Stravinsky and the Russian Period: Sound and Legacy of a Musical Idiom by John Van den Toorn, Pieter and McGinness (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 889 Naroditskaya deftly shifts the focus of attention to a new and unexpected field. Bewitching Russian Opera: The Tsarina from State to Stage provokes as much as it illuminates; its confident and successful fusion of methodologies borrowed from literary criticism, musical analysis, historical reconstruction and gender studies means that it repays repeated rereading from a number of different perspectives and should be of considerable interest to scholars working in all of the above fields. Wadham College, University of Oxford Philip Ross Bullock Van den Toorn, Pieter and McGinness, John. Stravinsky and the Russian Period: Sound and Legacy of a Musical Idiom. Music since 1900. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2012. xi + 324 pp. Tables. Figures. Music examples. Notes. Selected bibliography. Index. £60.00: $99.00. This is a useful book. It complements Pieter van den Toorn’s The Rite of Spring (Berkeley, CA, 1987) with two long chapters each on Les Noces and Renard, and one on Symphonies of Wind Instruments. There is a wealth of forensic detail about familiar van den Toornian topics like the octatonic scale or referential collection, in particular the interaction between octatonic and diatonic collections; rhythm and meter, in particular metric displacement; the construction of ‘conservative’ and ‘radical’ readings of listening (p. 20 n. 29); and the relationship between borrowed folk melodies and Stravinskii’s own ‘powers of fabrication’ (p. 120). The book is vintage van den Toorn: slow to read but rewarding if one perseveres and acclimatizes oneself to the style. One finishes it having survived ‘octatonic fever’ (p. 167), though there is an introduction to the topic in chapter two. There are perceptive insights into the structure of the infamous bassoon solo in The Rite of Spring (pp. 132–33); the interval patterning in Les Noces, which was loosely modelled on the bells of St Paul’s Cathedral as transcribed in a sketch (p. 69 n. 51, ex. 3.5); and the use of neo-Riemannian theory to produce Tonnetz graphs of pitch space in Les Noces and Renard (pp. 141–47, 216–20) — a brilliant idea deserving more work. As with van den Toorn’s earlier writings, the underlying ideology is that aesthetic ‘Immediacy and the world of reflection and analysis are complementary, of course, symbiotic as an ideal’ (p. 302). The ‘complexity of the invention’ (p. 172) remains a marker of value, and more complex musical textures attract more hyperbolic analytical writing. It is also unsurprising that, despite eclectic references to music psychology, listening is still configured as ‘reading’ (e.g. p. 278), and that van den Toorn and McGinness make extensive assumptions about what the listener sees in the score while listening. This is less a Freudian slip than an acknowledged axiom — theirs is a particular type SEER, 91, 4, OCTOBER 2013 890 of listener. This said, while citing Dahlhaus is hardly empirical proof of the listening process (p. 133), the references to music psychology are welcome, for they open suggestive avenues for further inquiry (Stravinskii is rarely used in empirical studies, no doubt for the reasons discussed in chapter ten). One subject broached by van den Toorn and McGinness is that of upbeats. This runs throughout the book but is only properly thematized when mentioningKeller’scritiqueofStravinskii(pp.249,299–301).Inseveralrespects Stravinskii’s (re-)introduction of real upbeats into his music during the 1920s (the Serenade in A was the turning point) was his other ‘rejoicing discovery’ (p. 173), and a major factor in the development of his mature Neoclassicism. In the earlier music considered by van den Toorn and McGinness, the upbeat had a more radical function: ‘In a giant form of displacement, upbeat figures identified with development and forward movement were shifted to the downbeat’ (p. 249). The final two chapters are on ‘Issues of Performance Practice and Aesthetic Belief’ and ‘Stravinsky and His Critics’. The argument in chapter nine is in essence a simple reversal of the convention that Stravinskii’s formalist aesthetics and strictures about performance directed his musical language. Rather, say van den Toorn and McGinness, ‘Stravinsky’s formalism and performance directives have been viewed here as a logical outgrowth of those processes, above all of processes of displacement, juxtaposition, and...