Customer Reviews

Expositions and Developments

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This installation of the Stravinsky / Craft conversation books can be considered a supplement to Stravinsky's autobiography and, to a lesser extent, the "Poetics of Music". He talks more about his childhood and adult life in more personal ways than he had in those books. The statements in those books that caused confusion and came across as provocative and doctrinaire receive are fleshed out here and make more sense. He provides a context for what he was speaking against and what he was speaking for.

Basically, Stravinsky is strongly against trying to make music the servant of anything outside of the music. Of course, we see that in how Stravinsky uses texts. He breaks them up into syllables at times and uses them as sounds based on their vowels and especially the rhythm of their consonants. It is a quite interesting view, and like all doctrines it has its limits. Stravinsky himself talks about using the tritone in Oedipus Rex to depict the falsus pater notion. Well, hmmmm.... But I understand the vast difference between that and what Wagner was after and it was the cultural saturation of the Wagnerian music drama that Stravinsky was speaking most strongly against.

There are more interesting pictures here including one of Stravinsky with Charlton Heston(!), plus a list of Tchaikowsky sources that Stravinsky says he used for writing "The Fairy's Kiss". There are also two very short pieces that were previously unpublished before this book. One is a Berceuse Stravinsky wrote for his daughter (words and music - provided here in French translation from the Russian of the original) and an Anthem of an English poem by T.S. Eliot: "The dove descending breaks the air" for SATB chorus.

Stravinsky also talks quite a bit about the composing of the first three ballets (Firebird, Petrushka, and Le Sacre) more deeply than in the other books. The stories are quite interesting and pop some of the myths that have grown up around the pieces. He also talks about the music and musicians that were contemporaries at various periods of his life including the present time of the book (1959-60), which is quite fascinating.