Stravinsky and the Realists

            I am struck in my study of the fin de siècle, Stravinsky, and the realist composers by the shift in musical focus from context to detail. Alex Ross describes this transition in The Rest is Noise as one from a “theater of the mind” to a “music of the body” (Ross 83). For most of the history of music, the primary approach to expressing place and meaning in composition has involved the creation of atmosphere and exciting moments full of direction and motion, with varying degrees of definition. Even as recently as Debussy, the atmosphere of each moment in the context of the overall meaning and emotion of the piece is the central musical characteristic. While Debussy tended to paint everything but the specific details in his music, Stravinsky (at least in his Russian period) and the realists painted specific details primarily.

            What Ross means by “theater of the mind” and “music of the body” is that post-Debussy, music became visceral and primal. Debussy creates an indistinct, ambiguous texture in his Brouillards to evoke the uneasy feeling associated with heavy fog, but little attention is given to any literal bodily reaction to that situation. The realism movement was in many ways a direct response to this. Though the realists tended to stay within vaguely recognizable key areas and melodic constructs, they also worked to capture the chaotic specificity of nature and of traditionally “nonmusical” noise. Bartok’s transcriptions of world folk music are unbelievably detailed – down to semitones and tiny fractions of beats. Janáček experimented with notating human speech patterns. Ross summarizes, “Such minute differences … could engender a new operatic naturalism; [the realists] could show an ‘entire being in a photographic instant’” (Ross 86). These composers were much more interested in evoking emotion by capturing specific natural impulses and quirks than by recreating atmospheric ideas and moments.

            Stravinsky was also more prone to this “music of the body” than his predecessors. Rite of Spring is forceful, visceral, and immediate rather than metaphorical and representative. There is clear evidence of Stravinsky’s effort to notate the chaos of the natural world (and of western ideas about pagan Russia). Shortly after the opening of the piece, the orchestra dissolves into what sounds essentially like unmetered improvisation (rehearsal ten). It’s rhythmically near impossible to follow and essentially devoid of any key or musical structure at all. Later, in The Augurs of Spring, we see Stravinsky’s famous Sacre chord (EM on top of Eb7) repeated as a driving beat by the strings, punctuated at varying intervals by dynamic accents. Both these strategies give the piece that same sensation of chaotic specificity favored by the realist composers and serve as a major connection between Stravinsky and his peers.