Still More on Displacement

Abstract

My thanks to Don Traut for his very intriguing comments on the larger role of displacement in Stravinsky's music. A strong parallel does indeed seem to exist between the metrical displacement of repeated motives and chords and the displacement of contrapuntal lines. Especially revealing is Traut's account of a passage from Stravinsky's Piano Concerto (Ex. 3). Schenker's earlier commentary on this passage (Ex. 4) is shown to have been a good deal more savvy about the nature of Stravinsky's art than his outright rejection of it would have led one to believe. The overlapping of tonic and dominant harmony, pervasive in the composer's neoclassical works from the time of Pulcinella (1919), has frequently been remarked upon, of course, as have the static, non developmental implications of the practice. By way of the Piano Sonata (Ex. 8), Traut includes it as a form of displacement. The sense of motion associated with the actual progression of these chord functions is more or less cancelled out by their superimposition. Harmony is flattened out in the process. My view of the Piano Concerto is that, at least on a local scale in the first movement, many of the techniques cited by Traut derive from Bach's use of the non-harmonic, metrically accented passing tone (another from of displacement, of course). Bach's keyboard music served as a constant point of reference for Stravinsky during the 1920s, even as a kind of daily staple for a while. The anti-modernist slogan back to Bach dates from this era. Underscored by Traut as well is the governing role that displace ment assumes in Stravinsky's music, whatever the stylistic orientation, presumably Russian, neoclassical, or serial. Overlooked by him, however, are the contrapuntal shifts that result as a matter of course from strati fication. In Stravinsky's layered structures, superimposed fragments, registrally and often instrumental!/ fixed, repeat according to spans or cycles that vary independently of one another. The result is an