Word: riting
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Polka for Jumbo. Yet all his life Igor Stravinsky has written music, sometimes great music, to order-for people who would hire him on his terms. The Firebird, Petrouchka and The Rite of Spring, Stravinsky's best ballet scores, were commissioned. He has composed a polka for elephants for the Ringling Brothers, a Scherzo á la Russe for Paul Whiteman, Ballet Scenes for Billy Rose, an Ebony Concerto for Woody Herman and his jazzband. Scherzo á la Russe was written to fit one side of a Whiteman record (says Stravinsky: "He played it very badly. He has a very...
Bebop to Ballet. At 66, Igor Feodorovich Stravinsky, if not the greatest living composer, is certainly the most influential. Since the violent rhythms, brutal harmonies and splashing tone colors of Firebird, Petrouchka and Rite of Spring first exploded on an astonished-and unprepared -world 35 years ago, Stravinsky has been imitated, consciously or unconsciously, by composers from bebop to ballet, from Russia to the redwoods...
Dissonance & Debt. In Firebird, Stravinsky had hinted at strange rhythmic innovations-accents that lurched and stuttered. In Petrouchka, he had chords embracing chords that were not even kissing cousins. In Rite of Spring, he had gone a greater distance in dissonance, and pounded the sounds home with all the drums the pit could hold...
...Curve in the Road. Then, a few years after The Rite of Spring, Stravinsky began to change his whole style. What had been warm and violent became-from about 1920 on-cold, classical, clear, calculated. Why? Today Stravinsky shrugs: "Who knows what causes change? You never see the change when you are driving along. A little curve in the road and suddenly you are proceeding east, another and you head north. One is unaware...
Stravinsky says that he "willed The Rite of Spring to be romantic" and that he has willed just about everything since to be severe and dry, a kind of music he regards as "more mature." In the years since The Rite, Stravinsky has turned out some 60 works, including The Wedding which is virtually a textbook today in some music classes; a remarkable oratorio, Oedipus Rex; The Soldier's Tale, Symphonies for Wind Instruments, Symphony in Three Movements, a Violin Concerto. All are as precisely and beautifully made as a fine watch-and, say his critics, most are about...