Skewing, Centricity, and Form in Wuorinen's Reliquary for Igor Stravinsky and Rhapsody for Violin and Orchestra

Abstract

SKEWING, CENTRICITY, AND FORM IN WUORINEN’S RELIQUARY FOR IGOR STRAVINSKY AND RHAPSODY FOR VIOLIN AND ORCHESTRA1 BRUCE QUAGLIA The name Rhapsody suggests an improvisatory construction. When Bach wrote his Musical Offering he made clear the difference between an improvisation and an elaborated composition. Though he was a great improviser he could not do justice to a theme given by Frederick the Great. —Arnold Schoenberg2 HE 1983 RHAPSODY FOR VIOLIN AND ORCHESTRA is a lesser-known entry in Charles Wuorinen’s extensive compositional catalog, but it is a work that nonetheless holds an impressive pedigree, and one that also demonstrates significant developments in Wuorinen’s working methods during an important period of his career. The Rhapsody’s “pedigree” results from its direct relationship to an earlier and betterknown piece by the composer, A Reliquary for Igor Stravinsky (1974– 75). That piece, in turn, descends directly from the late music of Stravinsky in ways that I’ll describe shortly. Such intertextual relationships are not at all unusual in Wuorinen’s oeuvre, and this is no doubt T 204 Perspectives of New Music the result, in part, of his concern not only to participate in the long history of high musical culture, but also to contribute to both its preservation and continuation.3 The sonic relationship of the Rhapsody to the Reliquary is visceral, but it is also the result of a carefully planned architectural scheme, or compositional design, that will require further explanation.3 Put simply, the scaffolding of the Rhapsody’s form is derived from a super-augmentation of the “Lament” section of the Reliquary, but beyond that, the Rhapsody’s basic material is clearly and audibly similar to that of the Lament. It is a carefully planned elaboration , with an improvisatory character. I’ll return to the Rhapsody shortly, but it is first necessary to explain in some detail both the methods and critical features of the earlier Reliquary. Reliquary was composed using unfinished fragments and arrays that were left behind by Stravinsky at the time of his death.5 These materials were intended as the basis for what would likely have been Stravinsky’s final orchestral work.6 The circumstances by which these “relics” came into Wuorinen’s possession have been recounted by the composer as resulting from a dinner party that he attended at the home of the widow Vera Stravinsky along with Robert Craft and Peter Lieberson. After dinner, Craft began showing Wuorinen a number of Stravinsky’s manuscripts.7 Among these were the unfinished fragments for the orchestral work. Wuorinen recalls that the next day he contacted Craft, and the arrangements for a new work began to unfold. Vera Stravinsky gave her permission for Wuorinen to complete the piece based on the surviving materials, but that permission was, strictly speaking, not hers to give. The publisher Boosey & Hawkes owned the permissions, but they also consented, and soon a new work entitled A Reliquary for Igor Stravinsky was commissioned by the Buffalo Philharmonic and the Ojai Festival for Michael Tilson Thomas.8 The Reliquary begins with a complex mixture of Stravinsky’s own fragments of music enfolded within a musical “continuity” subsequently composed by Wuorinen in an explicit imitation of Stravinsky’s late style. This continuity elaborates upon the fragments themselves by developing related materials from Stravinsky’s arrays and then presenting these in a Stravinskian voice.9 The middle section of the overall ternary design is titled “Variation,” and it restates the entire pitch-class structure of the opening section, but now cast in Wuorinen’s own compositional voice, using much thicker textures, a larger version of the orchestra, and a broader expanse of overall registral space. Otherwise, the placement of pitch-classes in time—in other words the abstract compositional design of the opening section—remains almost identical in the Variation. The Variation is interrupted part way through by a section that is marked “Lament” and which refers again, Skewing, Centricity, and Form 205 if more obliquely, to Stravinsky’s own late style. The Lament is a passage of about two minutes’ length that occurs approximately halfway through the Reliquary. Example 1 shows measures 151–166, the first half of the Lament, along with...