This piece has been excerpted from Simply Stravinsky by Pieter van den Toorn, part of Simply Charly’s Great Lives series.

At the time of [Igor] Stravinsky’s death on April 6, 1971, at the age of 88, the speculation among critics centered quite naturally on his legacy. Would his music survive into the next century and perhaps well beyond that? Looking back, what had been the substance and scale of his influence? Had he been, perhaps, in Western art music, the last of the “great composers”?

Stravinsky was certainly the most celebrated composer of the 20th century and possibly the greatest as well, if by “greatest” we mean “deepest,” as in the depth of the feelings or emotions stirred by his music. Fame arrived early with the three ballets—The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (1913). The popular success of these ballet scores, overshadowing that of all other classical music of the past century, brought the composer international stardom at the age of 28. And this early success has proved lasting: to this day, the early ballets, along with other Stravinsky music, is performed in concert halls, opera houses, and ballet theaters the world over. Stravinsky and his music are still in vogue, in other words, still very much a part of the contemporary scene.

At the same time, the twists and turns of his creative path were impulsive and contradictory. To many critics and listeners at the time, they seemed incomprehensible. While the stereotypical three-part division may readily be inferred from his music, the radical nature of the changes accompanying the three divisions or “stylistic periods” was unprecedented. Each of the three periods—Russian, neoclassical, and serial—seemed to negate (and even to betray) the one that preceded or succeeded it. Stravinsky’s neoclassicism of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s seemed a disavowal of the earlier folkloristic idioms, while serialism seemed a contradiction of his neoclassical ideals.

Consider, by way of comparison, the nearly seamless way in which the three stylistic periods follow each other in Ludwig van Beethoven’s music. (Recent scholars have partitioned Beethoven’s music in still more sophisticated ways, but the three-part division works well enough for our purposes). An early assimilation of the formal and more technical elements of the Classical style is followed by a gradual individualization of those elements—in effect, the arrival of the composer’s second, middle, or “heroic” period. This is the Beethoven sound with which audiences are most familiar and, symphony-wise, it begins with the length and drama of the “Eroica” Symphony and ends with the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies.

The distinguishing marks of Beethoven’s “late style” include the many theme-and-variation movements that are found in the Ninth Symphony, in the piano sonatas and string quartets of this era. Extended fugues may also be found in this music, reflective of a renewed interest in the contrapuntal techniques of Johann Sebastian Bach’s keyboard music. And Beethoven’s sonata forms are now often subject to sudden breaks in tempo and texture. The critic-philosopher Theodor Adorno professed to detect an air of “resignation” in these works, a retreat from the heroics of Beethoven’s second period. To follow Adorno’s quasi-Marxist critique, feelings of at-oneness with the outside world were followed “catastrophically” by disillusionment and alienation.

But the larger point here is that, regardless of the modifications from one creative stage to the next, the bulk of Beethoven’s music extends the Classical style that this composer had inherited from his immediate predecessors, including Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. And the musical language cloaked by that style was shared not only by Beethoven’s contemporaries, but also by composers of the Baroque and Romantic eras. Thus, the period extending from about 1650 to the close of the 19th century has long been known musically as the “common practice period.” Consisting harmonically of triads derived from the major and minor scales of the diatonic set, this “practice” is hierarchical in nature. The triads gravitate around a central or “tonic” triad. They depart from and return to that triad, acquiring their specific functions in the process, and emitting a sense of motion or harmonic progression. On a linear or melodic scale, the connections between triads are lines or parts that follow voice-leading rules, the most important of which is smoothness. The triads of a given scale and the functions associated with them form a key, and transpositions between keys are called modulations. 

Tonality is the term usually reserved for these musical processes. The system allowed for a certain structural depth in pitch relationships, one that proved capable of renewing itself or “advancing” through many changing forms, instrumentations, and styles. The art music of the West was bound in this fashion for centuries, as was that of Russia.

Thus, Stravinsky’s apprenticeship in St. Petersburg began with piano instruction and very traditional lessons in tonal harmony and counterpoint. The latter were capped by nearly three years (1905-08) of private lessons in composition and orchestration with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Acquired by such means was a close familiarity with tonal practice and a mastery of instrumentation and the orchestra; an intimate knowledge of 1) Russian folk songs harmonized in a kind of Westernized, tonal fashion (such songs were modal, as a rule), and 2) sequences built on symmetrical scales such as the whole-tone and the octatonic. These skills were brought to fruition with The Firebird and the sensational success of its first performance in Paris on June 25, 1910.

However, The Firebird was followed in short order by Petrushka (1911) and The Rite of Spring (1913), two works of truly startling originality. In particular, The Rite, with its rhythmic irregularities and sustained dissonances, can seem light-years from the immediately inherited traditions that underlie The Firebird.

Changing musical styles and tastes

Exiled in Switzerland during World War I, the composer partly turned his back on this early phase of his creative life. In place of the orchestra, he began composing for small chamber ensembles, and then eventually for singers and groups that resembled peasant bands and the instrumentations of street music. He began cultivating a musical folk language of his own, derived from bits and pieces of authentic Russian folk songs and popular verse. These efforts culminated in Renard (1916), The Wedding (1917-23), and The Soldier’s Tale (1918). The period in question, stretching from the composer’s years of tutelage in St. Petersburg to The Wedding, is often referred to as his Russian period.

Returning to France after the war, Stravinsky turned his back once again, this time on the folk languages with which he had worked with such abandon in Switzerland. Starting already with the ballet Pulcinella (1920), he began seeking an accommodation with the tonal forms, methods, and styles of the Classical and Baroque eras. This second or middle period is often called neoclassical, and it includes works such as the Octet (1923), the Symphony of Psalms (1930) and, later, the Symphony in C (1940), and the Symphony in Three Movements (1945), by which time Stravinsky had moved from France to Los Angeles. A climactic moment in neoclassicism was reached with the composer’s collaboration with the poet W. H. Auden on The Rake’s Progress (1948-51), the opera for which Auden, with the help of Chester Kallman, wrote the libretto.

No doubt, Stravinsky remained true to himself through these neoclassical excursions. From the time of The Firebird to The Rake’s Progress, there were features of pitch, meter, rhythm, and form that prevailed in one way or another, remaining a permanent part of the composer’s “voice.” And such was the case with many of the serial works as well, especially the early ones composed during the 1950s. Stravinsky was slow and deliberate in his adoption of serial methods. Encouraged by Robert Craft, the conductor and writer who in later years became his close associate and spokesman, Stravinsky began with the study of several scores by Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern. The middle part of In Memoriam Dylan Thomas (1954) is built on a chromatic series of five notes, while the rows in some of the miniatures of the ballet Agon (1953-57) are hexachordal, composed of six successive notes. (As a general rule, all notes of a row are sounded in order before there is a return to the point of departure. A series may be transposed as well as inverted or retrograded—sounded in reverse.)

The “Surge, aquilo” section of Canticum Sacrum (1955) was Stravinsky’s first completely 12-tone music, and it was followed by six full-scale works, all 12-tone in conception. Many of these latter accompanied religious texts, often biblical or liturgical in origin; their spirit is starkly devotional. As with Beethoven’s late works, Stravinsky’s feature contrapuntal techniques, in his case, canonic. Along with these full-scale works were seven smaller ones, often short memorials for friends and collaborators who had passed away.

To the extent that the term style (as in “stylistic period”) implies a musical surface of some kind, inflection at a musical foreground, the term can hardly stand as a descriptive cover for the three giant leaps in musical orientation surveyed briefly above: Russian, neoclassical, and serial. The foundation of Stravinsky’s music changed dramatically in each case. The Russian folk songs, tales, and verses of his Swiss years were replaced by the Baroque and Classical models of neoclassicism, and then, during the serial period, by a method of composition even more radically distant from the routines of neoclassicism than the latter were from those of the Russian era.

Somewhat analogous to these dislocations in Stravinsky’s creative path were those in the art of Pablo Picasso, a friend of the composer’s during the 1910s and 20s in France. (Picasso provided the scenery for the first staged performance of Pulcinella, and collaborated with the composer on other occasions as well.) With a good deal of overlapping, Picasso’s early “blue” period was followed by cubism until about 1925. A neoclassical phase during the 1920s coincided with Stravinsky’s early on; it was followed by surrealism and, toward the end of the 1930s, expressionism.

Yet the concept of style might work where the composer’s individual voice is concerned, with features that, as we have noted, remained characteristic of Stravinsky’s music through much of his career. These features include the following:

1. Octatonic harmony, materials that imply, or may originally have been derived from, the octatonic scale (the “diminished scale,” as it has long been known in American jazz circles);
2. Superimpositions of triads and other forms of vocabulary (placing one triad on top of another, often octatonically related, as a means of creating new dissonant sonorities).
3. Stratifications or polyrhythmic textures in which there is a superimposition of motives and chords that repeat according to varying spans or periods;
4. Ostinatos, often conceived as separate layers within a stratification;
5. Block structures in which two or more heterogeneous and relatively self-contained blocks of material are placed in a kind of abrupt juxtaposition with one another;
6. Displacements of repeated themes, motives, or chords relative to the meter (such displacement being so entirely characteristic of Stravinsky’s music as to assume the earmarks of a stylistic common denominator);
7. A strict performance style, according to which, in the performance of much of Stravinsky’s music, the beat is maintained strictly with a minimum of nuance or rubato;
8. A percussive approach to composition and instrumentation; staccato doublings of legato lines; a percussive use of the piano and string pizzicato as a means of punctuation.

These eight features are style characteristics to the extent that they are heard and understood as interacting with one another. One such characteristic can presuppose another. Thus, if the metrical displacement (6) of a repeated motive or melody is to be felt by the listener, then the beat must be maintained evenly (7). And so forth.

Finally, at the time of Stravinsky’s arrival on the international scene with The Firebird in 1910, the certainties of tonality, of an inherited and shared musical grammar and syntax, were being challenged and even overturned by composers in France and Germany. They were being challenged in Russia as well, if we count the many octatonic or minor-third related sequences in Rimsky-Korsakov’s operas and symphonic poems as non-tonal, subject to forces that were symmetrical rather than tonal. The chromaticism of the Prelude to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (1862) is usually cited in connection with the breakdown of tonality, but larger forces, including the drive for originality, were active in sowing the seeds of tonality’s exhaustion earlier in the 19th century.

In France, Claude Debussy’s music was often triadic and diatonic but no longer tonal, while in Vienna and Germany, Schoenberg’s music and that of his students Webern and Alban Berg was “atonal” or serial, founded on the total chromatic; dissonance and the pitch world generally were “emancipated” from tonality. Stravinsky was thus one of many composers reacting to a musical meltdown. Like him, Bela Bartok and Leos Janacek explored the use of authentic folk songs (Hungarian and Moldavian, respectively) in contemporary settings. Sergei Prokofiev and many others cultivated neoclassical idioms that were at times closely related to Stravinsky’s.

And so, the dramatic turns of Stravinsky’s three stylistic periods were to some extent a reflection of the musical times. This was especially the case with his belated embrace of serialism during the 1950s, methods of composition from which he had sought to distance himself in earlier decades.

On the matter of Stravinsky’s “greatness” as a composer, attributions of this kind were once applied freely to contemporary composers. They implied unfathomable depths (or heights) on the part of the music of a given composer, depths that were presumed to be felt widely by a listening public. There was something like a canon; in other words, a consensus to greatness.

However, with the fall of tonality and the disappearance of a musical mainstream in the generations following Stravinsky’s, “greatness” has seemed no longer to apply. Modernism in music may well have begun here, that is, with the inability of composers and listeners—unconsciously, as with a language—to absorb a common grammar and syntax when moving from the music of one composer to that of another, and even from one individual piece to another. Self-conscious “pre-composition” began here: composing from scratch, as it were, Pierre Boulez’s brave new worlds of the 1950s and 60s, and the high degree of self-reference or individuality that the American composer Milton Babbitt ascribed to the 12-tone works of Schoenberg.

Is greatness possible among the apples and oranges of today’s pluralism? Are unfathomable depths (or structural depths, for that matter) possible without a common language that is absorbed effortlessly by composers and listeners alike? Is language-free music necessarily flat and shallow, a succession of “pretty sounds,” as the American theorist Fred Lerdahl proposed in his description of Boulez’s Le marteau sans maître (1955)?¹

By the 1990s, postmodernists had inflicted further uncertainty on a predicament already rife with doubt. Composers were “deconstructed” in their characters, politics, and sexualities. Between the two World Wars, Stravinsky’s politics were reactionary (anti-Communist, at the very least), pro-order, pro-tradition, and pro-established religion. He admired Benito Mussolini and fascist Italy for a time. (Later in the United States, he admired Harry Truman.) Are his neoclassical works of the 1930s inflected (or infected) by these socio-political associations? Are they inherently scarred by them? Or is much of this more accurately a question of what the listener may be reading into the music?

And what might the maleness of the Western canon imply, not to mention its whiteness? Is the reach of this music limited by its “lack of diversity” in this regard? The proponents of the New Musicology at the beginning of the 21st century certainly thought so. (Ideas about the autonomy of music, its ability to stand alone and be listened to for its own sake—ideas shared and promoted by Stravinsky for at least a half-century—had by this time receded altogether.)

To follow W. H. Auden, the “modern problem” had to do with tradition and self-consciousness, with the artist being “no longer supported by a tradition without being aware of it.”² Composers were no longer able to think creatively—naturally and in good faith, as true believers—in the language of tonal harmony and melody, the materials having become spent through overuse. (The proverbial remedy for overuse, a constant alteration or individualization of the materials, could be carried only so far without the system itself breaking down.) The loss of tonality signaled something akin to a loss of innocence, a fall from grace.

One might have expected from all this a stilted and forced character on the part of Stravinsky’s neoclassical works, houses divided unto themselves, as it were. But such is not the case. Bach could hardly be more overtly present in 20th-century music than he is in the second movement of Stravinsky’s Capriccio (1929) and in the “Dumbarton Oaks” Concerto in E-flat (1938). Yet this music sounds new and fresh, not broken or contrived. The impression gained is that of a music composed in one fell swoop, in a single sweep of the imagination. It is as if Bach’s music, separated from Stravinsky’s by two centuries, had been a part of the latter’s immediate past. Such is surely a measure of the success of this music, maybe even of its old-fashioned greatness.

1. Fred Lerdahl, “Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems,” in Generative Processes in Music, ed. John A. Sloboda (Oxford, Clarendon, 1988), 231-59.
2. See Taruskin (2016, 509).

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Pieter van den Toorn

Pieter van den Toorn is Professor Emeritus of Music at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he taught from 1990 to 2016. He is the author of The Music of Igor Stravinsky (1983), Stravinsky and The Rite of Spring (1987), Music, Politics, and the Academy (1995), and, with John McGinness, Stravinsky and the Russian Period (2012). Professor van den Toorn is a former student of the French musician and pedagogue Nadia Boulanger, for many years one of Stravinsky’s closest colleagues and associates.