Igorian chant

‘Death is but a question of style’

—Vladimir Nabokov

In the course of his long creative career, Igor Stravinsky produced a substantial amount of works relating to death and grief. The list of compositions he created in memory of someone, or specifically for funerals, is oddly extensive. In 1920 he wrote Symphonies pour instruments à vent in memory of Debussy, who had died in March 1918; his 1943 Ode was written for Natalia Koussevitzky; Elegie (1944), for Alphonse Onnou; In Memoriam Dylan Thomas, Epitaphium for Max Egon of Fürstenberg, and Double Canon for  Raoul Dufy were composed between 1954 and 1959; Elegy for J.F.K. and Variations: Aldous Huxley in memoriam were both completed in 1964; Introitus (1965) was written on the death of T.S. Eliot; finally, Requiem Canticles (1966) is dedicated to the memory of Helen Buchanan Seeger. 

  More broadly, Stravinsky’s compositional output presents a compelling exploration of human loss and mortality. His choice of biblical texts speaks of a pervasive preoccupation with the Kingdom of the Dead—their absence and legacy. Jeremiah’s verses—‘how doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people?’—lament the loss of Jerusalem in Threni (1957-1958). There is a reminder of the possibility of redemption in The Flood, Stravinsky’s ‘inglorious flop’ (Joseph 2001), premiered on the CBS Television Network on June, 1962, which juxtaposes Noah’s story with that of the Creation. Humour is manifest in Stravinsky’s own description of the Te Deum: ‘not Gregorian chant, but Igorian chant’. But The Flood’s intended levity and lightness ostensively failed to bedazzle audiences and critics. By contrast, responses to the 2014 discovery and subsequent performances of Stravinsky’s long-lost Pogrebal’naya Pesnya, or ‘Funeral Song’ (1908), have been overwhelmingly positive (Walsh 2016, Ross 2017, da Fonseca-Wollheim 2017). Its modern premiere in St. Petersburg suitably unleashed a whirlwind of highly anticipated performances across the globe; written in memory of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, this piece was in Stravinsky’s own view his finest work before L'Oiseau de Feu.

  Other memorial compositions by Stravinsky could have enjoyed a kind of cultural renaissance in the wake of such success. This is extraordinary music, but music rarely heard in concert. Yet this repertoire remains virtually absent from the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s 2018/19 new series ‘Changing Faces: Stravinsky’s Journey’—the only exception being Variations: Aldous Huxley in memoriam. The challenge for any concert series with a focus on Stravinsky is to find an entryway into the composer’s stylistic diversity. How does one effectively advertise the ‘changing styles’ of his music, ‘as different cultural and geographical events influenced him’? There is the impulse to ‘chronologically chart the life and works of Igor Stravinsky’ in the series’ online overview. Nevertheless, producers and artistic directors have shown little interest in exploring Stravinsky’s compelling range within the overarching theme of mourning, which so fittingly recurs throughout his work. Through these musical monuments we can venture into the muddle of creative variousness with a sense of continuity. Only thus is reinvention poised between authenticity and originality, because as Joseph N. Strauss and other scholars have demonstrated, diverse compositional techniques provided Stravinsky with a means to simultaneously resist and surrender to systematisation.

  Any musical topic presents a composer with a field of possibilities. The conventions of mournful music are many.  To begin with, the movement of mourning in western funeral rites is ‘a slow, deliberate, leaden tread; the sonic analogs that correlate with these movements are similarly slow, deliberate, and emphasize timbres with a significant degree of low frequency disturbance’ (Zbikowski 2013). Stravinsky’s creative engagement with these conventions has a resonance that stretches far beyond the obvious use of slow tempo. One distinctive feature is the composer’s refusal to use formal devices and sorrowful motifs to foreground ideas of comfort and catharsis. At times, an enthusiastic embracing of doubt and gloom might seem cynical in its theatricality, if not altogether nihilistic, as in Funeral Song and Introitus. Both these pieces start with ‘an atmosphere of lugubrious expectation, with harmonies hovering like coastal mist. One has the sense of a wide-open musical space’ (Ross 2017). The interlocking recurrence of the main theme in Funeral Song, and of the instrumental motifs and dwindling declamation (marked ‘parlando sotto voce’, as in Threni) in Introitus, produce a sense that the composer could go on mourning forever.

      Despite their similarities, these works represent quite different modes of remembrance. In comparison with the Wagnerian fabric of Funeral Song, Introitus’ rotational arrays further the notion that a mature artist ought to yearn after order and objectivity with regard to true expressiveness—particularly as the formulaic quality of the music shifts from suggesting ‘a dutiful, impersonal kind of ritual’ in Funeral Song, to become a condition of empathy in Introitus. Intentionality, in this context, reinforces a desire for orderliness, which allows for both aesthetic self-definition and an anti-sentimental stance.

Stravinsky posing for the camera, Arnold Newman, 1946

       Intentionality is at the core of Joseph N. Straus’ 1999 essay ‘Stravinsky’s Serial ‘Mistakes’’, which investigates Stravinsky’s ‘apparent errors’ in serial works from 1952 onwards, with a focus on Introitus. Specifically, Strauss examines notes which are ‘row-incorrect’ or contradict pre-compositional charts; in attempting to distinguish between fortunate accidents, deliberate deviations, and genuine mistakes, we are thrust into a wider reflection on the nature of editorial choices in respect of these notes. This research highlights Stravinsky’s efforts to tessellate a serial lexis so as to fulfill a logical criteria. Straus does not explore the interaction of such criteria with auditory expectations, which also preoccupied Stravinsky—this is nonetheless evident in Milton Babbitt’s anecdotal account of the composer, who was reportedly found ‘…smiling broadly that pixy-like smile, and shouting: ‘I found a mistake, and the right note sounds so much better’’ (Straus 1999). Rows can be arranged to be reminiscent of tonality but also for notes to avoid any tonal inflection. The aural effects of rotational arrays allow for an experimentalist approach to sonority values, with the implication that what ‘sounds better’ is disparate among Stravinsky’s late works, and a contextual balance between anti-tonality and tonal innuendo is Stravinsky’s desired outcome. At once alluding to and a departing from Funeral Song and other previous pieces, Stravinsky’s in memorians are also an exercise in self-remembrance.

Bibliography

Fonseca-Wollheim, Corinna, ‘Review: An Old Stravinsky ‘Funeral Song’ Rumbles Anew’, The New York Times, April 2017.

Joseph, Charles M., ‘Television and The Flood: Anatomy of an ‘Inglorious Flop”, in Stravinsky Inside Out (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 132-161. 

Mori, Akane, ‘Proportional Exchange in Stravinsky’s Early Serial Music’, Journal of Music Theory, 41/2 (1997) 227-259.

Ross, Alex, ‘A Rediscovered Stravinsky Work, from Before He Made His Leap Into the Unknown’, The New Yorker, April 2017. 

Straus, Joseph N., ‘Stravinsky's Serial ‘Mistakes’’, The Journal of Musicology, 17/2 (1999) 231-271. 

Walsh, Stephen, ‘Lost Stravinsky piece performed for first time since rediscovery’, The Guardian, Dec 2016.

Zbikowski, Lawrence, ‘Listening to Music’, in Speaking of Music: Addressing the Sonorous, edited by Keith Chapin and Andrew H. Clarke (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 101–119.

Link to ‘Changing Faces: Stravinsky’s Journey’ series overview at the Southbank Centre.