What is it about?
Stravinsky started writing a musical memorial to Debussy soon after his death in 1918. The completed Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1920), which received a mixed early reception, would later be hailed as a signal work of 'modernist' music for its seemingly 'discontinuous' form. This article presents a completely new analysis, focused on rhythm, texture, and instrumentation. I argue that the difference between this approach and conventional pitch-based studies opens valuable critical perspective on received methods of 'music analysis', whose Germanic roots do not best serve music in this distinctly Franco-Russian tradition.
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Why is it important?
This article is a crucial contribution to the recent widespread professional interest in 'rebalancing' approaches to musical analysis, by restoring a long-neglected temporal dimension to a methodological tradition that has long privileged temporally abstracted approaches to pitch-based 'coherence' and 'unity'. At the same time, it proposes a new framing of the profound debt to Debussy in Stravinsky's composition - which has been considerably downplayed by scholars determined to raise his 'Russian' origins above all other aspects of his multi-dimensional creative formation.
Perspectives
I found it both gratifying and exciting to feel the emergence into focus of a distinctly rhythmic/ metrical kind of 'musical thought' through my intensive analysis of this music - which brought with it quite unexpected and rich resonances with my previous analyses of (e.g.) Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring and Debussy's orchestral Nocturnes. It was also very satisfying to revisit the polemics about 'analysis' previously offered by Kerman and Agawu ... and, I think, to develop my own fresh perspectives on the questions at stake in this esoteric but important sub-discipline of musicology.
Dr David J Code
University of Glasgow
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Analyse, que me veux-tu? Interpreting Stravinsky's Memorial to Debussy, twentieth century music, June 2018, Cambridge University Press,
DOI: 10.1017/s1478572218000166.
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