The Cambridge Companion to Stravinsky (review)

Richard Taruskin's compendious study Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1996) begins with a prophetic statement. 'Now that the twentieth century is nearing an end, it is safe to predict that Igor Stravinsky will be remembered as its most famous composer of what, in the twentieth century, has become known as 'serious' music. He was by far the most played, most recorded, most interviewed, most photographed, most talked about.' Even with that volume of discourse, Taruskin goes on to produce some 1,757 pages of scholarship—and they only take us up to Mavra (1922). Somehow, then, it is hard to imagine—even in a new millennium—what might still be left to talk about in this Cambridge Companion to Stravinsky. Of course, Taruskin himself was at pains to note that, despite all this potential information overload, Stravinsky is not necessarily the best known or best understood figure of an age of plurality which he seems so tellingly to represent. There are more contradictory statements about—or even by—this composer than probably any other in history, so there is plenty of controversy for further dissection, digestion, and deliberation.

Even this may prove problematic if the same contradictions, controversies, and deliberations recur with an ostinato-like repetition through a collection of articles that reinterpret rather than renew. There is a danger that Stravinsky scholarship will become somewhat neoclassical in itself. In truth, this Companion does offer some new perspectives, though any reader acquainted with the already burgeoning literature on the composer may at times have to search quite hard to find them, especially as all too often they are illustrated by way of extremely familiar examples. From a miscellany of essays that seem to represent the fundamental Stravinskian trait of calculated discontinuity, two trends emerge. The first may be termed, appropriately enough, a juxtaposition of contrasts. So many individual contributions present their viewpoint in confrontational terms, especially using the device of binary opposition. These may include any number of the following apparent conflicts: Stravinsky/Schoenberg; Apollo/Dionysus; Objective/Subjective; Thought/Emotion; Mind/Body; Neoclassicist/Expressionist; Traditional/Modern; Consonance/Dissonance—even Neoclassical versus Serial. This last example is indicative of the second trend: circularity. In the past, it was customary to divide Stravinsky's music into three stylistic categories: Russian, neoclassical, and serial. Then there was a backlash in a deep and meaningful search for common ground: all Stravinsky sounds like Stravinsky.

In this book, we seem to have reverted to the original position; its second part—The Works—clearly moves through each 'period' in turn, culminating in Joseph N. Straus's article, 'Stravinsky the Serialist'. I find Straus's book Stravinsky's Late Music (Cambridge, 2001) truly provocative and interesting, but the present digest seems to me rather less convincing. Straus tells us: 'While there is some truth in the cliché that Stravinsky always sounds like Stravinsky . . . none the less the late works differ from the early ones at every level' (p.150). Again, there is a binary opposition, here privileging difference over similarity—when surely both are crucially interdependent. Indeed, relative to the models of Schoenberg and Webern (and a further competition as to who might have been slightly more influential), Straus's conclusion about Stravinsky's serialism is absolutely right: 'He [Stravinsky] took what he wanted, and invented the rest' (p. 155). But isn't that true of the 'Russian' works? The late Anthony Pople's chapter on 'Early Stravinsky' clearly and elegantly reaffirms that this is the case. And, if we are seeking a simple definition of 'neoclassical', what could be clearer?

An attempt to define neoclassicism, but by no means to make it simple, is the thrust of Martha Hyde's contribution, 'Stravinky's Neo-classicism'. Attempting to codify such a large body of contrasting music—'there is no major work in this period in...