The Dance Element in Stravinsky's Music
In Stravinsky's music, the dance element of most force is the pulse. It is steady, insistent yet healthy, always reassuring. You feel it even in the rests. It holds together each of his works and runs through them all. The time in Le Sacre changes from measure to measure; in Oedipus the rhythms are four-square; in Apollon the patterns are uncomplicated, traditional; the Symphony of 1945 reviews almost everything he has done before. But in each work his pulse builds up a powerful motor drive so that when the end is reached you know, as with Mozart, the subject has been completely stated, is in fact exhausted.
Stravinsky's strict beat is his sign of authority over time; over his interpreters too. A choreographer should, first of all, place confidence without limit in this control. For Stravinsky's rhythmic invention, possible only above a stable base, will give the greatest stimulus to his own powers.
A choreographer can't invent rhythms, he only reflects them in movement. The body is his medium and, unaided, the body will improvise for a short breath. But the organizing of rhythm on a grand scale is a sustained process. It is a function of the musical mind. Planning rhythm is like planning a house, it needs a structural operation.
As an organizer of rhythms, Stravinsky has been more subtle and various than any single creator in history. And since his rhythms are so clear, so exact, to extemporize with them is improper. There is no place for effects. With Stravinsky, a fermata is always counted out in beats. If he intends a rubato, it will be notated precisely, in unequal measures. (Elsewhere, of course, a good instrumentalist, [End Page 138] Milstein, for instance, or a resourceful dancer, can give the feeling of rubato in Stravinsky's music without blurring the beat.)
Click for larger view | Example 1 Stravinsky, Violin Concerto © 1931 by Schott Music © renewed. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission of European American Music Distributors LLC, sole U.S. and Canadian agent for Schott Music. |
Stravinsky's invention is fascinating, not just because of his free shifting of bar lengths or accents. He can be very brilliant in this manipulation. But if he had merely followed the line of Le Sacre he would have burned out his own interest and ours too.
What holds me, now and always, is the vitality in the substance of each measure. Each measure has its complete, almost personal life, it is a living unit. There are no blind spots anywhere. A pause, an interruption, is never empty space between indicated sounds. It is not just nothing. It acts as a carrying agent from the last sound to the next one. Life goes on within each silence.
An interpreter should not fear (unfortunately many do) Stravinsky's calculated, dynamic use of silence. He should give it his trust and, what's more, his undivided attention. In this use of time, in the extreme, never-failing consciousness of it, he will find one of the living secrets of Stravinsky's music.
Dazzling too is the contour of Stravinsky's melodic line, so carefully weighted and balanced, so jewel-sharp in the molding. It now appears to have absorbed, and to reflect in wonderful transformation the whole dance idiom of Western music—the waltzes, polkas, gavottes, marches, can-cans, tangos and ragtimes; the inventions of Mozart and Gounod; of Offenbach, Lanner and Strauss; of Delibes and Tchaikovsky.
Even the non-balletic works have clear, compelling descriptions of dance movement. In the Violin Concerto (to which I set Balustrade) there is the following passage in Aria II:
Its grave measures, that recall Bach, suggested to me for the pas de trois of the ballet, a dance movement long and slow and very liquid.
Below are quotations from the Elégie, a beautiful work and a tour de force. With the limited sound values of one viola (it's...
