chant.

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Example 5.6: Rehearsal numbers 22 and 23 from Symphony of Psalms, 33-34.

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Example 5.6, continued.

The best examples of early Russian polyphonic influence are the two from this last movement—and especially the last example. In Chapter 1 I discussed the following statement from Stravinsky, concerning this movement:

The rest of the slow-tempo introduction, the Laudate Dominum, was originally composed to the words of the Gospodi Pomiluy. This section is a prayer to the Russian image of the infant Christ with orb and scepter. I decided to end the work with this music, too.5

In this statement the composer acknowledges his own original intention for a Russian Orthodox

Slavonic text. The fact that he changed the text to the Latin “Laudate Dominum” does not diminish the early Russian influences on the music itself. Although the work has been widely hailed as Stravinsky’s first major contribution to the sacred Latin repertoire, the influences from his own religious background should not be overlooked.

5 Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Dialogues and a Diary (London: Faber, 1968), 78.

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Chapter Six

Analysis of Stravinsky’s Mass

I was not influenced in my Mass by any “old” music whatever, or guided by any example.1 Stravinsky

The quote above is a perfect example of Stravinsky’s evasive nature; the superlatives

“not influenced . . . by any” seem disingenuous or oversimplified. Certainly the very act of composing a “Mass” suggests some link with the past, as this is one of Western music’s oldest genres, and indeed the work was written during the composer’s neoclassical period. Michael

Oliver, a biographer of the composer, certainly found some connection with the past in Mass:

In an attempt to write a “real” Mass (provoked into doing so, he said, by the “rococo-operatic sweets of sin” that he found in Mozart’s Masses) he adapted to his own style many techniques characteristic of the ancient musical language of the Church: linear and chordal chant, strict counterpoint, formalized ornament, strong contrast between solo and choral voices. There are as many recollections of these years (hieratic choral textures rooted in the Symphony of Psalms, motor rhythms, melodies in his “Russian” manner, repetitive and of narrow range) but the antique solemnity of the piece and its gaunt austerity announce a new phase.2

Oliver’s observations are similar to those made in the arguments below with regard to the early

Russian Church chant influences found in Mass—especially “linear and chordal chant” and

“‘Russian’ manner.” It is unclear whether Oliver—using the terms “’Russian’ manner”—was referring to the common name for Stravinsky’s early compositional period or music of Russia’s earlier historical eras; but it is more than a coincidence that Oliver found “Russian” influence in

Mass.

1 Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Expositions and Developments (London: Faber and Faber, 1959), 77.

2 Michael Oliver, Igor Stravinsky (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1995), 165.

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Claiming he was not influenced by music from a prior period, Stravinsky also indicated

“he was not guided by any example” (italics, mine). Robert Craft, who became friends with

Stravinsky around the time the composer was writing Mass, believed it to be completely Catholic in nature–drawing influences from that tradition:

Stravinsky’s Mass is Roman Catholic. He is by birth and education Greek Orthodox. Learned in the dogmas and forms of both, he is immensely concerned with the “place” of art in, say, St. Basil and St. Thomas. Stravinsky is predominantly Roman Catholic but always with that rare angle from 6th century Ravenna. Since Noces (1914–17) the fiercely sacred Byzantine without Purgatory and the third dimension has been supplanted, and in March of 1949 he arranged his Russian Pater Noster and Ave Maria for the Roman Catholic Church, an arrangement which brings them closer to the Credo of the Mass. The Mass itself is completely Roman Catholic. In a contrapuntal work this can only mean that it has avoided John Sebastian Bach. Certainly no single model was uppermost, and none at all of the last three centuries.3

Craft certainly believed Stravinsky’s Mass was guided by a Catholic example, even if that example were theological and not musical. It is possible—as Oliver and Craft suggest—

Stravinsky was influenced both by the past and by his faith.

Unfortunately, Craft’s assertions about Stravinsky are not always valid. Craft labeled the composer as Greek Orthodox, which is not technically true.4 Unlike the Catholic Church, which is largely universal in its hierarchy, the different Orthodox Churches are separate in leadership and style. Stravinsky was certainly not Greek Orthodox, nor was he Roman Catholic. The only professions of faith Stravinsky made were to the Russian Orthodox Church. Craft’s statement is thus somewhat problematic, due to his close relationship with the composer; but it should be observed that it was excerpted from his “Mass: a Notebook,” which was published in 1949,

3 Robert Craft, “Stravinsky’s Mass: a Notebook,” in Igor Stravinsky, ed. Edwin Corle (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, distributors, 1949), 205.

4 For research that questions the validity of authors who wrote about Stravinsky, see Laurence Davies, “Stravinsky as Littérateur,” Music & Letters 49/2 (1968): 135-44.

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immediately after Mass had been written and only a short time after Craft had met the composer.

Still, Craft’s observations are not to be taken too lightly, as he did work closely with Stravinsky on the performances of Mass. Due to his belief in a Catholic tradition behind the composer’s

Mass, he analyzed the piece in a modal framework.5 The possibility for Catholic influence is valid even if Craft is incorrect about the composer’s religious affiliation.

Elena Malysheva, a Soviet musicologist, was the first to suggest a dual influence between the Catholic tradition and the Eastern Orthodox tradition in Stravinsky’s Mass. She focused more on the influence of Georgian folk songs (which intersects also with Taruskin’s work), although she acknowledged the possibility of multiple religious-musical traditions.6

Instead of looking for particular compositional influences in the Mass, Pieter van den

Toorn has sought a single thread to tie all of Stravinsky’s works together through some unifying compositional technique. His answer, which involves the use of octatonic and diatonic pitch collections, is also traceable to the composer’s studies with Rimsky-Korsakov.7 Kofi Agawu, in his own analysis of Mass, has argued against such a blanket analysis:

The studied archaism [of Stravinsky’s Mass] resists facile categorization into a diatonic, octatonic, or octatonic-diatonic grid. This is not to underplay the value of van den Toorn’s insight that octatonic collections permeate apparently unrelated Stravinskyian surfaces, but merely to point out that the apparently rigorous theoretical demonstration of stylistic consistency still leaves room for— one might say requires—further synthesis and integration in analytical application.8

Agawu’s analysis approached the piece from neither Russian- nor Western- influenced perspectives; instead, he employed the general concepts of Schenkerian theory, and stated that

5 Craft, “Stravinsky’s Mass: a Notebook,” 204.

6 Elena Malysheva, “On the Georgian Sources of the Mass,” Sovetskaia musyka no. 7 (1982), 93.

7 Pieter van den Toorn, The Music of Igor Stravinsky (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983).

8 Kofi Agawu, “Stravinsky’s Mass and Stravinsky Analysis,” Music Theory Spectrum, xi (1989), 141.

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“In the final analysis, notions of consonance or dissonance are based on the force of context, with the referential elements becoming nominal or arbitrary consonances while the subsidiary elements are heard as dissonances.”9 Roman Vlad perhaps best captured the essence of

Stravinsky’s use of dissonance when he acknowledged different purposes for dissonance in different works by the composer:

The resulting clashes of dissonance, which at one time Stravinsky would have used to produce explosive, violent sensations, no longer generate dynamic effects; they are used to absorb the harmonies, whittling away their traditional function, performing a kind of blood-letting which relieves their tonal tension. It is this refining process, this clarifying of the classical harmonic entities that helps to create in the Mass . . . a sense of sublime calm, of freedom from the bonds of human passion.10

Mass, then, has been approached by scholars from different angles, and some insights can be gained from looking at Mass through the lens of the Russian Orthodox tradition, despite

Stravinsky’s own statement denying any influence. The concept of dual influence—Catholic and

Orthodox—is the focus of the present argument.

The first example to show this dual influence comes from the closing “Amen” of the

Credo. Here, as in the first two examples from the Symphony of Psalms, an imitative texture unfolds, beginning with the alto. As the voices enter, the use of consonance and dissonance becomes less conventional (in Western terms). The second measure includes consonant major thirds on the first and second beats, which is certainly permissible within traditional rules of counterpoint; but by m. 3 the consonances begin to break down, and by the downbeat of m. 4 any semblance of pure, consonant sonorities has disappeared. The sonority is 4-22 (0247) on that downbeat. As discussed in Chapter 5, 4-22 contains 3-6 (024), 3-7 (025), and 3-9 (027). 3-9 is

9 Agawu, 149.

10 Roman Vlad, Stravinsky, trans. Frederick and Ann Fuller (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), 162- 63.

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used on the second beat of m. 4. M. 5 begins with 4-22 again, using the A-natural resolution in the tenor; the exclusion of the B-natural on the downbeat in the tenor as part of the labeled sonority is due to its function as an accented passing tone. This non-chord tone designation is based on a Western voice leading analysis, which requires the downbeat of m. 5 to receive a dual interpretation as influenced by both Western and early Russian conventions. Finally, the second beat again contains both 3-7 and 4-22. The use of sonorities reminiscent of early Russian polyphony dissolves the typical contrapuntal “Amen” conclusion that is expected—expected, because of the traditional Western voice leading that is used to begin the “Amen,” as well as its use on the downbeat of m. 5 with the accented passing tone.

Example 6.1: “Amen” from Credo of Igor Stravinsky, Mass, Vocal Score by Leopold Spinner (London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1948), 25.

The Kyrie presents this Western/Eastern duality immediately in its first three measures.

Measure 1 begins with sustained pitches by the orchestra, mimicking the sound of bells. This succession of pitches, though spanning a great range in pitch space, actually generates the

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trichord 3-7 (025); thus, the very first sonority heard in Mass is non-tertian yet commonly heard in early Russian polyphony. This is almost cancelled out in the next measure, however, as the choir enters with traditional Western harmony and voice leading. C minor is established for the choir in mm. 2–3, except for the chord on the downbeat of m. 3. It could be explained as resulting from diminutions in the alto and tenor parts, which resolve to C minor before the second beat, except that the tenor has leaps before and after the downbeat to create this sonority.

Stravinsky has thus alerted the listener that this Mass is not going to be presented in a conventional harmonic language. The sonority on the downbeat of m. 3 is none other than 3-7, the trichord from the first measure, but inverted so that the C-natural and F-natural remain invariant. Looking at all the pitches in the first three measures, between the choir and orchestra, it is not so easy to conclude that C minor is the “key.” There are equal emphases of C minor, E- flat major, and A-flat major. I submit that a tonal center is not of relevance here, just as the tonal center of early Russian polyphonic chant often proves difficult to discern. The opening three bars are unified by the 3-7 sonority, which especially “pricks” the ear when listening to this passage.

Example 6.2: First three measures of Kyrie from Mass, 1.

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Agawu analyzed the Kyrie in terms of a Schenker-influenced prolongational model in order to demonstrate that the movement is unified, but not under standard tonal procedures.

Instead, he argued that

the most useful way of hearing the tonal process in this movement is a dual one, one that recognizes, on a deep level, an underlying tonal structure of G, which then defers to a more surface phenomenon, the “arpeggiated” tetrachord, 4-23.11

Agawu even suggests that 4-23 acts as a “dissonant tonic” or perhaps a redefined consonance:

Its terminal sonority is not a triad but a tetrachord . . . [namely] set-class 4-23 or (0257), significant for its symmetrical intervallic arrangement and, in this context, for its relatively open sound, the latter enabling an exploration of tonality-defining intervals, such as fourths and fifths. It is a cadence because, as a terminal sonority, it represents a moment of rest, of completion; rhythmic articulation and voice leading secure the cadential function. To accept this function is to accept a fundamental extension of conventional tonal practice in Stravinsky’s language. The issue turns on definitions of dissonance and consonance—in particular, whether the terminal sonority of any perfect cadence is not by definition a consonance.12

This passage refers to R7-1 (i.e., one measure before rehearsal marker 7), as well as R8-2. In both cases the music seems to find a moment of repose, which Agawu notes is a cadential point.

One can see in Example 6.3 (R8-2) that the orchestra indeed presents 4-23, while the choir’s pitches form 3-9, in this case, a literal subset of the orchestral sonority.

11 Agawu, 161.

12 Agawu, 145.

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Example 6.3: R8-2 in Kyrie from Mass, 5.

Agawu stressed the importance of 4-23 as a unifying element across the entire Mass, and he explained that “the same set provides the prolongational frame for the semicanonic opening four measures of the Gloria.”13 4-23 does act as the superset in these opening measures, but on more local levels, certain trichords are exploited as well. In Example 6.4 the first beat of m. 1 emphasizes 3-6 (024), and this trichord acts as a brief moment of resolution in m. 2, beats one and three. Trichords 3-7 (025) and 3-9 (027) govern the last beat of m. 3 and all of m. 4, and the entrance of the alti in m. 5 completes the trichord 3-9 with the woodwind duet. Each of these three trichords is a subset of 4-23. Even though Agawu has pointed out the significance of this tetrachord in terms of unification, these opening four bars are reminiscent of early Russian polyphony for two reasons beyond the sonorities employed. First, while the simple triple meter can be felt, the use of eighth- and sixteenth-note triplets, as well as quintuplets, frees the rhythm from the meter, especially in mm. 3–4 where it feels as if a hemiola is created. This is

13 Agawu, 156.

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reminiscent of indigenous Russian chant that was not bound to regular meter in the Western tradition. The second reason lies in the close range of the parts, especially with voice crossing.

Voices cross frequently in early Russian polyphonic chant, making it difficult to discern which voice is the upper and which is the lower one.

Example 6.4: Opening of Gloria from Mass, 6.

Like the opening of the Gloria, the entrance of the Discanti in R12 follows the same patterns of rhythm and intertwining lines. Of particular interest in this section, however, is how the trichords coincide with the text setting: as shown in Example 6.5, almost every articulation of a syllable occurs with either 3-7 or 3-9 (the syllables “ho-” and “-ni-” of “hominibus” are actually set by dyads, so their exclusion is not due to a different set of trichords). The only tertian harmony is a minor triad, found on the initial syllable “Et,” which seems significant in its exception, though the rationale is admittedly uncertain. Stravinsky took care to avoid regular, periodic phrasing and traditional Western harmony, relying on the freely flowing lines in spite of the meter and two common sonorities in early Russian polyphony, 3-7 and 3-9.

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Example 6.5: R12 in Gloria from Mass, 6.

The static nature of R13–R14 in the Gloria also hearkens back to early Russian polyphonic practice. Agawu pointed out that the orchestra reiterates 4-23 twenty-two times in this passage. Besides harmonic considerations, the rhythmic and metric structure of this section is similar to “Bogoroditse dievo,” where the meter also changes often. Although one might assume that the rhythm and meter were written to accommodate the text (which is a Russian

Orthodox method), Stravinsky actually took the opposite approach and established an arbitrary rhythmic and metric structure to control the text.14 He wrote that the “musical rhythm is not subordinate to the prosody: just the opposite. . . . As we see in Mass, the ‘rhythmic theme’ must impose its order on the Latin phrase even if this involves some mispronunciation.”15 This blatant

14 For scholarship on Stravinsky’s method of text setting, see: (1) Richard Taruskin, “Stravinsky’s ‘Rejoicing Discovery’ and What It Meant: In Defense of His Notorious Text Setting,” Stravinsky Retrospectives, ed. Ethan Haimo and Paul Johnson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987): 162-200; (2) Eric Walter White, Stravinsky: the Composer and His Works (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979): 534; and (3) Ruth Zinar, “Stravinsky and His Latin Texts,” College Music Symposium 18/2 (1978): 176-88.

15 Gilbert Amy, “Aspects of the Religious Music of Igor Stravinsky,” Confronting Stravinsky, ed. Jann Pasler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 199.

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refutation of Orthodox text-setting is certainly a case of dual influence. Stravinsky provided the semblance of a Russian Orthodox polyphonic chant, with a homophonic text-setting, metric ambiguity, and dissonant harmony; but it is not as purely Russian Orthodox because he intentionally distorted the delivery of the text. Here there is a conflict between the ordinary Latin text of the Catholic Church, as set, and the sound of early Russian Orthodox polyphony.

Example 6.6: R13–R14 in Gloria from Mass, 7-8.

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Example 6.6, continued.

In addition to being the central movement of the work, the Credo offers the clearest example of the dual influence of Catholic and Russian Orthodox traditions, because the two influences are here clearly separated. An obvious if superficial example is the priest’s intonation, which is the beginning of a commonly used Gregorian chant-setting of the Credo. However, as

Malysheva has noted, “Echoes of old Russian notated church singing are heard in the Credo.”16

The choir and orchestra have been divided harmonically in mm. 7-11. The choir sings mostly

16 Malysheva, 93.

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tertian-based harmonies (D major and E major) in mm. 7–9. Relative to the high level of dissonance in the previous two movements, this suggests a release of tension for the choir; it also reveals a separation of influence, however, as this represents the Western-Catholic tradition. The orchestra part, on the other hand, contains trichords 3-7 and 3-9, often used in combination to generate the superset 4-23. This harmonic contrast to the choir demonstrates influence from early

Russian polyphony by the orchestra and influence from the Western tertian tradition for the choir.

Example 6.7: Measures 7 through 11 in Credo from Mass, 13.

The Agnus Dei marks the conclusion of Mass. Unlike the tertian harmonies present in the

Credo, the Agnus Dei is highly dissonant, and as Craft noted, “Only four chords in the choral part do not contain major or minor seconds or sevenths, but the character of the music is archaic, nevertheless, and its instrumental conclusion is modal.”17 The first part of this statement is an objective fact, and the latter reflects Craft’s opinion that the work must conform to the Western

17 Robert Craft, Booklet to Igor Stravinsky: The Composer, Volume VII, orchestra of St. Lukes dir. Robert Craft, MusicMasters compact disc 01612-67152-2, pg. 8.

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tradition of harmony and voice leading. I submit that it is precisely this high level of dissonance that provides the archaic character of the music—archaic, that is, in the Russian Orthodox tradition. In the concluding four measures of the movement, the treble instrumental parts

(including first trombone) emphasize the two common trichords mentioned throughout this chapter: 3-7 and 3-9. These have been labeled in Example 6.8. Every chord in the penultimate measure, in the woodwinds, is either 3-7 or 3-9. Craft’s assertion that the piece ends modally is not entirely false, as it does make use of the diatonic collection, with the bass ending on D- natural and thereby suggesting Dorian; and indeed, there is no leading-tone preceding this D- natural. Still, the question of mode is beside the point. Agawu’s assessment of the importance of some of the dissonant sonorities in the work as a whole seems to be more valid than a focus on modal paradigms. Just as he focused on the structural importance of 4-23 in the Kyrie, he placed equal importance on the concluding sonority of the Agnus Dei (including the bassoons with the oboes and English horn): 4-23.18

18 Agawu, 156.

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Example 6.8: Conclusion in Agnus Dei from Igor Stravinsky, Mass, Full Score (London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1948), 29.

As Agawu based his analysis on Schenkerian theory, which is hierarchical, it is not surprising that the unresolved issue in his analysis was consistency in Mass’s hierarchical structure. “Perhaps the most radical aspect of structure in Stravinsky’s Mass,” he wrote, “is the discontinuity between formally hierarchical levels, the fact that local events are not mapped onto the global structure.”19 Agawu’s acceptance of certain non-tertian sonorities (such as 4-23) as valid structural harmonies a positive step in his analysis, which demonstrates that these sonorities are part of a larger stylistic gesture of Stravinsky’s. However, the need to find consistency between different hierarchical levels is certainly a Western idea—and perhaps a characteristically German one, in the case of Schenker. In contrast to this Western perspective,

Taruskin argued that Stravinsky’s works embrace a “calculated formal disunity and

19 Agawu, 157.

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disjunction—drobnost’ in Russian, meaning the quality of being a sum-of-parts,” and that this idea is specifically a Russian-Eurasian concept.20 It is possible that the unifying aspects of this work have more to do with the stylistic influences (Catholic and Russian Orthodox) than with typical Western ideas of form. Once one understands that this Mass is not entirely Western or

Catholic, one is free to acknowledge another system and culture of musical ideas and relationships.

20 Richard Taruskin, “Stravinsky and the Subhuman,” Defining Russia Musically (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997): 383, 416. Drobnost’ literally means “splinteredness.”

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Chapter Seven

Conclusion

If a musical composition is to meet the requirements of the liturgy, it must of necessity be inspired by an absolute and dogmatic faith; and in the light of this faith all the impulses of the spirit, all the upheavals and torments of the emotions must be calmed down, resolved and sublimated into the devout and serene contemplation of the divine mystery. 1 Roman Vlad

Stravinsky was a cosmopolitan figure in the world of the twentieth century: a citizen of

(successively) Russia, France, and the United States; and a composer who participated in some of the era’s major artistic trends (including neoclassicism and serialism). Nonetheless, he remained devoutly Russian Orthodox, something not easily accomplished in a part of the world dominated by Catholic and Protestant traditions. He took an interest in the Catholic Church, but it was merely that—an interest. His true faith was expressed through his admitted language of prayer: Slavonic. It may seem perplexing that such a devout Orthodox Christian would have delved into liturgical and sacred works appropriate to the Catholic Church, though that is not the subject of the present discussion. My focus has been on how his Russian Orthodox roots were embedded in some of his sacred works.

To summarize, as a young boy Stravinsky might have had knowledge of early Russian

Orthodox polyphonic chant (of the seventeenth century or earlier). During the late nineteenth century, church-music reform was at the top of the list for the Orthodox Church in Russia. Many scholars such as Razumovsky and Smolensky had completed extensive research on ancient chants, and Smolensky even organized historical concerts with the Moscow Synodal Choir.

Stravinsky could have heard one of these concerts, as he grew up in the then-capitol city of St.

1 Roman Vlad, Stravinsky, trans. Frederick and Ann Fuller (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), 156.

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Petersburg. In addition to this first-hand experience, Stravinsky might have acquired some knowledge of early church music from his teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov, who for a time was director of the Imperial Court Chapel. Later in life Stravinsky had an interest in Georgian indigenous religious music, as evidenced by his transcription of some works from a published phonographic source. Given the similarities between this indigenous Georgian music and early

Russian polyphony, one can reasonably assume that Stravinsky already had some understanding of his own Russian heritage. Finally, Stravinsky’s statement about finding “deeper roots,” with reference to the composers Bortniansky and Galuppi, suggests that Stravinsky actively sought knowledge of older Russian church music.

One could potentially argue against the hypothesis that Stravinsky’s Latin sacred works were influenced by early Russian polyphony, based on the fact that he employed similar compositional techniques in many other—and secular—works. The trichords 3-7 and 3-9 as well as the tetrachord 4-23 are found quite often in his oeuvre; and, of course, these sonorities are hardly unique to early Russian polyphony. However, these facts are beside the analytical point, as a comparison with another facet of Stravinsky’s musical language will show. Stravinsky’s use of octatonicism has been widely acknowledged; it was first considered by Arthur Berger, and then explored extensively by Pieter van den Toorn.2 Subsequently (in the words of Kofi Agawu),

Richard Taruskin

2 Arthur Berger, “Problems of Pitch Organization in Stravinsky,” Perspectives of New Music 2/1 (1963): 11–42; and Pieter C. van den Toorn, The Music of Igor Stravinsky (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1983). Although Stravinsky’s use of octatonicism is widely acknowledged, it should be mentioned that its significance— that is, its deeper-level guiding force—has been a subject of debate. See especially Dmitri Tymoczko, “Stravinsky and the Octatonic: A Reconsideration,” Music Theory Spectrum 24/1 (2002): 68–102; and two separate essays published under the heading “Colloquy: Stravinsky and the Octatonic,” in Music Theory Spectrum 25/1 (2003): van den Toorn, “The Sounds of Stravinsky,” pp. 167–85; and Tymoczko, “Octatonicism Reconsidered Again,” pp. 185– 201.

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set out to provide a historical confirmation of Stravinsky’s octatonic routines by searching for earlier (nineteenth-century) uses of the scale or constructs referable to the scale. From the works of Stravinsky’s teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov [and others] . . . Taruskin was able to provide the missing historical link and thus to corroborate as well as complement van den Toorn’s findings.3

In sum, the fact that octatonicism is found in music across Stravinsky’s diverse stylistic periods does not alter the fact that the device has some historical grounding in his Russian roots.

Likewise, even though the sonorities I have been discussing (3-7, 3-9, and 4-23) are prevalent in many Stravinsky scores, I have been arguing for their historical grounding in early Russian indigenous chant. Moreover, I should remind the reader that these sonorities do not, by themselves, suggest early Russian polyphonic influences in Stravinsky’s sacred music; but instead it is the combination of rhythm, meter, harmony, voice-leading, and texture that does so.4

To whatever extent we can posit a conscious influence—an intentional choice—the answer perhaps lies in the differences encoded in the Slavonic versus the Latin versions of his unaccompanied sacred choruses, which were conceptualized differently. Those stylistic choices specific to the Slavonic versions represent the early Russian polyphonic influences that have been the focus of this study; and these choices also served in composing the Symphony of Psalms and the Mass, if not other works beyond the present purview. Perhaps none of Stravinsky’s sacred works can be described as all Catholic, or all Russian Orthodox; it seems more likely that such pieces reflect his own faith and interests, which lie in both traditions. Using the analyses provided here as models, it may be possible to determine the influence of both traditions on

3 Kofi Agawu, “Does Music Theory Need Musicology?,” Current Musicology 53 (1993), 92. Ultimately, however, Agawu suggests that even if there had been no historical “confirmation” of Stravinsky’s octatonic usage, that would not have undermined the “massive evidence” of “patterns observed in Stravinsky’s scores” (ibid.).

4 I am indebted to David Carson Berry for helping to refine the preceding argument and for providing the references.

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Stravinsky’s other sacred works. Being able to determine the Russian Orthodox influence is especially significant, as in the past it was too often overlooked.

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