Building Blocks: Repetition and Continuity in the Music of Stravinsky by Gretchen Horlacher (review)

Igor Stravinsky established himself as one of the most influential composers of the twentieth century through a series of highly provocative pronouncements by both endorsing and fervently renouncing modernism—a term that clearly acted for him more as a signifier of Schoenberg’s compositional practices than as an indication of the radical renewal of musical language. The Russian composer stood at the vanguard of efforts to reinvigorate the Western European art music tradition through innovative aesthetic choices that drew, among others, on his Russian roots. The qualities of nepodvízhnost́ (immobility, stasis), uproshchéniye (simplification), and dróbnost́ (the quality of being formally a sum of parts), which Richard Taruskin introduced in his Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1996) and which the composer presumably distilled from Russian folk music, capture the character of a musical idiom that sought to undermine the teleological spirit of the Austro-Germanic musical heritage. The notorious Schoenberg–Stravinsky polemic, which moulded dominant perceptions of music history over the previous century, only solidified the association of Stravinsky’s name with the aesthetic qualities of stasis, disjunction, and juxtaposition. Analysing excerpts from several works written during the composer’s Russian and neoclassical phases, Gretchen Horlacher’s monograph puts this correlation under the microscope, inviting more nuanced hearings of Stravinsky’s output.

Horlacher holds that signature features of Stravinsky’s music, such as frequent use of ostinato and layering repeating strata, have encouraged previous scholarship to place excessive emphasis on the static and discontinuous qualities of Stravinsky’s music at the expense of elements that engender motion and continuity (p. 10). However, as the author situates her study in the context of previous Stravinsky scholarship over the course of the book, one might get the sense that this opening statement exaggerates the extent of the lacuna Horlacher’s research aims to fill. For her approach builds on a body of writing that has explored the degree and nature of the correlation between continuity and discontinuity in Stravinsky’s music, including Edward T. Cone’s seminal analysis of the Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1920), from which Horlacher departs in not sharing his urge to identify an ultimate synthesis (p. 56). Christopher Hasty (‘On the Problem of Succession and Continuity in Twentieth-Century Music’, Music Theory Spectrum, 8 (1986 ), 58–74) and László Somfai (‘Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1920): Observations on Stravinsky’s Organic Construction’, Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 14 (1972), 355–83) should be listed among those who have highlighted continuity, notably in studies of the very same work to which Horlacher, unsurprisingly, dedicates a chapter (her fifth). Yet Horlacher’s research is certainly an important contribution to discussions about the way static and disjunctive features interact with motion and continuity in Stravinsky’s music, putting forward a systematic method to assess such relations.

Although Stravinsky’s forms are frequently paralleled with the technique of collage—a parallelism encouraged by his practice of juxtaposing highly fixed fragments—Horlacher invites us to perceive his music more in terms of shape than assemblage. She meticulously traces processes that exhibit the composer’s predilection for order, a highly calculated and sophisticated fashion of organizing musical material, concentrating on the musical surface. For Stravinsky’s surface events are not restricted to single identities (pp. 59–60): a fragment may therefore appear both as a discrete repetition and as an emerging phrase (p. 30). Horlacher’s reliance on the notion of dual identity is not only refreshing in the way that it overcomes the either/or distinction, but also compelling in its argument that each identity becomes more remarkable and is enhanced in reference to the other.

Measurement of Stravinsky’s repetitions becomes Horlacher’s primary means of assessing continuity and discontinuity, and melody her primary tool for gauging iteration. Central to her analyses, then, is a study of the way melody is shaped through time, with reference to melodies...