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Stravinsky and Neo-Classicism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 February 2010
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Stravinsky himself has argued that neo-classicism embraced not only his own works but those of his great contemporaries: “Every age,” he observes, “is a historical unity. It may never appear as anything but either/or to its partisan contemporaries, of course, but semblance is gradual, and in time either and or come to be components of the same thing. For instance, ‘neo-classic’ now begins to apply to all of the between-the-war composers (not that notion of the neo-classic composer as someone who rifles his predecessors and each other and then arranges the theft in a new ‘style’). The music of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern in the twenties was considered extremely iconoclastic at that time but these composers now appear to have used musical form as I did, ‘historically’. My use of it was overt, however, and theirs elaborately disguised. (Take, for example, the Rondo of Webern's Trio; the music is wonderfully interesting but no one hears it as a Rondo.) We all explored and discovered new music in the twenties, of course, but we attached it to the very tradition we were so busily outgrowing a decade before.”
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page 9 note 2 Conversations with Igor Stravinsky, London, 1959, p. 126. If the rondo character of Webern's Rondo is, in fact, inaudible, one wonders if it may be legitimately described as even a disguised example of neo-classicism? In a later book, Memories and Commentaries, London, 1960, p.122, Stravinsky refers to three “neo-classic” schools, ascendant from 1930 to 1945—Schoenberg's, Hindemith's, and his own.
page 10 note 1 A point made in Hans Keller's “Towards the Psychology of Stravinsky's Genius”, The Listener, 29 November, 1956.
page 11 note 1 Expositions and Developments, p. 102.
page 11 note 2 Stravinsky, London, 1960, p. 115. (Translated by Frederick and Ann Fuller.)
page 12 note 1 Giedion, Sigfried, Space, Time and Architecture, London, 1956, p.472.Google Scholar We find a perfect example in literature of what Giedion has in mind; Dickens's incorporation of the Railway Age into his novels, a new world which he made “accessible to feeling” in, and through, a whole battery of new poetic images. This specific achievement is fully documented in The Dickens World, Humphry House, 2nd edtn., London, 1942, pp. 137–145.Google Scholar
page 12 note 2 In some respects the most overtly neo-classical work Schoenberg wrote was his Suite for String Orchestra in G major (1934), one of his later tonal compositions. It is not without significance, I think, that the return to tonality posed a problem of style that was solved, in part at least, by the adoption of some characteristic neo-classical features.
page 12 note 3 Article in The Sunday Telegraph, 3 12, 1961, p.11.Google Scholar