Symphony Of Psalms Research Articles

Sacred Music in Igor Stravinsky’s work. Symphony of Psalms

Abstract Researching the music of the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, devoutness is not the first attribute that I have offered it. He has remained in collective memory rather as a music revolutionary, not at all a pious spirit, bent towards divinity. The modernism of his works, the tendencies that he was the first to impose but especially the scandal that chaperoned him ever since the 1913 premiere of the ballet The Rite of Spring, all these have imposed him as a “rebel” of music in the early 20th century. The composer nevertheless claimed that his music was not modern but traditional. The order and discipline which constituted the pillars of his compositions go hand in hand with his claim, the return to tradition and his love for the ancient leading audiences towards the discovery of his mystical, religious side. A far too little explored direction in that period laden with marked social and cultural events was the composition of religious music. Too few of Stravinsky’s opera were inspired from sources of this nature – this is exactly why the discovery of and finding their meanings is important. One of the representative opera of this compositional direction is represented by Symphony of Psalms, considered to be a masterpiece placed in Stravinsky’s neoclassical compositional period. The work wanted to be a return to Christian values through a musical language adapted to the times, the music being led in the spirit of the Gregorian chant, simply, to which a text in the Latin language was added. The lines of the psalms chosen in order to be capitalised on underline his predilection for the complexity of religious feelings, departing from humble imploration to glorification. Thus, although this work firstly reflects a personal religious experience, at the same time it suggests the unbounded expression of constancy in faith of a community, which seems to participate in a collective prayer.

Rethinking Igor Stravinsky historically and theoretically — III

The article is a continuation of the author’s reflections on the phenomenon of musical polymorphism (the beginning is in Vol. 124, 2019; the continuation is in Vol. 128, 2020). Stravinsky’s use of the environment, space, motion, dissonance, and Janus morphemes is considered as his inheritance from a tradition dating back to the work of his great predecessors. The musical tableau Sadko by RimskyKorsakov, the introduction Dawn on the Moscow River to Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina, and Borodin’s symphonic poem In the Steppes of Central Asia are a clear confirmation of this. In Sadko Rimsky-Korsakov reveals himself as the founder of musical polymorphism. The multi-element polymorphism of Mussorgsky’s Dawn on the Moscow River forms the basis of the first tableau in Stravinsky’s Petrushka. In the Steppes of Central Asia is an example of a multi-elemental, polymorphic structure, recreated outside an existing object: a native caravan crossing the desert, guarded by a Russian military detachment. Its stereophonic nature appears in the displacement of the textural elements to the rear and the foreground, their spatial compression or expansion, changes to the acoustic volume, sound coloration. Introductory violins octave unison in In the Steppes of Central Asia displays its hidden timbre-polyphonic nature. In the historical perspective, this compositional discovery by Borodin foreshadows a similar approach in Stravinsky’s musical language. The timbrical layering of the unison can be traced in Dances of the Young Girls from The Rite of Spring, The Lullaby in the Storm from The Fairy’s Kiss. The rhythmic ostinato features of Rimsky-Korsakov’s and Borodin’s scores are developed by Stravinsky to the elaborated part of his musical language. The structures with more or less constant, exact repetitions are used in The Rite of Spring, Three Tales for Children, Three Pieces for String Quartet, The Soldier’s Tale, The Wedding, Symphony of Psalms.

Colloquy: Musicology and the Middlebrow

Colloquy: Musicology and the Middlebrow

Spiritual dualities revealed by the hermeneutic analysis of „Symphony of Psalms” by Igor Stravinsky)

Spiritual dualities revealed by the hermeneutic analysis of „Symphony of Psalms” by Igor Stravinsky)

On the Particular Commonalities of Compositional Approach in the Works of the St. Petersburg Classics

This article presents an analysis of the commonalities of compositional approach in Igor Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, Sergei Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky cantata, and Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7. The features of the St. Petersburg Classics’ object-oriented creative method are examined by means of conceptual pairing of morpheme and morph. A description is provided of the morpheme of the event, and its morph of the prayer ritual, in the first and third movements of the Symphony of Psalms. A comparison is drawn between the morph of the prayer ritual and the morph of the enemy invasion in “The Battle on the Ice” from Alexander Nevsky and in the invasion episode from the first movement of Symphony No. 7. In the “Crusaders in Pskov” section of Alexander Nevsky, the textual realization of the morpheme of the environment has been traced, in the form of the morph of the Teutonic yoke. The melodic, rhythmic, and textural resources in the morphic implementation of the morphemes of space, motion, and dissonance, and the Janus morpheme, are revealed. Common approaches to choral and orchestral writing are identified, as are similarities in melody and rhythm, which bond together these three masterpieces of 20th-century musical culture. Keywords: Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Symphony of Psalms, Alexander Nevsky cantata, Symphony No. 7, morphological analysis, morph and morpheme in music.

Symphonizing the Psalms: Igor Stravinsky’s Musical Exegesis

The twentieth-century composer Igor Stravinsky’s setting of the psalms can resonate with faithful communities today that find themselves in complex and often confusing relationships with God. In the Symphony of Psalms, Stravinsky’s use of Scripture shapes the listener’s sense of the Psalter as a whole and can lead worshipers in an honest, bold alleluia.

Stravinsky and U2 Fix Psalm 40

Abstract This paper examines the reception of Psalm 40 by Igor Stravinsky in the second movement of his “Symphony of Psalms” and by U2 in their song “40,” the final track on their 1983 album War. Though both limit their reception to only the first three verses of the psalm, their appropriation of the text indicates two different interpretations of the psalm within the Canon. Stravinsky places the verses between the concluding verses of Psalm 39 and the entirety of Psalm 150, the result of which is a typical personal lament psalm made up of lament, petition, assurance, and praise—a very different structure than the canonical Psalm 40's assurance followed by lament. U2's appropriation, on the other hand, is arguably more faithful to the text of the canonical Psalm 40 in that its concluding lyrics hearken back to the harrowing opening track of their album, the “lament” “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” The paper concludes by arguing that both Stravinsky and U2 remain faithful to the spirit of the psalter as a whole by re-appropriating the words of the psalmist for each musician's own Sitz I’m Leben.

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...

The Rake's Progress and Stravinsky's Return: The Composer's Evolving Approach to Setting Text

Abstract Stravinsky has a deserved reputation for manipulating the sound of words, which, among other factors, has given rise to accusations of “antihumanism” against the composer and his music. However, close analysis of the opera The Rake's Progress (1948–51) shows that Stravinsky actually takes care to set the text intelligibly, and at certain moments, even expressively. By analyzing metric displacement and motivic development as it evolved from the composer's earlier neoclassical settings—including Oedipus Rex (1927), the Symphony of Psalms (1930), and Perséphone (1934)—through his first efforts at serial composition in the Cantata (1952), this article contextualizes the seemingly anomalous expressiveness in The Rake's Progress. Discovery of this evolution in his approach to setting text also entails a reassessment of the composer's aesthetic concerns.

Running in Place: Sketches and Superimposition in Stravinsky's Music

This article considers Stravinsky's use of superimposed, repeating motivic fragments from the perspective of his sketches and drafts. It describes a common procedure where sketches with single statements of fragments are expanded by the insertion of repetitions from within. Thus, the repetitions originate as interpolations rather than additions, becoming members of a larger formal framework. The paper describes how the fragments may interact contrapuntally to create a series of ordered episodes that counteract their reiterative origins. It considers sketches from Symphony of Psalms and Symphony in Three Movements.

Experiencing music: a composer's notes

Vagn Holmboe (1909-1996), was one of the most important composers of his era, and the most important Danish composer after Carl Nielsen. In a book intended for the general reader, he discusses the nature of music, from the point of view of the composer, the performer and the listener. This is the first appearance in English of these important essays, originally published in Danish, under the title 'Music: the Inexplicable'. To the translation of this book several other essays have been added: Holmboe also writes on Stravinsky's 'Symphony of Psalms', 'Haydn and Tradition', on Nielsen, and his own early career, and on human responsibility and artistic freedom.

Long Ago with Willem de Kooning

Only gradually did I realize how much I learned from Edwin Denby and Willem de Kooning, neither of them a teacher.How did Edwin and I meet Bill? In 1935 we lived in a loft on Twenty-First between Sixth and Seventh and one day a black-and-white kitten came through the fire escape. It turned out to belong to Bill and Juliet, who lived next door. Before that, we'd been hearing loud hi-fi music drifting over: Flamenco, Louis Armstrong, Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms. We began visiting. A former girl friend, Nini, came around, too, and they all seemed to get along. I remember Bill saying once, No, he wasn't going to marry Juliet; if he was going to marry anybody it would be Nini.

Symphony of Psalms; Canticum sacrum

Symphony of Psalms; Canticum sacrum

STRAVINSKY'S DEVELOPMENT: A JUNGIAN APPROACH

THE VIEW OF Stravinsky as a time-travelling, fashion-mongering pasticheur seems at last to be dying. The validity of the composer's stylistic development is increasingly accepted. There are still critics of the so-called neo-classic works, notably among the avantgarde (Boulez, for example, has written of sclerose dans tous les domaines: harmonique et melodique, oiu l'on aboutit a un academisme truque, rhythmique meme, oiu l'on voit se produire une penible atrophie);' but in general the revolutionary nature of Stravinsky's attitude to the past is becoming apparent. A good example is Edward Cone's 'The Uses of Conventions: Stravinsky and His Models',2 in which the writer makes clear the unity of Stravinsky's works, the way in which different materials become merely different garbs for the essentially and unchangingly Stravinskian language. Increasingly, then, the identity of the music is replacing lists of alleged models and sources. But this does not go far enough. Stravinsky's development is not only a valid one but also an essential one: for himself and for the twentieth century. Neither does it comprise a mere procession of disparate styles but rather a pattern, with a psychological and nmusical logic. The common ground between 'Le Sacre du printemps' and the 'Symphony of Psalms' may be increasingly recognized but the enormous differences have still to be satisfactorily accounted for. Similarly, the fact that the composer of that revolutionary Dionysian Rite could by I939 demand on behalf of Apollo the subjugation of these intoxicating Dionysian elements3 has, if it is not put down simply to perversity or patronizingly seen as a late maturity, to be explained. The only explanation is a psychological one. One starts, as any discussion of this subject must, with 'Le Sacre'. To describe this work as a product of the Jungian collective unconscious is not new. Almost every writer recognizes the outburst of primitive unconscious energy, the sacrifice of the individual to the collective will, the barbaric and irrational forces released. The work is seen as part of the pioneering exploration of the unconscious common in art of its period.4 Sometimes the connection with the

1930: Symphony of Psalms

We all know that the Symphony of Psalms was ‘composed for the glory of God and dedicated to the Boston Symphony Orchestra’, but we don't always notice that this wry equivocation is appropriate to a work whose theme is the relationship between Man and God. A comprehensive and suitably illustrated analysis of the work in those (or any other) terms would fill at least a booklet. Here we must confine ourselves to the exposition and a few representative developments of the Man/God ‘theme’.

Barok in skladatelji 20. stoletja

Barok in skladatelji 20. stoletja

Symphony of Psalms, Symphony in C

Symphony of Psalms, Symphony in C

Remarks on the Recent Stravinsky

NE VER BE FORE year of Igor Stravinsky's eightieth birthday had I been privileged to speak publicly or to write about music of Stravinsky. That I was then invited to do so, and that I accepted this invitation happily and proudly might have been construed by some simply as evidence that invitations to birthday celebrations are tendered in a spirit of generosity and forgiveness, but must certainly have been interpreted by some less credulous others as a further evidence of a sinister realignment of allegiances, which has attended and reflected certain aspects of Stravinsky's compositional activity during past decade. My only concern, then as now, with this journalistic view from below of world of musical composition, is that it carries with it imputation that had I or certain of my colleagues been asked to speak on occasion of Stravinsky's seventieth birthday, we would have lacked both will and authority. As for will, and may Symphony of Psalms be my witness, I can but assert that had I been asked then or now to discuss then latest works, or of works preceding them, or-indeed-of any work or collection of works later than Piano Sonata of 1904, a composition which I must confess to knowing not at all, I would have done so with same sense of involvement, same sense of wonder, and same need of study and preparation, as I approach now latest works. And if my present presumption of authority derives merely from such a phrase of Stravinsky, in discussing his own music, as the combinatorial properties of this particular series, and indubitable serial and twelvetone attributes of this latest music, then allow me to suggest that my particular dispositions may be (and I like to think are) necessary conditions; they are scarcely sufficient bases for authority. At least as necessary, if not yet sufficient, is that kind of reflective, contemplated, and total knowledge of individual compositions themselves, which I cannot profess as yet to possess of The Flood, or Sermon, Narrative and Prayer, or even Movements, and which so many of us possess, and have had to possess for so many years, of Concerto for Two Pianos, or Octet, or The Rite of Spring. The convenient notion that prior to 1952 all contemporary compo-