CHAPTER 13

Stravinsky and the Subhuman

A Myth of the Twentieth Century: The Rite of Spring, the Tradition of the New, and “the Music Itself”

I

“IN THE ARTS an appetite for a new look is now a professional requirement, as in Russia to be accredited as a revolutionist is to qualify for privileges,” wrote Harold Rosenberg, the champion of action painting, in 1960. Densely packed with ironies intended and unintended, Rosenberg’s marvelous sentence encapsulates the atmosphere in which many members of the generation now reaching seniority in the arts and the academy were educated. Indeed, it is tempting now to look back on that period as if on some kind of Brezhnevite stagnation, in which yesterday’s antitraditionalist sloganeering was appropriated to defend today’s reactionary traditionalism, and in which loyalty to the new was professed in order to resist change. The attempt to marry the Permanent Revolution to the Great Tradition led to a vast proliferation of newspeak and doublethink, for as Rosenberg went on to observe, “the new cannot become a tradition without giving rise to unique contradictions, myths, absurdities.”¹

We are still living with them. The historiography of art—and particularly, it seems, of music—remains the most stubbornly Whiggish of all historiographies, despite long-standing maverick opposition.² That historiography is still a Tradition-of-the-New narrative that celebrates technical innovation, viewed as progress within a narrowly circumscribed aesthetic domain. The hermetic and formalist side of this paradigm and the heroically individualistic, asocial side of it remain sources of dissatisfaction to those of us who believe that this manner of accounting for the production and the value of artworks has had a deleterious influence on that very production and that very value.

Awareness has been growing that the two sides of the enduring paradigm are codependent, that in both aspects the resulting narratives have been tendentiously exclusionary, and that the ideology of the cold war, which sanctioned the association of logical positivism with democracy and of formalism with the defense of political freedom, has been to a long-unrecognized extent its artificial life-support system.

The influence of the cold war on modernist attitudes in Rosenberg’s field has been energetically documented of late, sometimes with a tinge of conspiracy theorizing.³ The single noteworthy attempt of this kind so far in the field of music so far has been Martin Brody’s “‘Music for the Masses’: Milton Babbitt’s Cold War Music Theory,” in which Babbitt’s scientism is somewhat benignly explained as a defense, on the part of a thinker formed (and scarred) by the “dangerously irrational” ideological battles of the 1930s, against a priori (which is to say political) constraints on conceptualizing “the nature and limits of music” and against the political exploitability of any “looser,” less intransigently rationalistic discourse.⁴

Will the end of the cold war bring an end to all these redemptive mythologies and exclusionary strategies? Will we finally get beyond the poietic fallacy that focuses all attention on the making of the artwork, hence on the person (and the putative freedoms) of the maker? Will we see that artists’ shoptalk is not invariably the best model or medium for criticism? Will we allow that the context of technical innovation in the arts need not be confined to the history of art? Will we accept that what an artist will experience as “an irresistible pull within the art”⁵ may have sources in the wider world, including some of which the artist may not be wholly aware, and that it is the historian’s or the critic’s job to describe them, however fallibly?

A major deterrent to enlarging the purview of art history and criticism along these lines is the unwholesomeness of what might be discovered, and the intolerable implications such discovery may be seen to harbor. Formalism is seen as a bulwark against such a threat. Its defenders have tended to impugn the motives of skeptics, who are suspected of genius-envy and, more sweep-ingly, of hostility to the integrity of the individual. As one who has investigated, and who has felt it important to investigate, Stravinsky’s alarming political affinities, and drawn fire in consequence, I can well appreciate the qualms expressed by the author of a recent inquiry into the occultist well-springs of modernist poetry. “This study is not a postmodern critique of modernism,” he felt it necessary to declare. “It is not my intention to unveil the errors, self-deceptions, and vices of those geniuses whose impossibly great achievements oppress us all.”⁶

He knows that he is in for censure from a “scholarly community [that] considers it poor form to dwell upon such an aberration” as occultism, and the history of Scriabin research, sketched briefly in the preceding chapter, shows that the musicological community has been similarly disposed. “Yeats’s occultism,” he continues, “has been a subject not to be raised in polite company. To do so could only serve to discredit an accredited genius of the modern age and give aid and comfort to the enemies of the modernist enlightenment.”⁷ Again, Scriabin scholarship bears this observation out. Those who wish to see Scriabin promoted from accredited crank to accredited genius are precisely the ones least able to cope with what, in this case, were the composer’s acknowledged allegiances and his professed purposes. These have been stigmatized and marginalized, as we saw in the previous chapter, precisely in the name of enlightenment.⁸

Anxious resistance to contextualizing Scriabin seems understandable enough. His inseparability from fin de siècle occultism has made his canonical status in the West incurably insecure. And yet when it comes to a central, uncontested and incontestable genius of modern music like Stravinsky, resistance is only magnified, especially when that looming cultural context involves more than what can be dismissed as private folly but links up with great public evils, like fascism and anti-Semitism, that have had gruesome public consequences.

Unlike Scriabin’s occultism (or Schoenberg’s, for that matter), Stravinsky’s fascism and his anti-Semitism were not, as a rule, matters the composer saw fit explicitly to thematize in his work. Although he did choose to set a couple of anti-Semitic texts in his American years, the texts do not seem to have been selected for the sake of their anti-Semitism.⁹ Stravinsky never made a setting of the Giovinezza or the Horst Wessel Lied (but he did set The Volga Boatmen’s Song on commission from the liberal post-Tsarist pre-Bolshevik provisional government of Russia in 1917, and he set The Star-Spangled Banner on his own initiative in 1941).

In the absence of any explicit indication from the composer, it cannot suffice merely to assert that his social circumstances and political attitudes ineluctably shaped his musical output. That amounts to no more than a truism, impervious to falsification and therefore empty of information. As in the case of sexuality—say, Chaikovsky’s or Schubert’s (to cite issues of lively currency)¹⁰—the burden of proof must rest with those who assert the critical relevance of the connection, and such relevance can only be usefully substantiated in specific terms: what circumstances? what attitudes? how have they shaped which works?

To the extent that the argument is advanced in terms of generalities (on the level, that is, of “theory”), adherents of the formalist or autonomist position will always be able to maintain, on the basis of its specificity, the superiority of context-free “essential” knowledge;¹¹ nor will they be in any way shaken in their belief that such knowledge, being purely “aesthetic,” engages the artwork without mediation and, hence, obviates any need for interpretation.¹²

Yet even when successfully demonstrated, the connection between music and its historical situation or between music and the wider world of ideas is not self-evidently enhancing or illuminating. Pursued one-sidedly, it can amount to a debased form of the intentional fallacy—debased in the sense that it is not even the composer but a mere surrogate, the researcher, who now claims the privileged authority of the creator. Just as undesirably, it can reduce works to the status of exemplification. Works can and certainly do survive their immediate contexts, and it is the hermeneutic position itself that would uphold their right to change (that is, to be reconstituted) accordingly. Again, cases must be judged on their merits, with due reckoning of gains and losses.

It is when works “survive” into the twilight zone of decontextualization—or recontextualization within the formalist canon—that losses can seem most decisively to outweigh gains. Often, and paradoxically, it is the very radicalism of modernist art that is supposed to vouchsafe its transcendence of historical contingency. Reacting to my own historical investigations concerning Stravinsky’s patrimony and stylistic evolution (and, as often happens, attributing to me stronger claims than I would care to make), Pieter van den Toorn has declared himself to be “not all that certain that this early Russian heritage is invariably the most useful context within which to position the terms of Stravinsky’s musical particularity,” because “what may astonish most about this music is not the ties that bind it to its immediate past but the distance that separates it from that past.”¹³ Certainly; and yet neither the ties that bind nor the distance that separates can be realistically gauged without specific knowledge of what van den Toorn and many others would evidently prefer to ignore.

Among those who have most loudly chanted the praises of amnesia was Stravinsky, whose squeamishness about his past, and whose rewritings of it, have become legend.¹⁴ By the latest (cold war) phase of his career, the amnesia, formerly applied selectively and opportunistically, had become a generalized defense against all “extramusical” association. The following exchange from the first book of “Conversations” with Robert Craft is indicative:

R.C. Have you ever thought that music is, as Auden says, “a virtual image of our experience of living as temporal, with its double aspect of recurrence and becoming?”

I.S. If music is to me an “image of our experience of living as temporal” (and however unverifiable, I suppose it is), my saying so is the result of a reflection and as such is independent of music itself. But this kind of thinking about music is a different vocation altogether for me: I cannot do anything with it as a truth, and my mind is a doing one. . . . Auden’s “image of our experience of living as temporal” (which is also an image) is above music, perhaps, but it does not obstruct or contradict the purely musical experience. What shocks me however, is the discovery that many people think below music. Music is merely something that reminds them of something else—of landscapes, for example; my Apollo is always reminding someone of Greece. But in even the most specific attempts at evocation, what is meant by being “like” and what are “correspondences?” Who, listening to Liszt’s precise and perfect little Nuages gris, could pretend that “gray clouds” are a musical cause and effect?¹⁵

The first thing to note, in attempting to unpack this remarkable little document, is that the phrase of Auden’s from which the composer is at such pains to distance himself is in fact a paraphrase—a knowing paraphrase, one has to think—of some famous pronouncements by Stravinsky himself. In his Parisian autobiography of 1936, Chroniques de ma Vie, Stravinsky followed his famous fighting words about music’s powerlessness “to express anything at all” with an honorable attempt to define not only what music was not, but also what it is. “Music,” he then wrote (or had his ghostwriter write),

is the sole domain in which man realizes the present. By the imperfection of his nature, man is doomed to submit to the passage of time—to its categories of past and future—without ever being able to give substance, and therefore stability, to the category of the present. The phenomenon of music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the coordination between man and time.¹⁶

A dozen years later, at lunch at the Raleigh Hotel in Washington, D.C., on 31 March 1948, Stravinsky surprised Robert Craft, whom he had just met and who recorded it in his diary, with the “marvelous remark” that “music is the best means we have of digesting time.” The Stravinskys’ other luncheon guest that day was W. H. Auden.¹⁷

For the interwar and the postwar Stravinskys, then—the Stravinskys whose thirdhand Bergsonian remarks Auden admired and improved upon—music, even if it did not “express,” nevertheless signified, and what it signified was of the most primal human significance.¹⁸ The cold-war Stravinsky was more exigent; he insisted not on music as metaphor but on “music itself.”

That is a very strange notion indeed, “music itself.” Its history has yet to be written, but it does not seem to be a very long one. In the sense in which the cold-war Stravinsky used the term, it does not seem to extend back more than a decade or two before Stravinsky used it. The term has nothing to do with the nineteenth century’s “absolute music,” with which it is now often mistakenly interchanged; for the absoluteness of absolute music, as Wagner (yes, Wagner) first envisioned it, was an absolute expressivity, not an absolute freedom from expression.¹⁹ Stravinsky’s first approximation to the term came in a little talk he took around beginning in 1935 to introduce the concerts at which he and his son Sviatoslav (Soulima) gave the initial performances of the Concerto per due pianoforti soli. “There are different ways of loving and appreciating music,” he would say:

There is, for instance, the way that I would call self-interested love, wherein one demands from music emotions of a general sort—joy, sorrow, sadness, a subject for dreaming on, forgetfulness of ordinary existence. But that devalues music by assigning it a utilitarian end. Why not love it for its own sake? Why not love it as one loves a picture, for the sake of the beautiful painting, the beautiful design, the beautiful composition? Why not admit that music has an intrinsic value, independent of the sentiments or images that it may evoke by analogy, and that can only corrupt the hearer’s judgment? Music needs no help. It is sufficient unto itself. Don’t look for anything else in it beyond what it already contains.²⁰

These are clearly related concepts. Yet to speak of “aimer la musique pour elle-même,” or to say that “elle suffit à elle-même,” is not at all the same as speaking of “la musique elle-même,” something of which Stravinsky does not yet seem to have the notion. He is still speaking (Kantianly, one might almost say) of pure motives and pure attitudes—of “aestheticism,” if you like—but not, as yet, of pure essences. (He could hardly have been doing that before concerts in which his Three Tableaux from Petrushka, played by Soulima, shared the program with the new concerto.)

The special congeries of notions expressed by tautological terms like “music itself,” “the music itself,” “music as music,” and so on, came later, at least to Stravinsky. And they came to him in America. They coincide with his serial period. (Indeed, he made a point, in a passage elided from the Auden discussion quoted earlier, of exempting the sort of music he was then composing from Auden’s metaphors, even insofar as he accepted them: “If I understand ‘recurrence’ and ‘becoming,’“ he now stipulated, “their aspect is greatly diminished in serial music.”)

So what was this new notion of “music itself,” of which the music of the cold-war period was the best and purest exemplar? Commonplace though the phrase has become in everyday parlance, intuitively though we may feel we understand it, its definition is intractably elusive—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say protean; for it is never defined except by its context, and its context is invariably one of negation. In Stravinsky’s response to Craft, “music itself” is defined as being not “the result of a reflection;” it is not evocative; it is not a correspondence; it is “below” the terms of Auden’s generalization (so it’s not that), and “above” such particular things as landscapes and clouds (so it’s none of those, either). But what is it?

Impossible to say—which is precisely why the term has become indispensable in certain kinds of metamusical discourse. It is the great instrument of rejection. In Joseph Kerman’s Contemplating Music, for example, a book that had as its objective precisely the redefinition of musicology’s domain and its methodology so as to put it in closer touch with “the music itself,” the concept is wielded like a bazooka. “Music itself,” or “music as music,” or, less often, “music in its own terms,” we learn, does not consist in facts about music; or in autonomous systems or structure; or in historical generalizations; or in texts (“the bare score”); or in “moments in a hypothesized evolutionary process,” or in “art ‘objects’ susceptible to objective manipulation,” or in bibliographical minutiae, or in analytical minutiae, or in music-in-culture or music-insociety, or indeed in any exclusive context.²¹

What’s left? Kerman has excluded the general and the particular, the autonomous and the contextual, the whole and the part. And still, his negatives do not equal Stravinsky’s negatives, nor do they suggest similar positive intuitions, except insofar as both writers seem to eliminate the reflective and associate “music” (Kerman tacitly, Stravinsky openly) with some kind of primary, inarticulate, implicitly incommunicable activity. In Kerman’s case the residuum is performing and listening; these are the activities to which his envisaged musicology (or “criticism”) is accessory. In Stravinsky’s case the privileged activity, naturally enough, is composing (for him, plain doing). For both of them, ultimately, “music itself” is a chimera, for it is half of a binarism—one hand clapping—of which the other half is the “extramusical.” As in any binarism, neither term can mean anything in the absence of the other. Each, therefore, is fashioned out of its relationship to the other. (The music itself is that which is not extramusical; the extramusical is that which is not the music itself.) And as always, the need for such constructions lies in the actions—and the exclusions—that they enable.

So maybe it were better to say that rather than being merely chimerical, the indefinable but indispensable notion of “music itself” acts as a cordon sanitaire, a quarantine staking out a decontaminated space within which music can be composed, performed, and listened to in a cultural and historical vacuum, that is, in perfect sterility.

II

The question remains as to why the quarantine is deemed necessary. Rather than go on theorizing about it, let us observe it in action. Stravinsky’s early masterpiece The Rite of Spring is the perfect test case: because its reputation has achieved genuinely mythic proportions; because the mythology of The Rite has generated a huge and many-sided literature; and because so much of that literature is so easily and instructively falsified.

The myth is an eclectic compound of at times contradictory elements. There was the work’s sensationally nasty Paris première. (“The real thing—a big ‘Paris’ scandal!” critics marveled or scoffed. “Things got as far as fighting,” the composer laconically reported in a letter home.)²² There were the many cheap imitations it inspired. (Robert Craft called The Rite “the prize bull that inseminated the whole modern movement.”)²³ There was the durable enigma of its technical premises, inspiring a clamor of irreconcilable analytical hypotheses. The myth of The Rite is at once a myth of iconoclasm and a myth of virgin birth; a myth of disruption and a myth of advancement; a myth of artistic synergy and a myth of musical autonomy. Several books have been devoted to the work by now;²⁴ but to appreciate the myth as such it would be better to look, at the outset, not at the specialized literature or the cutting edge of research but at the textbooks that transmit and cement the conventional wisdom about The Rite and about modernist music in general.

Stravinsky’s score is always a prime exhibit, and usually the prime exhibit, in the early chapters of textbooks on twentieth-century music. Two such textbooks, both straightforwardly entitled Twentieth-Century Music, have been published in the last few years, and can be fairly said to represent the current academic-critical consensus. The one by Elliott Antokoletz opens with a boldly formulated assertion of long-established facts:

An unprecedented departure from established musical traditions characterizes much of the music composed during the first decade of the twentieth century. ... No changes of musical style or technique have ever produced such a sense of historical discontinuity as those that gave rise to our own era. This condition may be traced directly to the radical change in the basic premises of the musical language itself, a revolutionary transformation stemming most prominently from the works of Ives, Scriabin, Debussy, Bartok, Stravinsky, and members of the Vienna Schoenberg circle.²⁵

This is a venerable saga. It has been handed down from bard to bard over many a year, but by now we all know it isn’t true. The music of the first decades of the present century, encompassing the outputs of all the figures named in the concluding honor roll, is far more appropriately viewed as a maximalizing phase within the traditions established over the course of the preceding century than as a departure from them. (To add to the topsyturviness of the standard account, when the real breaks came, in the 1920s, it was necessary to disguise them, then and since, as a recovery of historical continuity.)²⁶ Thanks to the recent work of many scholars, in what amounts to a burgeoning historiographical and analytical revolution, this is now very easy to see.²⁷ It takes far more intellectual effort, in fact, to go on maintaining the existence of (or perhaps more to the point, simply to go on maintaining) the wall between the modernist Mighty Handful and their antecedents. Yet as contemporary scholarly performance still attests, many think the effort worthwhile. Partly, no doubt, it is to keep up the status of the modernist giants as giants. Praising famous men—or rather, praising self-made men—will remain on the agenda until those perpetually rising middle classes quit rising. It won’t be anytime soon (and I’ve done my share and can’t promise I’ll stop).

But there is something else at work here, too. The myth of the revolutionary transformation acts as another sort of cordon sanitaire around the thing transformed—that is, as Antokoletz so resonantly puts it, “the musical language itself.” If rupture with the historical past is accepted as a given—if, for example (as van den Toorn insists in his subtitle), The Rite of Spring is assumed to represent “the beginning of a musical language” rather than an extension or a maximalization or a culmination—then study of “the basic premises” of modern music can proceed on an entirely inferential basis, and an entirely sequestered one. The “autonomy” of the analytical act is protected. The advantage of such an approach—the gain, as it were—consists precisely in what is lost from it.

Stravinsky knew this first and best. As early as the 1920s (the time, as I say, of the real “breaks”), Stravinsky was busily revising the history of The Rite and erasing its past. It was in 1920 that he first told an interviewer that the first inspiration for the ballet had been not a vision of its final dance (as he had previously stated) but a musical theme, and that consequently he had written “un oeuvre architectonique et non anecdotique.”²⁸ Over the next fifty years he continually reinforced the notion that The Rite of Spring, of all things, was a “purely musical” work. Perhaps influenced to some degree by the triumph he experienced in 1914 (“such as composers rarely enjoy,” he recalled in old age), when Pierre Monteux conducted the score in the Salle Pleyel to a reception as tumultuous as the first had been, but enthusiastically positive, he averred categorically that “I prefer Le Sacre as a concert piece.”²⁹

Many have followed him in this preference. And even if matters of preference are laid aside, it is undeniable that, as van den Toorn points out at the very beginning of his study of the ballet, “for the greater part of this century our knowledge and appreciation of The Rite of Spring have come from the concert hall and from recordings.”³⁰ For many if not most spectators, visual exposure to the work comes after years of tremendous stagings before the mind’s eye under the stimulus of the powerful music, and is often disappointing. Van den Toorn goes on to aver, with Stravinsky, that these facts of life and history justify the relegation of all impedimenta—”the scenario itself, the choreography, and, above all, the close ‘interdisciplinary’ conditions of coordination under which the music is now known to have been composed”—to the limbic category of “the ‘extra-musical.’“ “Like pieces of a scaffolding,” he ingeniously observes, “they were abandoned in favor of the edifice itself.”³¹

And yet we note a familiar diction, betokening a familiar discourse, in the elemental opposition of the “extramusical” scaffold to “the edifice itself,” and wonder how access to the latter is to be gained. The answer, it turns out, is no surprise. We reach the edifice itself by rigorously excluding all that does not conduce directly to “pure musical delight.”³² And what is that? Van den Toorn quotes the cold-war Stravinsky: “The composer works through a perceptual, not a conceptual process. He perceives, he selects, he combines, and is not in the least aware at what point meanings of a different sort and significance grow into his works. All he knows or cares about is the apprehension of the contours of form, for form is everything.”³³

Form is everything. That seems about as definitive and as extreme a declaration of formalist principles as could be desired. And yet van den Toorn actually manages to exceed the latter-day Stravinsky’s formalism in two distinct ways. The first is by explicitly identifying the listener’s viewpoint and role with those attributed by Stravinsky to the composer, something Stravinsky never thought to do. “One need merely substitute listener for composer in the above quotations,” van den Toorn observes, “and the reasoning becomes impregnable.”³⁴ It is not reasoning that is impregnable here, however, but a tautology. The second strategy, inadvertent though it may have been, was misquotation. The last sentence in the extract, as published by Craft and Stravinsky, reads as follows: “All he knows or cares about his apprehension of the contour of the form, for the form is everything.”³⁵ As a Russian speaker, to be sure, Stravinsky must have dropped his definite articles in English every day. But what a difference they make to the sense here! What Stravinsky evidently intended as a description of a particular act (composing) is transformed by van den Toorn into a universal aesthetic stance.

It transpires, then, that van den Toorn’s hypothetical listener is not really identified with this particular (or any particular) composer. He inhabits a hermetically sealed world of his own making, and he would like to rest there undisturbed for the sake of the pleasure to be derived by bonding, as it were intersubjectively, with the music he hears. In a later article van den Toorn makes this point yet more explicit:

The source of the attraction, the source of our conscious intellectual concerns, is the passionate nature of the relationship that is struck. But this relationship is given immediately in experience and is not open to the inquiry that it inspires. Moments of aesthetic rapport, of self-forgetting at-oneness with music, are immediate. The mind, losing itself in contemplation, becomes immersed in the musical object, becomes one with that object.³⁶

The music itself, then, is really the music myself. “Leave me alone with me,” is van den Toorn’s ultimate plea to historians and students of culture, and he speaks for a broad cohort. It is a perfectly reasonable request, coming from a listener. Is it reasonable when it comes from a scholar? Or do scholars have other responsibilities, public ones?

The formalist strategy just examined—that of authorizing the preoccupation with “music itself” by identifying the listener’s concerns with those of the composer—lies behind the analytical commonplace that to understand (or, more precisely, to comprehend) something is to give an account of its making. A prominent music analyst was recently provoked by a hostile reviewer into formulating this perception as a maxim (albeit in the form of a question): “How can anyone know what something is—i.e., be in a position to make aesthetic judgments about it—without knowing how it is made?”³⁷ To say this, of course, is to contradict a fundamental precept of Arnold Schoenberg, one of the founders, as a theorist, of the modern practice of musical analysis, and one of the primary objects, as a composer, of the analytical practices here upheld. In a letter to his brother-in-law, the violinist Rudolf Kolisch, who had worked out an exemplary formalistic analysis of Schoenberg’s Third Quartet, the composer wrote, “I can’t utter too many warnings against overrating these analyses, since after all they only lead to what I have always been dead set against: seeing how it is done; whereas I have always helped people to see: what it is!” And he admonished Kolisch in particular that an accounting of the manufacture of music “is not where the aesthetic qualities reveal them selves.”³⁸

But then, Schoenberg did not at the time possess the notion of “the music itself,” and, unlike Stravinsky, he did not live long enough to pick it up. Returning to a recent writer like Antokoletz and his discussion of The Rite of Spring, we will not be surprised to find its purview, like van den Toorn’s, resolutely purged of the “extramusical.” The subject and scenario have been boiled down to the single remark that the ballet is “highly ritualistic”; but even that little trace is immediately turned into a characterization of “the music itself”: “In this highly ritualistic ballet, we find the most thorough-going use of narrow-range melodies, based on nonfunctional diatonic modality, and constant repetition of short rhythmic motives or phrases in the typically irregular meters of Russian folk music.”³⁹ For the rest, the description of The Rite is a description of its manufacture, covering the “generation” not only of the individual work but also of the way in which “Stravinsky transforms and expands the Russian folk-music properties into an abstract set of pitch relations to form his own personal contemporary musical language.”⁴⁰ Both curious and typical is the identification of Stravinsky’s putative practical methods of construction with theoretical generalizations made many years after the fact by George Perle (“interval cycles”) and Pieter van den Toorn (“octatonicism”). Method is inferred from “structure” and then attributed to the composer, whose work is thus rationalized and rendered abstract.

And harmless. What is chiefly objectionable about such analysis is not its anachronism or its purloining of the composer’s authority. What is chiefly objectionable is its propensity to normalize and, in yet another way, sanitize. To perceive regularities and familiar patterns beneath a complicated or unusual surface (for all that it contradicts the myth of disruption) is evidence of analytical acumen; and so regularity of pattern is prized and sought, and inevitably found. Consider Antokoletz’s parsing of the opening bassoon solo in The Rite in such a way as to demonstrate its “structural balance” and its character as a “closed off” formal scheme (figure 13.1).⁴¹

Stravinsky’s adaptation of a Lithuanian folk melody is cut up into four segments, of which the first and last are held to be a rhythmic palindrome (1+4:5+1), and the middle pair are held to be a hemiola (2x3:3x2). By separating the sixth note (A with fermata) from the sixteenth-note group, Antokoletz’s segmentation contradicts Stravinsky’s phrasing, ignores the obvious melodic parallelism, and occludes the very cadential structure the segmentation is supposed to be revealing. As to the middle pair, hemiolas are only hemiolas when they take up the same amount of (notated) time. And besides, the separation of the two segments is entirely an artifact of the bar placement, a notational convenience that both the phrasing and the explicitly demanded “tempo rubato” conceal from the ear. The whole analysis is a fiction designed to produce a specious, sanitary (“classical”?) regularity. I would call it a white lie.

FIGURE 13.1. Elliott Antokoletz’s analysis of the opening measures of The Rite of Spring (Twentieth-Century Music [Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1992], p. 95)

Tendentious segmentation is in fact a standard feature of analysis that purports to reveal “the music itself.”⁴² What is revealed instead is a germ-free vivarium, entirely “closed off,” as Antokoletz says, from the world in which the music was composed and in which it is experienced. This utopian harmony seems maladapted, to say the least, to Antokoletz’s general view of twentieth-century music as a “revolutionary transformation,” an “unprecedented departure,” and a product of “historical discontinuity,” all of which, at first blush, connote violence. But on reflection it is all the more apparent that a reading of twentieth-century music as “closed off” from the past is precisely what is necessary to clear space for such Utopian visions of rational order as modern analysts propose. Reading such analyses with even minimal historical awareness is discomfiting. One can only wonder why such well-behaved music should have evoked protests at its first performance.

Robert Morgan’s analysis of The Rite, in his similarly titled textbook, is similarly normalizing and sanitizing. He describes the famous ostinato chord from the “Augurs of Spring” as being only superficially what it appears to be, namely, “a combination of two triadic structures, a dominant seventh chord built on E-flat and a major triad on F-flat.” Such a description (which Stravinsky, it should be noted, never outgrew) attempts an accommodation with the perceptual, if not the conceptual, norms of an earlier practice, and therefore violates a cardinal precept of the modernist myth. Rather, Morgan says, the chord is “an integrated sonority with octatonic qualities” because it is “largely, though not exclusively, drawn from the scale E-E-F-G-A-B-C-D-E”⁴³

Morgan’s two descriptive comments are in contradiction: one posits integration, the other (“largely, though not exclusively, drawn . . .”) posits eclecticism, but an eclecticism that is never acknowledged or accounted for, because Morgan never says where the part of the chord comes from that is not drawn from the octatonic scale he adduces. The discrepancy between the object and its description is swept under the rug.⁴⁴ The function of the “Augurs” chord, as Morgan describes it, is likewise normative and reassuring: “the chord provides a basic pitch reference, or tonal focus, for the entire section: twice interrupted by contrasting segments, it returns in unaltered form,” while “even the interruptions reveal the influence of this chord.”⁴⁵ So again one wants to ask, Why the great Paris scandal? Why did things get as far as fighting?

Morgan does try to account for the initial reaction by admitting “the harshness of The Rite” owing to its “high level of dissonance and chromaticism.”⁴⁶ He may have been responding to Arnold Whittall’s very salutary reminder, in an article entitled “Music Analysis as Human Science?” that, whatever the analytical premises from which it is approached, “what is most significant” in The Rite “is the existence and dominance of discords.”⁴⁷ This does need saying nowadays, and it does evoke the early reception of the work: after the first Russian performance (under Koussevitzky in Moscow in February 1914), the critic Vyacheslav Karatïgin wrote in amazement (and only slightly hyper-bolically) that “from beginning to end there is not a single pure triad.”⁴⁸ Whit-tall goes on to propose that “as a portrait of human savagery, the tragic power of Le Sacre may depend precisely on the freedom for conflict to be expressed by the most immediate and effective means.” This sounds like a plea to restore the “extra-musical” dimension that van den Toorn and the others so zealously exclude. And yet even Whittall cannot envision an analytical practice that goes beyond “the music itself.” It’s the nature of the beast to exclude the world, he finally agrees, in what seems to me a very pessimistic conclusion. “It may indeed be the case,” he concedes, “that the ‘rules’ of the game can only be discovered if the discords are ‘translated’ into some other medium, in which they can be examined without the psychological burden of their true character and quality. For Le Sacre remains an explosive work, and analysis may be impossible unless the score is first defused.”⁴⁹

Yet the myth of The Rite demands reinstatement of its explosiveness, and analysts are thus in a quandary. One way out is to imagine The Rite in a dual aspect: as being one thing historically, quite another thing “essentially.” Those committed to maintaining the high disciplinary walls that now separate “musicology” from “music theory” seem to have no trouble with such a divided consciousness. The division, furthering methodological purity, is seen as a necessary ablution, a cleansing-of-the-hands that must precede the delicate operation by which “the music itself” is isolated and dissected. The sterility of the theoretical discipline is itself seen as evidence of its superior condition. Thus, asks V. Kofi Agawu, summarizing the case for institutional isolation,

Has not the most influential historical work always needed theory, whereas the best theoretical work rarely depended on the insights of conventional history? On present showing, we might say that theory is theory and history is history, and that although they may meet or clash sometimes, they remain separate disciplines. To this writer at least, that ain’t such a bad thing.⁵⁰

I have no problem with Agawu’s notion of a music history in need of theory. One cannot visit the bathroom without theory. In my own scholarly work, for all that I am classified, at least by Agawu, as a “historian,” I certainly have had need of theory, have freely helped myself to it, and even contributed to it. As for theory in no need of history—well, that’s his problem. But the divided consciousness Agawu asserts as healthy is what provides writers like Morgan with a way out of the quandary to which I have referred. Morgan prefaces his normalizing, sanitizing account of The Rite as a score with a paragraph devoted to The Rite as an event, in which a familiar fable is related:

If the Paris productions of The Firebird and Petrushka established Stravinsky as a major composer of international reputation, the score for his third Diaghilev ballet, The Rite of Spring, made him the most widely recognized composer of his age. The premiere of The Rite in Paris on May 29, 1913, is probably the most famous (or notorious) premiere in the history of music. The ballet’s scenic evocation of pagan Russian rituals elicited from Stravinsky a score of unprecedented primitive force, in which music seemed to be distilled to its rhythmic essence, hammered out by the orchestra with unrestrained percussive intensity. Shaken by the radical nature of both score and ballet, the opening-night audience was in an uproar from the beginning, with those both for and against shouting at one another in heated debate. The noise level was so high that most of the music remained inaudible; yet if nothing else, the sensational aspect of the event placed Stravinsky at the forefront of the musical revolutions of the time. For contemporary listeners of The Rite, as for those of the first atonal works of Schoenberg, music could never be the same again.⁵¹

III

Not a bad achievement for inaudible music. But again, as always, the myth accommodates contradictions. That is what myths are for. The reality was different. As the ballet historians Joan Acocella, Lynn Garafola, and Jonnie Greene have put it, “The original Rite of Spring was no sooner made than it was laid aside.” With a sophistication that knows no peer in the musical literature on the work, they go on to observe that “therefore while in the historical record we call it a ballet, the way we actually know it is as a collection of ideas: ideas leading up to its creation, together with ideas leading away from the circumstances of its production.”⁵² These remarks come at the outset of a remarkable essay entitled “The Rite of Spring Considered as a Nineteenth-Century Ballet,” in which the authors do what in the musicological literature seems to be unthinkable: they insert the work into a context defined by the past, not the future. They perceive no break with tradition, but manifold extensions of it. They go so far, in fact, as to interpret the reception history of The Rite as “a history of the twentieth century’s coping with its inheritance from the nineteenth” (p. 71). This is fabulously succinct and discerning, and provides the best possible context for considering the sanitizing efforts I have been describing.

What did that nineteenth-century legacy consist of? First of all, of course, it comprised primitivism, the belief that the qualities of primitive or chronologically early cultures are superior to those of contemporary civilization, or as the ballet historians put it, that “it is those things that are least socialized, least civilized—children, peasants, ‘savages,’ raw emotion, plain speech—that are closest to truth” (p. 68). Primitivism is often touted, especially in discussions of The Rite of Spring, as one of those twentieth-century revolutions that cut our age off from the past, but it has a very long history indeed. (As the ballet historians shrewdly note, “it is one of the chief teachings of the New Testament.”) It was a core constituent of romanticism, against which the modern (and again, especially The Rite) is so often and so wrongly construed as a break. The idea of primitive immediacy of consciousness, of at-oneness with the world, was at the very heart of the German romantic concept of culture—Kultur—as opposed to the false Zivilisation of the Enlightenment (that is, of France), and became the most basic component of the Germans’ construction of their national identity.⁵³ At the other end of the nineteenth century, the end that provided The Rite with its immediate background, the idea surfaced with particular force in Russia, where in a curious semantic switch, the cognate word, kul’tura, was associated with Enlightenment, and a good wr-Slavic antonym, stikhiya, was pressed into service in the name of primitive romantic immediacy.⁵⁴ All this was brought to a head by the same sense of impending catastrophe that seized political and social thinkers in the aftermath of the Emancipation with its great uprooting of the peasantry, and horror at “the mockery that urban poverty made of the promises of the Industrial Revolution” (p. 68). “In our hearts,” wrote the poet Alexander Blok in 1908, “the needle of a seismograph has twitched.”⁵⁵ It was in the name of a maximalized primitivism that nineteenth-century romanticism gave way to twentieth-century revolutionary politics.

Maximalized and desentimentalized primitivism leads to that bleak vision known as biologism, “the belief that life is fundamentally its physical facts: birth, death, survival” (p. 68) and that anything else is mere ornament and palliative, a lie. Many were those who immediately saw this in The Rite and were afraid. Jacques Rivière, the editor of the Nouvelle revue française, who wrote the most prescient of all reviews of the ballet, concluded the review with the flat statement that beneath its “sociological” exterior “there is something even more momentous, there is a second meaning, more secret, more frightful: ce ballet est un ballet biologique.” And, he continued,

it is not just the dance of the most primitive man, it is also the dance before there was man. . . . There is something profoundly blind in this dance. There is an enormous question being carried about by all these creatures moving before our eyes. It is in no way distinct from themselves. They carry it about with them without understanding it, like an animal that turns in its cage and never tires of butting its forehead against the bars. They have no other organ than their whole organism, and it is with that that they carry on their search. They go hither and thither and stop; they throw themselves forward like a load, and wait. . . . Nothing precedes them; there is nothing to rejoin. No ideal to regain. . . . Just as the blood within them, without any reason save its pumping, knocks against the walls of their skulls, so they ask for issue and succession. And little by little, by dint of their patience and persistence, a sort of answer comes, that is also nothing other than themselves, which also meshes with their physical being, and which is life.⁵⁶

It was the great thrust of the nineteenth-century science of anthropology to demystify mythology, to demote myths from the status to which occultists, like the post-Wagnerians and the symbolists (and, of course, Scriabin), wished to reelevate them—the belief that myths represented “a record of contact between mortals and the au delà”⁵⁷—to that of metaphor for grim biological realities. It was the project of Sir James Frazer, for example, in his Golden Bough, to strip away the anecdotal content of myths and the metaphorical content of rituals, and reveal the ruthless rites of propitiation that lie behind them—the very thing that The Rite of Spring exposed. So where Scriabin’s occultism sought to elevate human consciousness above the human plane, the “second sense” of The Rite of Spring plunged it down beneath, suggesting the prehuman or subhuman reality that civilized consciousness cloaks but does not replace.

It was a threat not only to poetic mythologism but to the sanctity of revealed religion as well. As Leon Surette observes,

Frazer’s findings reduced the putatively unique event of Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection to just one of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of such deaths and resurrections that have been enacted around the world from the earliest times. Frazer’s revelation that the solemn Christian mass is a survival of bloody ritual murder and ritual cannibalism—even though he was careful to avoid explicitly drawing this obvious conclusion—can clearly count as the revelation of a secret history.⁵⁸

And there it was, no longer secret, on the stage of the Théátre des Champs-Elysées. As Acocella, Garafola, and Greene observe about the Chosen Maiden, “Had the community simply sat down and eaten her, this would have made a difference of tone but, arguably, not of meaning” (p. 68). In that case they would have been celebrating the Eucharist.

Now before proceeding any further, the obvious objection must be addressed, that everything that the trio of ballet historians and I have been discussing belongs to the “extramusical” layer of The Rite, the “seaffolding,” as Pieter van den Toorn says, that has been rightly discarded over time in favor of the music, “the edifice itself.” But Stravinsky’s contribution is not so easily separable from the rest. And the metaphor of the edifice is all wrong because it suggests permanence, whereas Stravinsky’s music has undergone change—the first and most decisive change being precisely its detachment from its original context.

When Acocella, Garafola, and Greene say that the “original” Rite was “laid aside,” we can assume that they mean Nijinsky’s Rite, not Stravinsky’s. The original choreography was not only laid aside but forgotten. Deliberately suppressed by Diaghilev following Nijinsky’s departure from his company, and replaced in 1920 by Massine’s, it was only painstakingly and (necessarily) fairly speculatively reconstructed by Millicent Hodson in the 1980s for performances beginning in 1987 by the Joffrey Ballet.⁵⁹ After a hiatus of three-quarters of a century, the Nijinsky choreography possessed little more than an archeological or (early modernist) period interest for most observers, and was found inadequate by many dance critics.⁶⁰ Nijinsky’s contribution, it is clear, has played a negligible role in the ballet’s history.

What binds all productions together, of course, is the uniform presence of the score, which thus seems all the more compellingly to assume the standing of essential “edifice,” to which everything else, including the transitory plastic and visual embodiments, remains parasitic and, ultimately, excrescent (the “scaffolding”).

And yet that score, too, was at first “laid aside.” The handful of performances it received in May and June of 1913 by the Ballets Russes in Paris and London was followed by the two Russian concert premières (Moscow and St. Petersburg) under Koussevitzky the next February, and, finally, Monteux’s triumphant performance at the Salle Pleyel in the spring.

And that, for a long time, was it. It took a long while for the score to achieve the awesome reputation we now assume it possessed from the beginning. In 1913 it was not the primary object of attention. The most cursory perusal of the Paris reviews of the original production, conveniently collected in Truman C. Bullard’s dissertation, reveals that it was the now-forgotten Nijinsky choreography, far more than Stravinsky’s music, that fomented the famous “riot” at the première. Many if not most reviews fail to deal with Stravinsky’s contribution at all beyond naming him as composer. And, as most memoirs of the première (and even Morgan’s account of it) agree, a lot of the music went unheard, which did not dissuade the protesters in the least. In the words of one reviewer, “at the end of the Prelude the crowd simply stopped listening to the music so that they might better amuse themselves with the choreography.”⁶¹ And the crowd managed to turn Stravinsky against Nijinsky, giving him his first reason for wanting to cleanse his score of “extra-musical” taint.

The score was not published until 1921—that is, not until Nijinsky’s contribution had been scratched and Stravinsky had begun, in tendentious interviews, the process of purifying the music. Only then did the score’s victorious career begin in any real sense. The composer’s squeamishness was conditioned in part, no doubt, by the initial “failure” of the work as a ballet, a failure the composer felt alongside the choreographer all through the war years, his so-called Swiss period. Throughout that time, for all that it was instantly his most notorious work, thoughts of The Rite were tinged for Stravinsky with thoughts of defeat. Briefly despondent in the fall of 1913, he unburdened himself in a remarkably—indeed, practically uniquely—self-revealing letter to Alexandre Benois, a letter that betrays not only the extent of Stravinsky’s emotional dependence on Diaghilev but also the extent of his fear about his own creative future in the wake of the Rite fiasco:

Ah, my dear, this last offspring of mine even now gives me not a moment’s peace. What an incredible storm of teeth-gnashing rages about it! Seryozha [Diaghilev] gives me horrible news about how people who were full of enthusiasm or unwavering sympathy for my earlier works have turned against this one. So what, say I, or rather, think I—that’s how it ought to be. But what has made Seryozha himself seem to waver about Le Sacre? —a work he never listened to at rehearsals without exclaiming, “Divine!” ... To tell the truth, reviewing my impressions of his attitude toward Le Sacre, I am coming to the conclusion that he will not encourage me in this direction. This means I am deprived of my single and truest support in the matter of propagandizing my artistic ideas. You will agree that this completely knocks me off my feet, for I cannot, you understand, I simply can not write what they want from me—that is, repeat myself—repeat anyone else you like, only not yourself!—for that is how people write themselves out. But enough about Le Sacre. It makes me miserable.⁶²

Here we get an inkling of what it was that caused Stravinsky to take refuge from the “extramusical” in “the music itself”—a creative swerve that colored all the rest of his career. His reasons need not be our reasons. And yet we seem to have our own reasons for laying the “original” Rite aside and purging its music. We want to forget the ways in which Stravinsky’s music participated in the great stripdown from kul’tura to stikhiya, from humanism to biologism—ways that have always been salient and that used to be acknowledged, but that the music-analytical enterprise has striven hard to hush up. In the absence of a perceived threat, denial would have been superfluous.

As observed in the preceding chapter with respect to Scriabin’s late music, the attenuation of functional harmonic relationships entailed a knowing loss in the power of music to represent desire, hence subjectivity. Both Scriabin and Stravinsky were happy to give up what the symbolist poet Vyacheslav Ivanov called the malïy ‘ya,’ the “petty ‘I,’“ in the interests of, in the one case, the transcendent dissolution of the ego and, in the other, the absorption of the individual consciousness in the collective. As Rivière noted with his customary percipience, the nonprogressive harmony and the relentless foregrounding of the corps de ballet went together in the representation of “l’homme au temps ou il n’existait pas encore comme individu,” mankind without individuals: “The beings [on stage] are still attached; they move in groups, in colonies, in flanks; they are in the grip of a frighteningly indifferent society; they are devoted to a god that they collectively comprise and from which they do not yet know how to distinguish themselves.”⁶³

Where Scriabin represented the eschatological collapse of time and space in a music that was highly mobile in its darting root movements within an inversionally and transpositionally invariant harmonic matrix, Stravinsky’s music in The Rite was of a kind that prompted critic after critic in Russia to resort to the word nepodvizhnosf—immobility—to describe its character and affect. The long stretches of arrested root motion and pulsing rhythm that analysts of “the music itself” now prefer to rationalize as structurally unifying—that is, reassuringly fulfilling a traditional formal mandate—was originally heard (and is still easily heard) as the annihilation of the subject and the denial of psychology.

Along with this immobility went a calculated formal disunity and disjunction—drobnosf in Russian, meaning the quality of being a sum-of-parts. Study of Stravinsky’s sketchbook shows just how deliberate this calculation was. Motivie or even full-blown thematic relations that were salient in early sketches were ruthlessly attenuated as the music was “refined.”⁶⁴ The “art of transition” between sections is famously eschewed in favor of abrupt, lurching shifts, often coming, as Elliott Carter once observed, “at a point where the statement of an idea is incomplete,” or even of a section.⁶⁵ The very ending of the first tableau is similarly unprepared, coming as a shocking halt rather than a conclusion. There is little recall of the past in this music, and little forecasting of the future; in any case, there is far less than is customary in concert music, which is the category, in the opinion of Stravinsky and the analysts, to which we are now supposed to assign The Rite.

The absence of recall and forecast is an absence of memory—precisely what Rivière described in characterizing the subhuman corps (and what Nietzsche, in a famous essay, defined as the crucial lack—or freedom—that sets the animal kingdom apart from mankind).⁶⁶ Carter sensed this characteristic in Stravinsky’s music, too. It was a perception that began with the repetitive folk-tale plots of Renard and Histoire du soldat, both adapted from the collection of the nineteenth-century ethnographer Alexander Afanasyev.

In these two stories, the characters on stage and the audience are dealt with as if they had no memory, as if living always in the present and not learning from previous events—a dramatic situation that suggests the puppet world, like that of Punch and Judy, as the authors certainly intended, and also in a larger sense inescapable fate and universality of action such as that in the Everyman plays or that of the shades in the Hades of Gide’s libretto for Persephone who ceaselessly repeat the gesture of living.

Whatever the intention, this kind of almost disjointed repetition immeasurably increases the pathos of both works. In fact, I came to believe, as I studied the soldier’s part [for a performance under Lukas Foss], that it was just because of this curious plot repetition, especially as it is coupled with music, that, although almost continually different in tiny details, is always drawing attention to its repetitive form.⁶⁷

In The Rite, unlike Histoire du soldat with its very reflective title character, the elimination of memory does not increase the sense of pathos. Rather, it makes pathos impossible. And that may be why even Carter resisted the drob-nosf of The Rite, preferring to view its harmonic ostinatos as “structures” that “characterize and unify each dance,” and even speculating, as he suggested to Stravinsky (who declined to respond), that “all the chords in the Sacre were related to one source chord,” which he thought he had discovered in the Introduction (where such a thing belonged).⁶⁸

Indeed, the global unifier in The Rite has been an analytical unicorn or philosophers’ stone, avidly hunted, found, asserted. Always, it turns out, some transient recurrent feature has been seized upon and exaggerated to the status of “universality,” as when Robert Moevs asserted that the whole ballet is in the key of D minor,⁶⁹ or when Messiaen and (following him) Boulez reduced it all to a rhythmic “cell.”⁷⁰ I, too, have been susceptible to this need,⁷¹ and, I’m sure, one of the reasons why Allen Forte chose The Rite for his first full-dress demonstration of his highly abstract “set-theoretic” technique of harmonic analysis is because through its use he was able to propose solutions to the famous enigma. The search for the global unifier, I am convinced, is not motivated only by analytical preconceptions or by the wish to give The Rite the academic respectability that is obviously its due. Nor is it only or mainly the prestige that comes to any successful solver of standing problems that motivates the constant search. It is a case of resistance to a threat that goes far beyond the disciplinary limits of musicology.

That threat is hinted at in a third Russian word that was often applied to The Rite when it was new: uproshcheniye, simplification. The Rite, for all its novelty and its inscrutability and the dazzling virtuosity of its orchestral presentation, is not a complex score. Elaborate analytical procedures can make it look far more complicated than it is, even if that complexity is introduced only in order to be whittled down in turn to an orderly structural scheme.⁷² Why is this felt to be desirable? Because a rational complexity is far less disquieting than a mystifying simplicity. Stravinsky’s radical simplification of texture, his static, vamping harmonies, and his repetitive, ostinato-driven forms were the perfect musical approach to the primitivist ideal—the resolute shedding of conventional complexities of linear thought and their replacement by long spans of unchanging content, accessible to instant, as it were gnostic, apprehension and eliciting a primitive, kinesthetic response.

Was this stripdown truly an uproshcheniye, a “second” simplicity, a synthesis vouchsafing a higher integration of thought and feeling? Or was it merely what the Russians call an oproshcheniye, a dehumanizing retreat from intellectual engagement and an impoverishment of culture? That is a question that has never really gone away. It gave rise to a controversy that continued to swirl about Stravinsky almost to the end of his career, until preoccupation with “the music itself” and with the technology of its production, a preoccupation Stravinsky did everything in his power to abet, managed to marginalize it at last.

The view of Stravinsky as an apostle of oproshcheniye, of course, is the view associated with Adorno, for whom Stravinsky’s simplified forms and ego-annihilating ostinatos spelled “permanent regression.” Adorno, unfairly as it may seem, seized upon an early Berlin review of Renard that interpreted Stravinsky’s primitivism (or “infantilism,” as he preferred to call it) as “an affirmative ideology,” and noted that such an interpretation “later appeared in Germany in a sinister context.”⁷³ Yet how unfair is it, really, inasmuch as we know now, far better than Adorno could have known it, that when that sinister affirmative surfaced in Germany, Stravinsky was highly susceptible to its allure?⁷⁴

Ultimately we have to ask what kind of a drama The Rite embodies—that is, to what category shall it be assigned? We have seen that Arnold Whittall associated its shocking musical qualities with “tragic power” and the expression of “conflict.” But is that not a sentimental reading, one that identifies with the Chosen One in a manner supported neither by the scenario nor by the score? Was not the dance critic Andrey Levinson closer to the mark when he called The Rite “an icy comedy of primeval hysteria”?⁷⁵ And was not Jacques Rivière correct when he called special attention to the absence of conflict, even at the dénouement? The Chosen One, he exclaimed, betrays no “personal terror” at all, even though we developed humans in our humanism cannot help assuming that such terror “must fill her soul.” On the contrary,

She carries out a rite; she is absorbed into a social role, and without giving any indication of comprehension or interpretation, she acts according to the will and under the impact of a being more vast than she, of a monster full of ignorance and appetite, of cruelty and darkness. . . . Mankind is dominated by something more inert than itself, more opaque, more constraining—namely, society with its fellows.⁷⁶

It is with that opaque, constraining force that Stravinsky’s crashing orchestra, in the “Danse sacrale,” is clearly identified, and in its terrible dynamism it persuades us—nay, coerces us—to share its point of view. Rarely has an antihumanist message been so irresistibly communicated.

Even the ballet historians seem to offer a sentimental reading of The Rite when they write that “the girl is forthrightly sent to her death in order to benefit the community” and add that “the situation could hardly be more horrible” (p. 69). On the contrary, the sacrificial dance is presented as anything but horrible—and that’s what’s horrible. The ballet presents and even celebrates an absolute absence of compassion as the necessary correlate of the absence of “psychology,” of human subjectivity. The Chosen One, after all, is one of those beings initially presented in the first tableau as an Adolescente, described by the composer (in a text he repeatedly attempted to disavow in his interwar and cold-war phases) as being “not fully formed: their sex is unique and double, like that of a tree.”⁷⁷ This hermaphroditism is at the opposite evolutionary extreme from the androgyne, the perfected being toward which the art of Scriabin (and the early Schoenberg) aspired. It is the mark of an unformed, insensate, and expendable creature, and the ballet’s music, no less than its “extramusical” components, mark her for pitiless forfeiture.

Now these are among the troubling aspects of The Rite that the discourse of “the music itself” evades. That discourse is by no means confined to academic analysis. It dominates public criticism of classical music as well, and the evasion, when challenged, can turn quite explicit, as when Samuel Lipman of the New Criterion, responding to New York Times pieces about Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky, denounces my “attempt to write about music by writing about something else very much not music.”⁷⁸ One senses the same sort of evasion in recent performances of the The Rite—one might even say, in its contemporary performance practice—where emphasis is placed on fleet precision and on an athletic virtuosity that defies or ignores the crushing strain the music was meant to evoke, and that it achieved far more dependably when it actually strained the capabilities of its performers.⁷⁹

The work becomes all the more troubling when one reflects, as Adorno did, on other manifestations of that special congeries of ideas that The Rite embodies. The discussion by Acocella, Garafola, and Greene, following that of Rivière, emphasized the darker aspects of primitivism—biologism, sacrifice of the individual to the community, absence of compassion, submission to compulsion, all within a context defined by Slavic or Russian national folklore. Now here is a list drawn up by a prominent contemporary social philosopher in an attempt to detail the “coherent cluster of values and ideas” that, he maintains, governed the policies of the Nazi regime: “nationalism, biologism, communalism, hierarchy, corporatism, acceptance of authority, territoriality, aggression, rejection of compassion.” I hope it is evident that these hair-raising correspondences are not adduced in order to establish guilt by association. As Professor Gellner put it of his list, “This cluster did not simply spring out of the head of Hitler [or, I’ll add, out of Stravinsky’s]; it has its roots in European history and ideas, and deserves investigation.”⁸⁰ That is precisely what I would like to maintain about The Rite of Spring.

Rigorous musical analysis of a professional caliber must have a place of honor in any such investigation, for the music plays the primary role in carrying whatever cluster of values and ideas The Rite or any other Stravinsky composition may embody to our minds and hearts. Can such an analysis be accomplished without “defusing” the work, as Arnold Whittall suggests it must? I hope that as the boundaries between “history” and “theory,” between historiography and criticism, and between “the extramusical” and “the music itself” continue to soften, and eventually dissolve, we will find it less difficult to believe that it can.

¹ Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 9. Although I begin with an appreciative nod toward Rosenberg, who coined my titular phrase and whose writing I admire, I am well aware that he would not wish me for an ally. The questions I will be asking would immediately mark me in his eyes for a “kitsch critic” (or worse, a “community critic”), because they refuse his principal tenet that “the gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation, from Value—political, esthetic, moral” (p. 30).

² The most conspicuous early voice was Leo Treitler’s; see his “On Historical Criticism” (1967) and “The Present as History” (1969), both reprinted in Music and the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).

³ See, for example, Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); or (with special reference to the CIA-funded Committee for Cultural Freedom) Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy (New York: Free Press, 1989).

⁴ Musical Quarterly 11 (1993): 161-92. Brody captures well the central, characteristic paradox: the actual assertion of privilege and orthodoxy through an apparent argument for pluralism (or “cultural freedom”). His argument might have been strengthened by a more critical examination of Babbitt’s claim that his premises are “value-neutral” (see p. 165), and a more explicit recognition that where Babbitt speaks of “music” (as having a “nature” and “limits,” as being “autonomous,” as having “individuation”) he usually means “musicians,” or, more simply, “Babbitt.”

⁵ Igor Stravinsky, in Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959), p. 127. He was speaking of the “hiatus” created by “‘atonality,’“ which “Marxists,” as he imagined them, ascribed to “social pressures.”

⁶ Leon Surette, The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats and the Occult (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993), p. 4.

⁷ Surette, The Birth of Modernism, p. 9.

⁸ See James M. Baker, The Music of Alexander Scriabin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), and R. Taruskin, review of same, Music Theory Spectrum 10 (1988): 143-69.

⁹ These texts are found in the Cantata (1952) and A Sermon, A Narrative and a Prayer (1961); see R. Taruskin and Robert Craft, “Jews and Geniuses: An Exchange,” New York Review of Books, 15 June 1989, pp. 57-58.

¹⁰ The most informative account of Chaikovsky’s sexuality can be found in Alexander Poz-nansky, Tchaikovsky: The Quest for the Inner Man (New York: Schirmer Books, 1991); for the backlash see Paul Griffiths, “The Outing of Peter Ilyich,” New York Times Book Review, 5 January 1992, p. 24; on the treatment of the theme by the composer’s biographers, see R. Taruskin, “Pathetic Symphonist,” New Republic, 6 February 1995, pp. 26-40; on its potential critical application see Henry Zajaczkowski, “Tchaikovsky: The Missing Piece of the Jigsaw Puzzle,” Musical Times 131 (1990): 239-42, and “On Čajkovskij’s Psychopathology and Its Relationship with His Creativity,” in Čajkovskij-Studien, vol. 1, ed. Thomas Kohlhase (proceedings of the Internationales Čajkovskij-Symposium, Tübingen, 23-28 October 1993) (Mainz: Schott, 1995); also R. Taruskin, “Tchaikovsky, P. I.,” The New Grove Dictionary of Opera (London: Macmillan, 1992), vol. 4, p. 667. On Schubert, see Maynard Solomon, “Franz Schubert and the Peacocks of Benvenuto Cellini,” 19th-century Music 12 (1988-89): 193-206; Susan McClary, “Constructions of Subjectivity in Schubert’s Music,” in Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary Thomas, eds., Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 205-34, and 19th-century Music 17, no. 1 (Summer 1993), a special issue (“Schubert: Music, Sexuality, Culture”) with contributions by Rita Steblin, Maynard Solomon, Kristina Muxfeldt, David Gramit, V. Kofi Agawu, Susan McClary, James Webster, and Robert Winter.

¹¹ Compare a typical dictum of Carl Dahlhaus: “If one Bach fugue is a tonal reflection of the principle of manufacture, then so is another. The individuality of the entities, which constitutes their very essence, is not within the reach of social decoding, at least at present” (“The Musical Work of Art as a Subject of Sociology,” in Schoenberg and the New Music, trans. Derrick Puffett and Alfred Clayton [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987], p. 236).

¹² Compare Pieter van den Toorn: “The question of an engaging context is an aesthetic as well as an historical and analytic-theoretical one. And once individual works begin to prevail for what they are in and of themselves and not for what they represent, then context itself, as a reflection of this transcendence, becomes less dependent on matters of historical placement. A great variety of contexts can suggest themselves as attention is focused on the works, on the nature of both their immediacy and the relationship that is struck with the contemporary listener” (“Context and Analytical Method in Stravinsky,” in Music, Politics, and the Academy [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995]), p. 196. The impersonal constructions attributing agency to inanimate objects and notions (contexts suggesting themselves, individual works taking hold and prevailing, etc.) are characteristic of this line of thinking, even indispensable to it.

¹³ Ibid., pp. 195-96.

¹⁴ See R. Taruskin, “Stravinsky and the Traditions: Why the Memory Hole?” Opus 3, no. 4 (June 1987): 10-17.

¹⁵ Stravinsky and Craft, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky, p. 15.

¹⁶ Igor Stravinsky, An Autobiography (New York: Norton, 1962), p. 54. The ghostwriter of this book was Walter Nouvel, an old Ballets Russes hand.

¹⁷ Robert Craft, Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship (New York: Knopf, 1972), p. 6.

¹⁸ For the discussion on which the two quoted remarks depend, see Pierre Souvtchinsky, “La notion du temps et la musique,” in the special Stravinsky number of La Revue Musicale, no. 191 (May-June 1939): 70-81; Stravinsky paraphrased it (with due attribution) in his Harvard lectures later that year: see Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons, trans. Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), pp. 38-43.

¹⁹ Wagner coined the term in an 1846 commentary to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, where he wrote that the instrumental recitative in the fourth movement, “already almost breaking the bounds of absolute music, . . . stems the tumult of the other instruments with its virile eloquence.” The absoluteness of absolute music (or, as Dahlhaus paraphrases it, “objectless instrumental music”) lies in its “endless and imprecise expressiveness,” an idea Wagner locates in Ludwig Tieck’s description of symphonic music: “insatiate desire forever hieing forth and turning back into itself.” See Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Roger Lustig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 18.

²⁰ “Quelques Confidences sur la Musique” (1935), reprinted in Eric Walter White, Stravinsky: The Composer and His Works (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), p. 539.

²¹ See Joseph Kerman, Contemplating Music (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 55, 73, 115, 119, 139, 145, 163, 164, 171, 180, 190.

²² Leonid Sabaneyev, “Vesna svyashchennaya,” Golos Moskvï, 8 June 1913; Stravinsky to Maximilian Steinberg, 20 June/3 July 1913, in L. Dyachkova, ed., /. F. Stravinskiy: Stat’i i materialï (Moscow: Sovetskiy kompozitor, 1973), p. 474.

²³ Robert Craft, “The Rite of Spring’: Genesis of a Masterpiece,” in Igor Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring: Sketches 1911-1913 (London: Boosey and Hawkes, 1969), p. xv.

²⁴ Allen Forte, The Harmonic Organization of “The Rite of Spring” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978); François Lesure, comp. and ed., Le Sacre du Printemps: Dossier de Presse (Geneva: Minkoff, 1980); Pieter C. van den Toorn, Stravinsky and “The Rite of Spring” : The Beginnings of a Musical Language (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987); Shelley C. Berg, Le Sacre du printemps: Seven Productions from Nijinsky to Martha Graham (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988).

²⁵ Elliott Antokoletz, Twentieth-Century Music (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1992), p. viii.

²⁶ See R. Taruskin, “Revising Revision,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 46 (1993): 114-38, and “Back to Whom? Neoclassicism as Ideology,” 19th-century Music 16 (1992-93): 286-302.

²⁷ Antokoletz himself, in his specialized work, has made a fundamental contribution toward revealing the stylistic continuity between early twentieth-century “new music” and what came before. See his The Music of Béla Bartók: A Study of Tonality and Progression in Twentieth-Century Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), especially the introductory and concluding chapters (pp. 1-25, 312-28). In this work he has followed on that of George Perle: see, inter alia, the latter’s article “Berg’s Master Array of the Interval Cycles,” Musical Quarterly 63 (1977): 1-30. With particular reference to Stravinsky, see R. Taruskin, “Chernomor to Kashchei: Harmonic Sorcery; or, Stravinsky’s ‘Angle,’“ Journal of the American Musicological Society 38 (1985): 72-142.

²⁸ Michel Georges-Michel, “Les deux Sacres du printemps,” Comoedia (11 December 1920), quoted from Truman C. Bullard, “The First Performance of Igor Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Rochester, 1971), vol. 1, p. 3.

²⁹ Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Expositions and Developments (Garden City, N. Y.: Dou-bleday, 1962), pp. 164, 165.

³⁰ Van den Toorn, Stravinsky and “The Rite of Spring” p. 1.

³¹ Ibid., p. 2.

³² Ibid., p. 7.

³³ As quoted by van den Toorn on p. 18.

³⁴ Ibid., p. 19.

³⁵ Stravinsky and Craft, Expositions and Developments, p. 116 (italics added).

³⁶ “Politics, Feminism, and Music Theory,” Journal of Musicology 9 (1991): 276.

³⁷ Derrick Puffett, letter to the editor, Times Literary Supplement, 20-26 July 1990, p. 775. The provocateur’s response: “I take it that [Puffett] knows the recipes of all the meals he enjoys” (Michael Tanner, letter to the editor, ibid., 27 July-2 August 1990).

³⁸ Letter of 27 July 1932; Arnold Schoenberg, Letters, trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser, ed. Erwin Stein (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), p. 164.

³⁹ Antokoletz, Twentieth-Century Music, p. 94.

⁴⁰ Ibid., p. 96.

⁴¹ Ibid., pp. 95-96. Antokoletz purports here to develop ideas proposed by Pierre Boulez in his article “Stravinsky demeure” (1951), first published in Musique russe, ed. Pierre Souvtchinsky, vol. 1 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953), pp. 151-224, later collected and published in Pierre Boulez, Notes of an Apprenticeship, trans. Herbert Weinstock (New York: Knopf, 1968), pp. 72-145 (in a section entitled, revealingly enough, “Toward a Technology”). Boulez’s parsing, however, is not the same as Antokoletz’s, and is not necessarily subject to the strictures entered herein (see “Stravinsky demeure,” p. 158; Notes of an Apprenticeship, p. 79).

⁴² This ground has been thoroughly gone over with reference to pitch-class set analysis of The Rite. See R. Taruskin, review of Forte, The Harmonic Organization of “The Rite of Spring” in Current Musicology, no. 28 (1979): 114-29, esp. pp. 121-26; Forte, “Pitch-Class Set Analysis Today,” Music Analysis 4 (1985): 29-58, esp. pp. 36-37; and the exchange of letters to the editor in Music Analysis 5 (1986): 313-37.

⁴³ Robert Morgan, Twentieth-Century Music (New York: Norton, 1991), p. 97.

⁴⁴ Similarly, in the seminal article in which the octatonic scale was christened, Arthur Berger infers from a passage in Svadbeka (Les Noces) the as yet unnamed “referential collection of eight pitch classes” that “accounts for it all—with a few exceptions so marginal as scarcely to require mention (some dozen tones, mainly ornamental)” (“Problems of Pitch Organization in Stravinsky” [1963], in Perspectives on Schoenberg and Stravinsky, ed. Benjamin Boretz and Edward T. Cone [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968], p. 132). Since nowhere are criteria stated by which the structural and the ornamental are distinguished, one must conclude that referability to the referential collection is the tacit criterion, one that bends the argument, characteristically, into a circle. The “ornamental” pitches, of course, have since proved “structural” by reference to another analytical template (see the next section of this chapter).

⁴⁵ Morgan, Twentieth-Century Music, p. 97.

⁴⁶ Ibid.

⁴⁷ Arnold Whittall, “Music Analysis as Human Science? Le Sacre du Printemps in Theory and Practice,” Music Analysis 1 (1982): 50.

⁴⁸ “Sed’moy kontsert Kussevitskogo,” Rech’, 14 February 1914.

⁴⁹ Whittall, “Music Analysis as Human Science?” p. 50.

⁵⁰ V. Kofi Agawu, “Does Music Theory Need Musicology?” Current Musicology 53 (1993): 98. The italics in the first sentence are added. Reread the sentence without the italicized words to appreciate the author’s sophistry to the full.

⁵¹ Morgan, Twentieth-Century Music, pp. 95-96.

⁵² Joan Acocella, Lynn Garafola, and Jonnie Greene, “The Rite of Spring Considered as a Nineteenth-Century Ballet,” Ballet Review 20, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 68. Further page references to this source will be made in the text.

⁵³ For a stimulating discussion of this dichotomy (in the light of its formulation by the German sociologist Norbert Elias) and its implications for the historiography of music, see Sanna Peder-son, “On the Task of the Music Historian: The Myth of the Symphony after Beethoven,” repercussions 2, no. 2 (Fall 1993): 5-30. See also Celia Applegate, “What Is German Music? Reflections on the Role of Art in the Creation of a Nation,” German Studies Review (Winter 1992), special issue (“German Identity”), pp. 21-32.

⁵⁴ For an especially pertinent discussion see Vyacheslav Ivanov (representing kul’tura) and Mikhail Gershenzon (representing stikhiya), “A Corner-to-Corner Correspondence” (1920), trans. Gertrude Vakar, in Marc Raeff, ed., Russian Intellectual History: An Anthology (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966), esp. pp. 374-75, 398.

⁵⁵ “Stikhiya i kul’tura,” in A. Blok, Sobraniye sochineniy v shesti tomakh (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Pravda,” 1971), vol. 5, p. 283.

⁵⁶ Jacques Rivière, “Le sacre du printemps,” La Nouvelle revue française, November 1913; quoted from Bullard, “The First Performance of Igor Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps,’“ vol. 3, pp. 271-74.

⁵⁷ Surette, The Birth of Modernism, p. ix.

⁵⁸ Ibid., p. 57.

⁵⁹ On this reconstruction and its sources see Millicent Hodson, “The Fascination Continues: Searching for Nijinsky’s Sacre,” Dance Magazine 54, no. 6 (June 1980): 64-66, 71-75, and “Nijinsky’s New Dance: Rediscovery of Ritual Design in ‘Le Sacre du Printemps’“ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California at Berkeley, 1985), “Nijinsky’s Choreographic Method: Visual Sources from Roerich for Le Sacre du printemps,” Dance Research Journal 18, no. 2 (Winter 1986-87): 7-15, and “Sacre: Searching for Nijinsky’s Chosen One,” Ballet Review 15, no. 3 (Fall 1987): 53-66; Arlene Croce, “Footnotes in the Sands of Time,” New Yorker, 23 November 1987, pp. 140-48; Robert Craft, “The Rite: Counterpoint and Choreography,” Musical Times 129, no. 1742 (April 1988): 171-76 (but also R. Taruskin, letter to the editor, Musical Times 129, no. 1746 [August 1988]: 385).

⁶⁰ And in particular, by Joan Acocella: “Who can say whether ‘Le Sacre du Printemps’ was in fact the great modernist masterpiece that it is now claimed to be? Perhaps it was something more like the shaggy, dull, pseudo-folkloric thing that we saw in the Joffrey Ballet ‘reconstruction.’ Many of those who were disappointed by the Joffrey version simply concluded that its flatness was due to its having been put together from such scrappy evidence—in other words, that it wasn’t really Nijinsky. But who knows?” (“After the Ball Was Over,” New Yorker, 18 May 1992, p. 98).

⁶¹ Louis Vuillemin, “Le Sacre du Printemps,” Comoedia 7, no. 2068 (31 May 1913); quoted from Bullard, “The First Performance of Igor Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps” vol. 1, p. 144.

⁶² Letter of 20 September/3 October 1913; Dyachkova, ed., /. F. Stravinskiy: Stat’i i materialï, pp. 477-78.

⁶³ Cited from Bullard, “The First Performance of Igor Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps” vol. 3, p. 271.

⁶⁴ This observation applies in particular to the “Games” in the first tableau, the “Game of Abduction” (Igra umi’kaniya, called the “Jeu du rapt” in the published score) and the “Game of Cities” (Igra dvukh gorodov, or “Jeu des citées rivales”). They were included in the scenario in response to a single passage in the Kievan Primary Chronicle—see R. Taruskin, “The Rite Revisited: The Idea and the Sources of Its Scenario,” in Music and Civilization: Essays in Honor of Paul Henry Lang, ed. Edmond Strainchamps and Maria Rika Maniates (New York: Norton, 1984), pp. 183-202—and were originally sketched as a unit, with many thematic ideas in common. Later Stravinsky had no hesitation in detaching the “Game of Abduction” from its companion and inserting it in a much earlier position in the score. Not only are the earlier thematic associations obscured but the new placement also disrupts the thematic links that had unified the pair of dances (“Les Augures printaniers” and “Rondes printanières”) between which the “Game of Abduction” now intrudes. Full details in R. Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 951-53.

⁶⁵ Untitled memoir in “Stravinsky: A Composers’ Memorial,” Perspectives of New Music 9, no. 2-10, no. 1 (1971): 3.

⁶⁶ See Friedrich Nietzsche, Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historié fur das Leben (“On the Use and Misuse of History for Life”), in the second volume of Thoughts out of Season (Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen): “Man says ‘I remember,’ and envies the animal that forgets at once, and watches each moment die, disappear in night and mist, and disappear forever. Thus the animal lives unhistorically: it hides nothing and coincides at all moments exactly with that which it is; it is bound to be truthful at all times, unable to be anything else” (Werke, ed. Karl Schlechta, vol. 1 [Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1954], p. 211).

⁶⁷ Carter, untitled memoir, pp. 3-4.

⁶⁸ Ibid., pp. 4-5.

⁶⁹ Robert Moevs, review of The Harmonic Organization of “The Rite of Spring” by Allen Forte, Journal of Music Theory 24 (1980): 103.

⁷⁰ In Boulez, “Stravinsky demeure.”

⁷¹ Cf. the discussion of the three-note “Rite chord,” in Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, pp. 939-48.

⁷² For a lunatic-fringe example of this tendency, see Roman Vlad, “Reihenstrukturen im Sacre du Printemps,” Musik-Konzepte 34-35 (1984): 4-64.

⁷³ See Theodor Weisengrund-Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. A. G. Mitchell and W. V. Blomster (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), pp. 165-67.

⁷⁴ The primary published document here is Stravinsky’s correspondence with B. Schotts Söhne, his German publisher, in I. Stravinsky, Selected Correspondence, ed. Robert Craft, vol. 3 (New York: Knopf, 1985), pp. 217-72. See also my editorially titled article “The Dark Side of Modern Music,” New Republic, 5 September 1988, pp. 28-34, and “Back to Whom?” (cited in n. 26).

⁷⁵ Andrey Levinson, “Russkiy balet v Parizhe,” Rech’, 3 June 1913.

⁷⁶ Quoted from Bullard, “The First Performance of Igor Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps,” vol. 3, pp. 271-72. This passage is of course ironically reminiscent of Stravinsky’s later strictures on musical performance (especially on “execution” as opposed to “interpretation”). See the sixth chapter of Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons.

⁷⁷ Igor Strawinsky, “Ce que j’ai voulu exprimer dans Le Sacre du Printemps,” Montjoie! 29 May 1913, p. 1; reprinted in Lesure, ed., Le Sacre du Printemps: Dossier de Presse, p. 14.

⁷⁸ Samuel Lipman, Music and More: Essays, 1975-1991 (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1992), p. 14.

⁷⁹ See R. Taruskin, “Stravinsky Lite, Even The Rite” New York Times, Arts and Leisure section, 22 December 1991, pp. 29, 36

⁸⁰ Ernest Gellner, “Mind Games,” New Republic, 22 November 1993, p. 38.