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PARTISAN REVIEW
which have been attacking Western musical tradition since the begin–
ning of the nineteenth century. Among others were the
Sturm und
Drang
of Romanticism with its great emotional upheaval; the chimera
of Wagner's
Gesammtkunstwerk
with its absurd scheme of
leitmotive,
and the general "spirit of the confessional" which pervaded the arts
in the nineteenth century, producing in music a torrent of confes–
sions and searchings in lush rhetoric and faulty technique.
In a very conscious and methodical way, Stravinsky attempts
to pick up the many loose threads of tradition which were abandoned
during the last hundred years. He wishes not so much to begin anew,
as to understand anew what tradition implies. Herein, I believe, lies
the chief importance of Stravinsky for our time; in the measure that
he achieves this understanding he serves the most urgent need of the
art of music.
How
is
Stravinsky able to achieve this integration? Primarily it
is through hi<; miraculously pure craftsmanship, developed over long
years of "speculative training," self-schooling, self-discipline and art–
istic contemplation. Every note of his lucid and admirably exact
scores (and this becomes truer with every new composition) sits on
its line or space like a well behaved and well groomed child in a class–
room. It is immediately evident that all the calculations which sur–
round his inventive process have been carried out with the most
scrupulous precision and conscientiousness.
Another reason for his success lies in the fact that he understands
that tradition is a process of continuous renewal. It is a living thing,
eternally reborn, unlike musicology, for instance. Many composers
commit the error of understanding tradition to mean a kind of "musi–
cological-historical" revival and write pieces in accordance with
seventeenth or eighteenth-century conventions. The result is that most
of these "modern" fugues, passacaglias and classical symphonies, writ–
ten under the banner of neo-classicism or "the new polyphonic style"
are just so much academic dust. In
this
case the Soviet critics are
quite right in discarding such music as "absurd formalism."
I remember the irritation among the older gentlemen of the
Parisian public (and, alas, quite a number of otherwise intelligent
younger musicians) produced by the first performance of Stravinsky's
First Piano, Concerto.
They were shocked at this "Bach revival in
modern clothes" ; it seemed arrogance to them to touch the immortal
memories of Bach's style.
If
Stravinsky had written a polite classical
symphony in the conventions of the eighteenth century, they would
probably have been delighted by it, just as the American public is
