Teaching Stravinsky from the Wennerstrom Anthology

Let me begin by acknowledging Dr. Mary Wennerstrom’s profound impact on my decision to become a music theorist. An inspiring teacher for several courses and independent studies during my master’s and doctoral coursework from 1973–75 and 1976–78 at Indiana University, she soon became my model for what a music theory teacher can achieve. Her graduate classes on variations and theory pedagogy were legendary, but so was her undergraduate teaching. I was one of her associate instructors for the Classical-Romantic undergraduate semester, during which I learned as much or more as her students did.

When Allen Forte’s The Structure of Atonal Music first appeared in 1973, I immediately began working through it page by page, in an independent study the next fall with Dr. Wennerstrom.¹ But sadly, I never had the opportunity to take a twentieth-century course with her. Nevertheless, her Anthology of Twentieth-Century Music became the vehicle through which she continued to influence my pedagogical development, as I designed twentieth-century undergraduate core courses at Michigan, Penn State, and Indiana (where I returned to teach from 1999 to 2011).² Her choice of examples was pedagogically ideal in so many ways that, despite supplementing her collection with excerpts from the Burkhart Anthology, I continued to use the Wennerstrom Anthology through 2010, the last year I taught the course.³

In this brief tribute, I will concentrate on Dr. Wennerstrom’s selections from three early Stravinsky works—Petruschka, Rite of Spring, and Soldier’s Tale—to illustrate how they helped focus my attention on a set of strategies that could be effectively taught as an integrated style. Figure 1 reproduces a one-page handout I created as a summary of these interrelated concepts.⁴ I distributed this handout during the last two weeks of my first unit, which I organized around the stylistic innovations of Debussy, Bartók, Hindemith, and Stravinsky (in that order).

Introducing students to twentieth-century theory by beginning with generally pitch-centered, if not traditionally tonal, styles was a lesson I had learned at Indiana while serving as an associate instructor for Dr. Gary Wittlich’s twentieth-century core course. Beginning with more familiar-sounding music can help prepare students for more radical, post-tonal systems. (I found that few of my students had any prior exposure as performers or listeners to works by Schoenberg, Berg, or Webern.) During this first unit, I could plant the seeds for a more thorough introduction to pitch-class analysis for post-tonal music. Using intuitive integer descriptions for simple three-pitch collections, students can learn convenient labels for sonorities that do not always have familiar traditional names (or that do not function traditionally): e.g., whole-tone collections, as found in Debussy (024, 026, 048, perhaps adding 0268), or typical “pandiatonic” collections (025, 027), as found in Hindemith. Although I might introduce an 015 cell to describe the opening motto for the first theme in the first movement of Bartók’s String Quartet No. 6, I typically saved the (01X) collections (012 through 016) for the next unit, at which point I introduced pitch-class theory more formally.

Figure 1.

Class handout created by Prof. Hatten for T351 (Music Theory and Literature V), Fall 2008, Indiana University

But delaying pitch-class theory for pedagogical reasons need not delay the presentation of other radical modes of musical organization. Stravinsky was revolutionary, even before the Rite, in creating a new approach to temporal strata, one that can be seen as analogous to the spatial innovations of Cezanne and Picasso in the visual arts. Cezanne’s great innovation was to model figures and landscapes based on an accumulation of disparate flat planes (with slabs of paint loosely representing the light on variously angled surfaces). Picasso, collaborating with Braque, radically extended the consequences of Cezanne’s discovery by presenting irreconcilable flat surfaces that could imply multiple, simultaneous perspectives (cubism). Stravinsky in turn conceived of a highly mobile temporal surface whose “planes” (strata) were also “flat” (without strong...