Robert Craft Research Articles

Singing Webern, Sounding Webern: Bethany Beardslee, Grace-Lynne Martin, and Marni Nixon, 1950–1957

Abstract Anton Webern’s vocal music has long been overshadowed by the aphoristic miniatures and rigorously organized twelve-tone works—both largely instrumental genres—for which the composer is best known. Yet over half of Webern’s output consists of vocal works. During the 1950s, as composers and intellectuals celebrated the “instrumental” Webern, an alternative view of the composer was emerging through the performances of three soprano soloists. Bethany Beardslee gave posthumous premieres of three of Webern’s works in New York and recorded his Four Songs op. 12 for Dial Records. On the other side of the country, Grace-Lynne Martin and Marni Nixon performed works by Webern at the Evenings on the Roof in Los Angeles, and collaborated with Robert Craft on Columbia Records’ Anton Webern: The Complete Music. Beardslee, Martin, and Nixon adopted a variety of approaches to learning Webern’s famously difficult works, and their work paid off: all three sopranos earned praise for weathering the extreme technical challenges of Webern’s soprano lines while also delivering musically satisfying performances. Yet these performances have been largely forgotten in the decades since, as a consequence of changing attitudes toward postwar performance practices as well as the sometimes sexist views of male music critics. Nevertheless, the performances of these sopranos constituted a crucial step toward perspectives on Webern that are now current among contemporary performers and scholars, and understanding their contributions is essential to understanding the vocal side of Webern.

Ígor Stravinski en México (1940-1961). Recepción e influencia en los músicos españoles del exilio: el caso de Jesús Bal y Gay

El presente artículo analiza la recepción en México del compositor ruso Ígor Stravinski entre 1940 y 1961, años de su primera y última gira en este país, a partir de su influencia en los músicos exiliados españoles, con especial atención al musicólogo y compositor Jesús Bal y Gay, exiliado en México entre 1938 y 1965. En primer lugar, se examinan las primeras giras mexicanas de Stravinski, y su vínculo con Bal y Gay a partir de los diarios de Vera Stravinski y Robert Craft, entre otras fuentes. En una segunda parte, se analiza la presencia del compositor ruso en los escritos del musicólogo español, valorando el papel de Bal y Gay como difusor de la obra musical y literaria de Stravinski en el ámbito hispanoamericano.

Nadia Boulanger and the Stravinskys: A Selected Correspondence ed. by Kimberly A. Francis

Reviewed by: Nadia Boulanger and the Stravinskys: A Selected Correspondence ed. by Kimberly A. Francis Kendra Preston Leonard Nadia Boulanger and the Stravinskys: A Selected Correspondence. Edited by Kimberly A. Francis. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2018. (Eastman studies in music.) [x, 348 p. ISBN 978-1-58046-596-0. $90 (hardcover), $55 e-Book]. In her newest book on Nadia Boulanger and the Stravinsky family, Kimberly A. Francis uses selected letters between Boulanger and the Stravinskys to create a narrative that seeks to clarify the relationship between the French pedagogue and the Russian composer and his relatives. Francis asserts that in doing so she pushes back against Robert Craft’s dismissive account of Boulanger’s involvement in Stravinsky’s life and career (that she was only a proofreader); argues that Boulanger’s interest in the composer was entirely platonic; and examines Boulanger’s connections with the women of the Stravinsky family. Francis does repudiate Craft’s dismissals of Boulanger, but she does this much more effectively in her previous book, Teaching Stravinsky: Nadia Boulanger and the Consecration of a Modernist Icon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), rather than through these letters. Her second argument, that the relationship between Boulanger and Stravinsky was platonic, is based on Alexandra Laederich and Rémy [End Page 67] Strickler’s research into Boulanger’s private life and a claim that Boulanger’s passionate language in her letters to Stravinsky is, despite appearances, utterly platonic. This latter claim would be stronger if Francis had compared Boulanger’s language to Stravinsky with that of her letters to other composers and those whose work she supported; as it is, the letters can certainly be read as indicative of Boulanger’s non-platonic interest in Stravinsky, while his clearly do not reciprocate. On the final point, that it was the Stravinsky women who “facilitated and nurtured the lines of communication between Igor Stravinsky and Nadia Boulanger in the early 1930s”, the letters included here are simply too few and too superficial to support this reading (p. 4). Despite the mixed results in Francis’s stated goals for the book, this collection is an important addition to the literature, not just on Stravinsky and Boulanger, but in documenting a common manifestation of gender roles in music in the twentieth century in which male composers used the admiration, connections, and goodwill of female colleagues to assist them for free and promote their careers. In particular, it offers additional support for Virgil Thomson’s claim that “Nadia bullied women, but she served men”, a critical issue in understanding Boulanger and her influence (Virgil Thomson to Leonie Rosenstiel, 14 May 1982. Gilmore Music Library, Yale University, MSS 29 Series 3, Box 28, Folder 29). Not long after Boulanger accepted Igor and Katherine Stravinsky’s son Soulima as a composition and analysis student, Katherine Stravinsky asked Boulanger to intervene in Soulima’s love life, encouraging him to end a relationship that the family felt improper. Boulanger’s social engineering with her students knew no bounds, and in addition to her teaching Soulima, this request for involvement in the family’s affairs allowed her to begin a relationship with all of the Stravinskys. From there, Boulanger made herself available to Igor Stravinsky as a colleague, a champion of new music, and, above all, an enthusiastic volunteer editor and proofreader. Writing that Stravinsky and his music were “constantly present” (p. 23) in her mind and heart, Boulanger worked to become indispensable to Stravinsky. For his part, Stravinsky used Boulanger’s connections with patrons to obtain commissions, her knowledge of publishers to make his work more quickly available, and her teaching to make his work better known to both French and American performers. She obtained guest teaching and conducting engagements for him, and even paid him out of her own salary for classes he taught to her students (p. 36). Boulanger benefited from this by being able to teach Stravinsky’s works—and sometimes première them—before anyone else, and was able to bring Stravinsky to the Conservatoire Américain for masterclasses, raising her own cachet among her students and potential students, and establishing her as an expert on his works. She was...

Madrigali a cinque voci by Carlo Gesualdo Principe di Venosa

Reviewed by: Madrigali a cinque vociby Carlo Gesualdo Principe di Venosa Massimo Ossi Carlo Gesualdo Principe di Venosa. Madrigali a cinque voci. Quinto libro (Gesualdo, 1611). A cura di = Edited by Maria Caraci Vela. (New Gesualdo Edition, V.) Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2017. ["General Criteria for Secular Polyphony Edition," in Ita., Eng., p. vii–xiv; general introd. and bibliographic description in Ita., Eng., p. xv–lxx; poetic texts in Ita., Eng., p. lxxi–xcvii; general bibliog., p. xcviii–civ; facsimiles, p. cv–cx; score, p. 1–95; crit. apparatus in Ita., Eng., p. 97–123. ISMN 979-0-006-55721-9; pub. no. BA 10385-01. €249 (reduced price is available for subscribers).] Carlo Gesualdo stands out among Renaissance composers for the originality of his madrigals, with their "experimental" use of chromaticism, harmony, and dissonance, as well as their fragmentation of the text into discrete and sharply contrasting emotions. Socially, too, he was unusual: not many members of the nobility practiced music as intensely as he did—Count Alfonso Fontanelli, whom he knew at Ferrara, was one, and Duke Guglielmo Gonzaga in Mantua, among a handful of others, but none was as accomplished or as publicly recognized as he. And his personal life, marked by tragedy and psychological as well as physical pain, has contributed to his notoriety and has fueled probing discussions of its connection to the extreme expressivity of his music, both secular and sacred. Glenn Watkins, in particular, has delved into Gesualdo's private life, bringing to light the many contradictory influences of his upbringing, his marriages, affairs, and personal connection to music as a form of escape and emotional release (see his recent The Gesualdo Hex: Music, Myth, and Memory[New York: W. W. Norton, 2010], and his earlier Gesualdo: The Man and his Music[Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973]). Finally, there is the fortuitous resonance that results from the startling similarities between his nearly atonal style and that of twentieth-century composers—most famously Igor Stravinsky, but others as well. Gesualdo's reputation for modernity was already established during his lifetime even if his virtuosic handling of contrapuntal technique and technically correct treatment of dissonance appeared to some to align him with older practices. (On historical views of Gesualdo's style, see Catherine Deutsch, " Anticoor Moderno?Reception of Gesualdo's Madrigals in the Early Seventeenth Century," Journal of Musicology30, no. 1 [Winter 2013]: 28–48.) As late as the eighteenth century, critics remained divided regarding his contribution to modernity: Padre Martini credited him with a "sublime, expressive, and artful style" (cited by Deutsch, p. 48), while Charles Burney, despite acknowledging Gesualdo's "unlimited praise" from sixteenth and seventeenth-century commentators, found his style "so far from being the [End Page 162] sweetest conceivable, that, to me, it seems forced, affected, and disgusting ( A General History of Music from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period (1789), 2 vols. edited by Frank Mercer [New York: Dover Publications, 1957], 2:180). Gesualdo's modern prominence derives largely from Stravinsky's "discovery" in the early 1950s of his motets and madrigals (thanks to Robert Craft, whose ensemble Gesualdo Madrigalists rehearsed at Stravinsky's house). His fascination with Gesualdo's contrapuntal technique and highly chromatic style resulted in Stravinsky's completion of some of his motets and eventually the "recomposition" of three madrigals as Monumentum pro Gesualdo: two from the fifth book, "Asciugate i begli occhi" and "Ma tu, cagion di quella" (the seconda parteof Poiché l'avida sete), and "Beltà poi che t'assenti" from the sixth. Stravinsky's interest coincided with a spate of editorial activity and helped to spark a veritable "Gesualdo renaissance" that initiated a wave of performances and scholarly interest lasting into the present. The fifth book (1611) has been central to Gesualdo's "daring cabinet of works" (Watkins, Gesualdo Hex, p. 36) and to the definition of his apparently late, not to mention his "wanton and depraved" style (Watkins, Gesualdo: The Man and His Music, 2d edition [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991], 169). Separated from the fourth (1596) by fifteen years, it and the sixth book (also published in 1611) invite significant questions regarding the dating of their...

Order within disorder: what kinds of tonal plans exist in Gesualdo’s Tenebrae Responsories?

Inspired by statements by Robert Craft, Claudio Abbado and Glenn Watkins, this article explores the presence of tonal order within the apparently disordered context of Gesualdo’s music, using as a case study the Tenebrae Responsories of 1611. Pitch-based devices of ‘order’ include uses of cadence tones, harmonic patterns, underlying stepwise lines, and the musical association of similar concepts between responsories, though these tend to be small in scope. A comparison of Responsories 1 and 3 for Maundy Thursday shows how order and disorder contribute to their theological interpretation and performance. The description of devices and the analyses show that disorder is potentially present everywhere, but that order coalesces at certain crucial moments.

Composer’s Word

Composer’s Word

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

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...

Review: Teaching Stravinsky: Nadia Boulanger and the Consecration of a Modernist Icon, by Kimberly A. Francis

Teaching Stravinsky: Nadia Boulanger and the Consecration of a Modernist Icon , by Kimberly A. Francis. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. xxiii, 266 pp. The teasingly ambiguous title of Kimberly Francis's book gives us some clues as to the part played by Nadia Boulanger in Stravinsky's career. Boulanger was a champion of Stravinsky's music, both as the teacher of her own students and in what would now be termed public engagement, and she taught his younger son Soulima from 1929. But Francis also makes the bolder claim that “For all intents and purposes, [Boulanger] taught [Igor Stravinsky] how to view his own music; her analysis opened his eyes to his work. She helped him articulate his voice and the mechanisms underlying his ‘technique.’ She also taught him about presentation, the direct relationship between the score's appearance and its legacy” (p. 248). While Robert Craft considered Boulanger simply to be “a prodigious proof-reader” (quoted p. 9), Francis instead provides “a feminist account of Boulanger's professional interactions with Stravinsky, his family, and his music” (p. 9). She follows Suzanne Cusick and others in her wish to shed light on “woman's work and the culturally feminine so that they cease to be marginalized and devalued, but might be re-interpreted as important elements of musical culture” (quoted p. 9). Francis chooses to view the Boulanger-Stravinsky relationship through the lens of Pierre Bourdieu's theory, referencing particularly the concepts of cultural capital, consecration, and agency. Yet the theoretical framework is handled with a light touch after the introduction: Boulanger's …

Confronting the Recent Past: Robert Craft and Pierre Boulez in Memoriam

Confronting the Recent Past: Robert Craft and Pierre Boulez in Memoriam

Funeral Games in Honor of Arthur Vincent Lourié. Ed. by Klára Móricz and Simon Morrison

Not many have encountered the name of the Russian composer and music essayist Arthur Lourié (1892?–1966) and most of those who have will most likely have been offered an introduction that involves Igor Stravinsky. Indeed, in many respects Lourié could be said to have been the Robert Craft of Stravinsky’s Parisian years, serving as his right-hand man, but also as his propagandist. Yet, he failed to capitalize on the service he offered his friend Igor—or, in fact, on his contribution to various chapters of music history in pre- and post-Revolutionary Russia, interwar Europe, and post-war America, a contribution that goes hand in hand with his association with such weighty names as Anna Akhmatova, Anatoliy Lunacharsky, Serge Koussevitzky, and Jacques Maritain. As the editors of the present volume put it, ‘Lourié seems to have been destined to be but a footnote in the pages of music history’ (dust jacket). This edited volume (which originated at a symposium on Arthur Lourié at Amherst College in 2009), dedicated to the composer’s life, work, and aesthetic views, and featuring an impressive roster of scholars, is the most substantial and systematic attempt so far to examine Lourié the composer and intellectual. But what did Lourié do to deserve the attention of such a ‘stellar constellation of scholars’ (from a review on the back cover) that will surely earn him wider appreciation in the future? As the composer moves through a number of movements, ideologies, and world-views (Symbolism, Acmeism, Futurism, Modernism, Ultra-chromaticism, Bolshevism, Neoclassicism, Eurasianism, NeoThomism), the reader is guided through key aspects of the history, politics, and culture of the twentieth century. Yet, given Lourié’s lifelong attachment to his motherland, especially St Petersburg—initially as a contributor to this hub of artistic creativity and innovation, and subsequently, in exile, through his growing nostalgia—the editors have decided to anchor all those ‘-isms’ to the so-called ‘Petersburg Text’, the ‘dense intertextual network of literary texts that have shadowed the imperial city since the nineteenth century’ (p. 3), thus expanding its chronological and typological boundaries (p. 4). To this end, Lourié’s unperformed opera The Blackamoor of Peter the Great (1941) is discussed in most of the chapters, and features as a significant addition to the ‘Petersburg Text’. The degree to which the authors of various chapters feel committed to this methodological orientation varies across the volume, and the outcome is effectively (and thankfully) a much richer soundscape. On a second level, this book highlights important aspects of the cultural space of the twentieth-century Russian émigré and of the history of Russian emigration itself. It brings out the practical and psychological difficulties surrounding emigration by following the itinerary of an artist who struggled to make his way to the West and to survive there, to integrate with host countries, artistic circles, local and émigré communities, to flourish professionally and to come to terms with separation from his homeland and unfulfilled professional aspirations.

M�ricz, Kl�ra and Morrison, Simon (eds). Funeral Games in Honor of Arthur Vincent Lourié (review)

SEER, 93, 3, JULY 2015 550 talent and sadness at its loss (especially the premature deaths of his protégés Leopold Sulerzhitskii and Evgenii Vakhtangov); anger at drunken colleagues and pleas on behalf of arrested relatives. Other entries include a reverential allusion to Lenin and a seemingly sincere encomium to Stalin. Laurence Senelick has done a superb job as editor and translator, the only slight concern being whether the fastidious Russian would have penned some of the colloquialisms (e.g. an actor’s performance described as ‘gobsmackingly disgusting’, p. 454) in quite the translated form they assume here. London Nick Worrall Móricz, Klára and Morrison, Simon (eds). Funeral Games in Honor of Arthur Vincent Lourié. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2014. ix + 303 pp. Illustrations. Music examples. Bibliographical sketch. Notes. Index. $74.00. Arthur Lourié (1892?–1966), was a fascinating, yet very neglected Russian composer whose life was almost certainly more interesting than his music. This splendid book attempts to describe his fragmented and little heard musical heritage, as well as piecing together the sometimes contradictory elements of his beliefs. It also provides rich detail of his life in Silver-Age Russia, a friend of poets including Akhmatova and Blok, and shows him as part of the ‘Petersburg Text’, followed by brief service to the new Soviet state and, after predictable disillusion, exile to Berlin (1922), Paris (1923, where residence was delayed on account of his Communist past) and finally, with the coming of Hitler, in 1941 to the United States. Funeral Games is the first study of Lourié since a German biography by Detlef Gojowy in 1993 (Arthur Lourié und der russische Futurismus), and presents, apart from anything else, rich material for a future fuller biography. It consists of five chapters with an introduction and epilogue: Klára Móricz’s ‘Introduction: Endgames and Funeral Games’ (pp. 1–27); a biographical sketch by Olesya Bobrik (pp. 28–62); ‘Turania Revisited, with Lourié My Guide’ by Richard Taruskin (pp. 63–120); ‘Koussevitsky’s Ghostwriter’ by Simon Morrison (pp. 121–50); Móricz’s ‘Retrieving What Time Destroys: The Palimpsest of Lourié’s The Blackamoor of Peter the Great’ (pp. 150–96); ‘Jacques Maritain and the Catholic Muse in Lourié’s Post-Petersburg Worlds’ by Caryl Emerson (pp. 196–268); and finally Morrison’s ‘Epilogue: The Silver Age and Tinseltown’ (pp. 269–87). The comprehensively annotated Introduction outlines Lourié’s disjointed and in many ways disappointing career as a composer, and introduces REVIEWS 551 elements of his life, particularly in respect of the funeral games of the book’s title. These complex texts have for the most part been prepared with great care, but something has gone awry on pp. 17 and 22, with, for instance, ‘chortï’ for ‘cherti’, ‘Grafine rostopchine’ more often than with the name capitalized, and Lourié’s cantata given variously as ‘Sibylla Dicit’ and ‘Sibylla dicit’. Despite these small errors, the Introduction presents the subject in a way that is clear and yet full of detail. Bobrik’s excellent biographical sketch, translated by the editors, is straightforward and informative. Taruskin’s characteristically lively and informative piece begins by debunking Stravinskii’s outrageous remark to Suvchinskii after Lourié’s death that he had never heard a line of the latter’s music (p. 63). In fact they had worked together, with Lourié playing a role later performed by Robert Craft as Stravinskii’s publicist and factotum; moreover, Lourié not merely imitated aspects of his friend’s work, but also transcribed several of his works for piano. Taruskin’s main theme begins with discussion of his subject’s contribution to the Schönberg/Stravinskii debate, ‘Neogothic and Neoclassic’, going on to discuss Eurasianism, to which Lourié, a former Petersburg dandy, became entirely devoted. Turania, incidentally, for this loose ideology was ‘the ur-Russia of [the Eurasianists’] fantasies’ (p. 78). From this chapter, as from other parts of the book, emerge some of the many contrasts and contradictions of Lourié’s thought: for instance, he saw Stravinskii’s classical period as that of his truest genius, whilst openly admiring the playing and compositions of Rakhmaninov (p. 91). Next comes a brief illustrated discussion of Louri...

Noah im kalten Krieg: Igor Strawinsky’s Musical Play “The Flood.” by Hannah Dübgen (review)

Reviewed by: Noah im kalten Krieg: Igor Strawinsky’s Musical Play “The Flood.” by Hannah Dübgen Emily Richmond Pollock Noah im kalten Krieg: Igor Straw insky’s Musical Play “The Flood.” By Hannah Dübgen. (Musiksoziologie, no. 17.) Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2012. [131 p. ISBN 9783761822654. €29.95.] Music examples, facsimiles, bibliography. Noah im kalten Krieg presents a variety of interpretations and insights regarding a single work: Igor Stravinsky’s The Flood, composed for a CBS television broadcast in 1962. Each of Hannah Dübgen’s eight chapters approaches the piece from a different angle, marshaling evidence from source material, music analysis, secondary sources, and published statements by Stravinsky (with Robert Craft), to sketch a series of narratives about how the work might be understood. The introduction poses the question, “Why did Stravinsky compose a work of music theater on the subject of the story of Noah’s Ark at the beginning of the 1960’s in America?” (p. 13). Dübgen’s title gives a clue to her answer: the Cold War is the overarching interpretive reference point, specifically referring to the connection between the biblical cataclysm presented in The Flood and the fear of the atomic bomb (as she quotes Stravinsky, “The Flood is also The Bomb” [p. 12]). Dübgen argues that the story ought to best be considered allegorically, and that the allegory in question is no mere moral abstraction, but is really a kind of contemporary analogy. The best moments of the book are those that tie back to this allegory by integrating a discussion of modern musical techniques with questions of theology and dramatic tradition. It is intriguing that, given the political charge of her interpretive framework, the Bärenreiter series in which this monograph appears is focused on “music sociology,” and Dübgen quotes as her epigraph Charles M. Joseph’s epilogue to Stravinsky Inside Out, which calls attention to “a more expansive, more humanistic context” (Joseph, Stravinsky Inside Out [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001], 269). While Joseph’s own chapter on The Flood is filled with interesting contextual details, personal reflections, and insights from correspondence, readers seeking a similar focus in Dübgen’s book—e.g., thick history, cultural reception, a study of the influence of larger social and artistic systems on the work—will find such topics confined to the last twelve pages of the volume. This is perhaps disappointing, as the bomb allegory she favors is so particular in its political and cultural resonances, which could have been more comprehensively explored. It was interesting, however, to read her analysis of the fraught and even ironic dynamic between television (as mass media) and the marketing of The Flood as a major cultural event involving persons of aesthetic importance (pp. 103–6). After a synopsis of The Flood and a summary of basic information, Dübgen sketches out several different possible paths, many of which have the potential to lead to other fruitful work on the piece. Integrating music analysis into hermeneutics is a challenging task, and Dübgen executes it with confidence and flair. Dübgen’s discussion of the piece’s opening passages demonstrates her analytical method, which connects musical features (in this case, the structure of the opening “chaos” chord) to the “semantics” or significance created by those musical features (pp. 35–42). One particularly concentrated chapter, with [End Page 429] similarly astute attention to both musical content and dramatic significance, discusses the “antipodes” of God and Lucifer both musically and theologically, connecting their exaggerated characterizations to the difficulty of “sacralizing” a modern drama that has secular, contemporary resonances (pp. 64–70). Also illuminating is her discussion of the music of The Flood in light of other Stravinsky works that are “ritualized” (Les noces) or that have elements of “religious narrative” (The Rake’s Progress), which raises interesting problems about the connection between profane dramatic genres and religious content (pp. 71–83). The second half of the same chapter, however, is a flyover discussion of so many other works (the Mass, the Canticum Sacrum, the Symphony of Psalms, the Requiem Canticles, and Threni) that it becomes difficult to perceive as an integrated argument. Dübgen organizes...

DAVID DREW: TRIBUTES & MEMORIES (III)

When I heard the shocking news of David's death, I thought of favourite pieces of writing, the pick of which would be his Preface to the paperback edition of the first two books of Stravinsky's Conversations with Robert Craft. Plucking this cherished volume from the shelves and glancing at David's text, I was struck by the following line: ‘The true craftsman must at some point be a fanatic (and the fanatic who is a bad craftsman is an impostor or a lunatic)’. David may have been writing about Stravinsky, the ‘great Poet’ of the fable which tops and tails his Preface, but he could no less aptly have been referring to himself. To describe David's fanaticism and craftsmanship as complementary, or reciprocal, is hardly adequate: their relationship was symbiotic. Each spurred on the other and the coupling was extraordinarily fertile.

Lessons with Stravinsky: The Notebook of Earnest Andersson (1878–1943)

In 1978, Robert Craft expressed the hope that some record might be found of the lessons that the virtually unknown American composer Earnest Andersson (1878–1943) took with Stravinsky in Hollywood during 1941–42. Also missing were scores of the symphony Andersson worked on with Stravinsky. These documents have now come to light. A private collection in Pennsylvania houses Andersson's Futurama symphony and the notebook he kept of his lessons, items heretofore unseen except by family members. These sources contribute to our understanding of Stravinsky in at least two unique ways. First, Andersson's notebook is the sole record of any long-term pedagogical commitment by Stravinsky, one that eventually numbered 215 lessons. Second, the manuscripts of both composers for Futurama and for two other large orchestral works establish Stravinsky's only known compositional collaborations (with the exception of a one-month stint with Ravel in 1913), which stretched over almost two years. This article examines Stravinsky's previous sporadic role(s) as pedagogue, outlines the various careers of polymath and composer Andersson, questions Stravinsky's final and self-serving remarks in 1966 about Futurama, offers preliminary analyses of two movements from Futurama upon which both men worked and which are discussed in Andersson's notebook, and suggests how and what Andersson may have learned, as recorded in his 58-page notebook (late February–early October 1941). The notebook is here transcribed in full.

Stravinski et ses exégètes (1910-1940) by Valérie Dufour (review)

!52 SEER, 86, I, 2008 career, ensure his survival, and allow his prolific and poetic painting to achieve success, and through it to address the world. On the cover of thisbook Chagall's SelfPortraitwith SevenFingers shows the painter working fastwith Paris through thewindow but Russia in his mind. He signed inHebrew at the top and French-style lower right. When Chagall was latermade responsible for art in Soviet Vitebsk, he signed his Cubist Landscape (p. 16) again and again in a stream of letteringfalling like raindrops on a window pane, first in Hebrew then Russian, French and again in Russian, a list of his identities in his early life, in St Petersburg, in Paris and in Soviet Russia where he was deeply committed to the revival of Jewish Theatre. Many years later he was buried in a Christian cemetery at St-Paul-de-Vence in France. For Moyshe Shagal/Marc Chagall, as Harshav reveals it in this invaluable source book, the issue of identitywas never far away. Courtauld Instituteof Art,London John Milner Dufour, Val?rie. Stravinskiet ses ex?g?tes (igio-iQ4o). Facult? de Philosophie et Lettres, 112 ? Art. Editions de l'Universit? de Bruxelles, Brussels, 2006. 276 pp. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. 24.00 (paperback). Stravinskii's love-hate relationship with the press and his despotic attitude towards his critics became inseparable aspects of his rigorous profile, a profile that reflected his aesthetic ideals of order, control and objectivity. It is this complex relationship and the interactionwith some of his critics thatDufour investigates in her book, focusing not on the reception, but on the exegesis of Stravinskii's output by various intellectuals during theyears 1910 to 1940.The former, she explains, involved occasional reviews of his music, while the latter refers to systematic attempts to grasp and interpret the Stravinskii 'phenom enon' based on each writer's personal set of ideas. Dufour studies texts by a number of 'exegetes' from several countries (Russia, USSR, France, Belgium, Germany, Italy and England), thus shedding light on their dialectical exchanges with the composer. No less than twenty cases of critics are explored whose connection and degree of proximity to Stravinskii varied substantially, ranging from opposition (Andrei Rimskii-Korsakov), to autonomy (Boris Asafev, Boris de Shletser), to close friendship and collaboration (Andr? Schaeffner, Charles-Albert Cingria, Petr Suvchinskii, Artur Lure). To be sure, Dufour is not the firstmusicologist to expose Stravinskii's relationship with his critics. In fact, the bottom line of her argument is his previously acknowledged desire for complete control over his image which, forDufour, renders him an incarnation of themedia epoch inwhich he lived. Yet, her study is a valuable contribution to understanding not only this specific issue, but also Stravinskii's neoclassicism more broadly. By analysing a vast number of contemporaneous articles and books ? many of them long overlooked ? by all thewriters she could correlate with Stravinskii, Dufour establishes thathis involvement in criticism of his production was much more systematic than formerly thought. On a second level, she demonstrates how REVIEWS IOS Stravinskii's interactionwith some of those intellectuals,many ofwhom acted as his propagandists, actually influenced his neoclassical aesthetics. She thus contextualizes and puts in perspective some of Stravinskii's neoclassical ideals and concepts. The strongest point of her research is undoubtedly the examina tion of hitherto unpublished archival sources, which she uses, for instance, to confirm Suvchinskii's key role in the composition of Stravinskii's Poetics of Music. Dufour does not hesitate to make some bold statements in her book. She claims, for example, that Robert Craft minimized the importance of Suvchinskii for Stravinskii, because the twomen played a very similar role in the composer's life (pp. 51, 57). She also makes some original associations, such as her interpretation of Lur'e's 'Neogothic and Neoclassic' as a response to Schoenberg's mocking Stravinskii's neoclassicism (pp. 93-97). However, on thewhole, the reader will probably feel overwhelmed by the amount of infor mation presented; at times, the book admittedly reads like a reference book. Dufour's investigation would have benefited from the examination of fewer case studies on those intellectualswho interactedmore closelywith Stravinskii, and a more thorough analysis of their texts and thought...

The Final Chorale. Juxtapositions, 3, and: Arvo Part -- 24 Preludes for a Fugue (review)

The Final Chorale. Juxtapositions, 3. DVD. Based on Symphonies d'instruments a vent by Igor Stravinsky and Funf Orchesterstucke op. 16 by Arnold Schoenberg. Directed by Frank Scheffer. [Paris]: Ideale Audience International, 2005. DVD9DS13. $28.99. Arvo Part-24 Preludes for a Fugue. Juxtapositions, 4. DVD. Directed by Dorian Supin. [Paris]: Ideale Audience International, 2005. DVD9DS09. $28.99. In the program booklet accompanying his remarkable films, Frank Scheffer likens music history to a river that flowed into the twentieth century, branched when it encountered Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky, and became a delta of styles and practices after World War II. It is a familiar and almost cliched metaphor, used in countless classrooms and textbooks, but a useful one given the pairing of films in this third release in Ideale Audience International's Juxtapositions series. The Juxtapositions series is dedicated to exploring contemporary music through the marriage of film and music. It follows Serge Eisenstein's dictum that when two shots are edited together they create not a supplement of the two, but something new. In the case of this series, aural and visual images are combined to explore music in a new way, and in the case of this particular release, two figures often viewed as polar opposites are juxtaposed for a fresh look at their accomplishments. Frank Scheffer's films form the bulk of the series for good reason; the Dutch filmmaker constructs his films about music as though they were compositions themselves. His style is best seen in the first film on the DVD, The Final Chorale. The film is based on Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments and features interviews with Robert Craft and Reinbert de Leeuw as well as archival footage of Stravinsky and images of the musicians from the Netherlands Wind Ensemble preparing for the work's performance. Scheffer mirrors the composition's famous ritualistic construction of juxtaposed blocks of musical material by cutting his shots together in the exact same format. The result is a stunning visual documentary about the Symphonies of Wind Instruments that moves like the work it discusses. Scheffer follows a similar tactic for Schoenberg's Five Orchestral Pieces. He devotes a section to each movement and explores Schoenberg's intentions behind the enigmatic titles he assigned the movements. Interviews with Charles Rosen, Carl Schorske, and Michael Gielen form the basis of the film's narration. Overall, the format is not as successful as that of The Final Chorale, but Scheffer's proposed interpretations of these landmark compositions are worth consideration. Both films end with a complete performance of the examined work and this is where the release fails in part to deliver. DVD offers so much potential in the realm of sound reproduction that it is a shame the soundtrack was not remastered for Dolby Digital 5.1. Instead it is presented in a fairly flat 2.0 mix that undermines some of the intricate sounds described by the film's participants. The film's transfer, however, is pristine with only a few moments of artifacts and shimmer. The accompanying program book is complete and informative, although the composers' biographical sketches and the recommended recordings are surprisingly thin in a DVD obviously intended for lovers of contemporary music. …

Pierre Monteux: Maitre (review)

Reviewed by: Pierre Monteux, Maître Jane Gottlieb Pierre Monteux, Maître. By John Canarina; forward by Neville Marriner. Pompton Plains, NJ: Amadeus Press, 2003. [372 p. ISBN 1-57467-082-4 $29.95.] Illustrations, discography, bibliography, index. In his loving and detailed biography of Pierre Monteux (1875–1964), John Canarina seeks to shed new light on the conductor who was responsible for the premieres of Stravinsky's Petrushka, The Rite of Spring, and The Nightingale; Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé; and Debussy's Jeux. While many know of Monteux's connection with the legendary premiere of The Rite of Spring, few perhaps think of him as the conductor who made the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra a professional ensemble, or one whose performances and recordings of works of Beethoven and Brahms were heralded by musicians and audiences alike. [End Page 981] Canarina, who was a student of Monteux, undertook this project to address the lacunae in published book sources about the conductor. Prior to Canarina's book, the only book sources were two by Monteux's third wife, Doris. As Canarina points out in his preface (p. 12), the first of her books, Everyone is Someone (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1962) was written under the name of the couple's pet dog, Fifi Monteux. Doris published her next book It's All in the Music (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965) under her own name, and Canarina frequently refers to it (through text-inserted references) in his volume. Canarina acknowledges that "perhaps it was difficult to write about Monteux for the simple reason that there was very little about him that was controversial" (p. 12). Even with his connection to the notorious premiere of The Rite of Spring, the portly, affable Monteux did not attract scholarly or even novelistic interest (with the exception of the books by his wife). Canarina corrects this gap through his incredibly detailed chronicle of Monteux's life. The conductor's daughter Nancie Monteux-Barendese provided the author with the surviving documents in her possession, including clippings, correspondence, photographs, and other memorabilia. Canarina chronicles the details of his life and background from his ancestors in the city of Monteux (near Sête in the south of France, home to many Sephardic Jews), to his studies at the Paris Conservatoire (first on the violin; later on the viola, with harmony and counterpoint studies with Albert Lavignac and Charles Lenepveu respectively), and his first conducting opportunities. In 1911 he was engaged to rehearse Diaghilev's Ballets Russes Orchestra for the premiere of Stravinsky's Petrushka, which was to be conducted by Nikolai Tcherepnin (1873–1945). Stravinsky was so impressed with Monteux's quick command of his complex score that he insisted that Monteux conduct the premiere performance, thus beginning the conductor's providential association with Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes. Canarina's chapter on Monteux's connection with the legendary premiere of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring in Paris on 29 May 1913 repeats some quotes found in other sources, such as his first reaction to hearing the composer play the work on the piano (relayed by Doris Monteux): "My own head ached terribly, and I decided then and there that the symphonies of Beethoven and Brahms were the only music for me, not the music of this crazy Russian!" (p. 40), as well as Monteux's specific corrections to the score in a letter sent to Stravinsky on 30 March 1913 (p. 41; quoted in Robert Craft's Stravinsky: Selected Correspondence, 3 vols. [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984], 1:53). This is somewhat disappointing, and one can only assume that the Monteux collection that Canarina worked from did not have additional primary source material on this historic event, such as Stravinsky's notes to the conductor. While the The Rite of Spring premiere certainly put the spotlight on Monteux, so to speak, it did not automatically send him to a secure conducting post. In August 1914 he was called up to serve in the French army (an experience humorously recounted by Canarina). His enlistment did not prevent him from traveling to New York with the Ballets Russes, which brought him into contact...

Tchaikovsky and His Contemporaries: A Centennial Symposium by Alexandar s> Mihailovic (review)

REVIEWS 533 Mihailovic, Alexandar (ed.). Tchaikovsky andHis Contemporaries. A Centennial Symposium. Contributionsto the Study of Music and Dance, 49. Greenwood Press, Westport, CT, and London, i999. xiv +4I8 pp. Index. Illustrations.Musical examples.Appendices. Notes. $75.00. CHAIKOVSKIIhas never gone completely out of fashion as Rakhmaninovonce did, but the volume under review shows that he is not only still one of the world'smost popular composers,but one also consideredworthy of scholarly attention. None the less, as Samuel Lipman shows in his mischievouslytitled article'Tchaikovsky:The Love That Dare Not SpeakItsName' (pp. 237-43), the snobberywhich flourishedin the firsthalf of the twentieth century is still alive, even among such luminaries as Robert Craft. This collection of essays derives from a conference which took place in October 1993 at Hofstra University, under whose auspicesit is published. It is divided into seven parts with two appendices, the latter being of musical examples, and of the conference programme which includes a map of the campus, amongst other more interesting illustrations, such as photographs. The seven main parts comprise: 'Changing Perspectiveson the Composer'; 'Tchaikovskyand His Musical Contemporaries';'TheOprichnik: Tchaikovsky's"Lost"Opera'; 'The Mature Operatic Composer';'Tchaikovsky,RussianOrthodoxy, and Nationalism '; 'Other Perspectives,Contemporaryand Modern'; and 'Round Table Discussions'. After an introduction by the editor, 'Tchaikovskyas Our Contemporary', the firstzection opens with a wide-ranging and thought-provokingpiece by Richard Taruskin,alreadysubstantiallyfamiliarfrom his 1997 Defining Russia Musicalyl: Historical andHermeneutical Essays(SEER,76, I998, 2, pp. 339-42) in which, beginningwith a planned opera on a storyby George Eliot, he goes on to challenge received views on 'classicalmusic' and 'classicism'as they relate to Chaikovskii'swork.In the same section Malcolm HamrickBrowndiscusses the latter in Anglo-American criticism from the i89os to the I950s, and Alexander Poznansky reassesses some of the myths that surround the composer. In the second section Rosamund Bartlett reassesses the influence of Wagner's music on Chaikovskii's symphonic writing, Joseph Kraus finds interestingcomparablerhythmicpatternsin Schumann and Chaikovskii,and Leslie Kearney makes an analyticalcomparison of the settingsby Musorgskii and Chaikovskiiof two poems, by Heine and Aleksei Tolstoi. The two essays on TheOprichnik by SusanEggarsandAnne Swartzbringnew insights,as does TrumanBullard'stracingof musicallinksbetween Tat'ianaand Lenskii. In the fifth section two essays, by Olga Dolskaya and Vladimir Morosan, aredevotedto Chaikovskii'schurchmusic,and a third,byWilliamH. Parsons, relatesUvarov's political trinityto the 1812 Overture, assessingthe latter'sfate over the lastdecade or so. In the followingsection, thereare essayson Modest Chaikovskii'splay TheSymphony by Stephany Gould and on Ken Russell'sfilm 7heMusicLovers by James Krukones, as well as the already mentioned piece by Samuel Lipman. The three round-table discussionswere devoted to biographical issues in Chaikovskii scholarship, to the place of the composer in American and 534 SEER, 8o, 3, 2002 Russian musical education, and on the interpretationand performanceof his ballets. These appear to have been reproduced verbatim, and convey the impression of a lively debate involving members of the audience, including one Ukrainian who was provoked into saying, 'So much of what I've heard today is the absolute distortion of the truth' (p. 3II). Solomon Volkov, apparentlyas lively in discussionas in his disputed memoir of Shostakovich, Testimony, seems to have been uncharacteristicallyequivocalwhen challenged about his reference to Nekrasov and Saltykov-Shchedrinas 'great Russian writers [. . .] who disliked ballet as a genre, as an art', responding to the question, 'Those aregreatRussianwriters?'with 'Yeah,well . . .' (p. 306). The impressiongained from reading this handsomely produced volume is that the conference from which it arose must have been a stimulatingand, in places, groundbreaking occasion. It is good that so much of it has been perpetuated in print, and the book should be of great interestto those whose minds arenot closed to the workof a much wronged and yet eternallypopular composer. School ofSlavonic andEastEuropean Studies ARNOLD MCMILLIN University College London Laiiryk,Juras. Bie1arusk#ja kniznyja paznakiu zborach Biblijateki imiaF. Skaryny u Londanie. The FrancisSkarynaBelarusianLibrary,London, 2001. 58 pp. Notes. Illustrations.L4.oo: $6.oo. THE FRANCIS SKARYNA BELARUSIAN LIBRARY has existed in its present form forthirtyyears.Basedon theprivatecollectionsof FrLeu Haroskaand Bishop Ceslai Sipovic, it has expanded greatly over the years, and now comprises a collection of books, periodicals and manuscriptsunrivalledin the West, with several items which are not to be found even...

Sounds of Silence: Stravinsky's 'Double Canon'

Igor Stravinsky's Double Canon for string quartet was written in 1959, in memory of Raoul Dufy. According to Robert Craft, the music was not intended as a personal tribute to Dufy (the two men had never met), but was originally composed as a duet for flute and clarinet in response to a private request for an autograph (White 1979, p. 510). In spite of its brevity (it lasts about one minute and sixteen seconds), scholars have described it as remarkably strong. Andre Boucourechliev, for example, mentions its 'completely timeless character, which it shares with the Shakespeare Songs. This is due as much to the actual material as to its handling .... Dateless, but timeless too in the sense that it can be endlessly repeated.' (1987, p. 281)l StephenWalsh writes that the piece 'sounds supremely natural; and yet the canons are rigorously strict, and the retrograde forms also reverse the rhythms of the original, a device which, for once, can be heard and is important for the work's expressive effect' (1988, pp.254-5). By the time he wrote this canonic epigram, Stravinsky was working on Movements for piano and orchestra. Having employed dodecaphonic techniques in the great religious works of the 1950s, the composer was already familiar enough with the new method to change and manipulate it in order to find 'new ... serial combinations' (Stravinsky and Craft 1960, p. 106). Indeed, his method of deriving tables of material from the original set by rotating the intervals of its two hexachords separately a method developed in Movements and beyond is well known. The years between 1952 and 1966, during which the composer applied serial techniques, may be subdivided into three shorter periods of four or five years each. The mid1950s saw an exclusive use of complete twelve-note sets and their transpositions. Next, between 1958-9 (Movements) and 1962 (A Sermon, a Narrative, and a Prayer), Stravinsky employed both transpositions and hexachordal rotations to compose his chords and melodies. Lastly, after 1962-3 (from Abraham and Isaac to the Requiem Canticles), the composer made exclusive use of hexachordal rotations: no transpositions of complete twelve-note sets are found. This division of the late period into three is necessarily sketchy and therefore slightly inaccurate because the different techniques overlap. In fact, each newly introduced technique appears to have been introduced into the old technique on a modest scale.2 However, in Double Canon as in Epitaphium, written in the same yearno hexachordal rotations are yet used. In Epitaphium, we only find the original set

Evenings on and off the Roof: Pioneering Concerts in Los Angeles, 1939-1971

In April of 1939 an unusual event occurred on a Los Angeles rooftop: nineteen people gathered to hear an all-Bartok program of chamber music. Thus was launched the now-famous Evenings on the Roof. The concert series later became the Monday Evening Concerts, whose popularity continues to this day. This is the story of that adventurous series, and Dorothy Crawford's graceful telling reveals the changing world of twentieth-century art music. It is also a story of idealism and determination, and of a unique synthesis of talent that could happen only in Los Angeles.Evenings on the Roof were the inspiration of writer Peter Yates and his wife, pianist Frances Mullen. To the Yates' rooftop studio came local and emigre musicians and composers. Though performers received little financial compensation, composers offered their latest works, and the growing audiences welcomed the challenging new music. Music critic Lawrence Morton joined this endeavor and helped forge an innovative musical community. The series introduced works of Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Lukas Foss, Pierre Boulez, and John Cage and provided an early venue for Robert Craft, Marilyn Horne, Marni Nixon, and Michael Tilson Thomas, among others. The fascinating contradictions that are part of Los Angeles emerge in this book as well: the city known as both 'Lotusland' and 'Tinseltown' could also embrace the most challenging music of the Western heritage. Through the vision of Yates and Morton and the devotion of extraordinary artists, music in Los Angeles achieved a rich maturity.