Strawinsky

The new steel organs of man have begotten their music in "Le Sacre du

printemps." For with Strawinsky, the rhythms of machinery enter musical

art. With this his magistral work a new chapter of music commences, the

spiritualization of the new body of man is manifest. Through Debussy,

music had liquified, become opalescent and impalpable and fluent. It had

become, because of his sense, his generation's sense, of the infirmity

of things, a sort of symbol of the eternal flux, the eternal

momentariness. It had come to body forth all that merges and changes and

disappears, to mirror the incessant departures and evanescences of life,

to shape itself upon the infinitely subtle play of light, the restless,

heaving, foaming surface of the sea, the impalpable racks of perfume,

upon gusts of wind and fading sounds, upon all the ephemeral wonder of

the world. But through Strawinsky, there has come to be a music

stylistically well-nigh the reverse of that of the impressionists.

Through him, music has become again cubical, lapidary, massive,

mechanistic. Scintillation is gone out of it. The delicate, sinuous

melodic line, the glamorous sheeny harmonies, are gone out of it. The

elegance of Debussy, the golden sensuality, the quiet, classic touch,

are flown. Instead, there are come to be great, weighty, metallic

masses, molten piles and sheets of steel and iron, shining adamantine

bulks. Contours are become grim, severe, angular. Melodies are sharp,

rigid, asymmetrical. Chords are uncouth, square clusters of notes, stout

and solid as the pillars that support roofs, heavy as the thuds of

triphammers. Above all, there is rhythm, rhythm rectangular and sheer

and emphatic, rhythm that lunges and beats and reiterates and dances

with all the steely perfect tirelessness of the machine, shoots out and

draws back, shoots upward and shoots down, with the inhuman motion of

titanic arms of steel. Indeed, the change is as radical, as complete, as

though in the midst of moonlit noble gardens a giant machine had arisen

swiftly from the ground and inundated the night with electrical glare

and set its metal thews and organs and joints relentlessly whirring,

relentlessly functioning.

And yet, the two styles, Debussy's and Strawinsky's, are related.

Indeed, they are complementary. They are the reactions to the same

stimulus of two fundamentally different types of mind. No doubt, between

the two men there exist differences besides those of their general

fashions of thinking. The temper of Debussy was profoundly sensuous and

aristocratic and contained. That of Strawinsky is nervous and ironic and

violent. The one man issued from an unbroken tradition, was produced by

generations and generations of gentlemen. The other is one of those

beings who seem to have been called into existence solely by the modern

way of life, by express trains and ocean greyhounds, by the shrinkage of

continents and the vibration of the twentieth-century world. But the

chief difference, the difference that made "Le Sacre du printemps"

almost antithetical to "Pelléas et Mélisande," is essentially the

divergence between two cardinal manners of apprehending life. Debussy,

on the one hand, seems to be of the sort of men in whom the center of

conscience is, figuratively, sunken; one of those who have within

themselves some immobility that makes the people and the things about

them appear fleeting and unreal. For such, the world is a far distant

thing, lying out on the rims of consciousness, delicate and impermanent

as sunset hues or the lights and gestures of the dream. The music of

Debussy is the magistral and classic picture of this distant and

glamorous procession, this illusory and fantastical and transparent

show, this thing that changes from moment to moment and is never twice

the same, and flows away from us so quickly. But Strawinsky, on the

other hand, is in the very midst of the thing so distant from the other

man. For him, the material world is very real, sharp, immediate. He

loves it, enjoys it, is excited by its many forms. He is vividly

responsive to its traffic. Things make an immediate and biting

impression on him, stimulate in him pleasure and pain. He feels their

edge and knows it hard, feels their weight and knows it heavy, feels

their motion in all its violence. There is in Strawinsky an almost

frenetic delight in the processes that go on about him. He goes through

the crowded thoroughfares, through cluttered places, through factories,

hotels, wharves, sits in railway trains, and the glare and tumult and

pulsation, the engines and locomotives and cranes, the whole mad

phantasmagoria of the modern city, evoke images in him, inflame him to

reproduce them in all their weight and gianthood and mass, their

blackness and luridness and power. The most vulgar things and events

excite him. The traffic, the restlessness of crowds, the noise of

vehicles, of the clatter of horses on the asphalt, of human cries and

calls sounding above the street-bass, a couple of organ grinders trying

to outplay each other, a brass band coming down the avenue, the thunder

of a railway train hurling itself over leagues of steel, the sirens of

steamboats and locomotives, the overtones of factory whistles, the roar

of cities and harbors, become music to him. In one of his early

orchestral sketches, he imitates the buzzing of a hive of bees. One of

his miniatures for string-quartet bangs with the beat of the wooden

shoes of peasants dancing to the snarling tones of a bagpipe. Another

reproduces the droning of the priest in a little chapel, recreates the

scene almost cruelly. And the score of "Petruchka" is alive marvelously

with the rank, garish life of a cheap fair. Its bubbling flutes,

seething instrumental caldron, concertina-rhythms and bright, gaudy

colors conjure up the movement of the crowds that surge about the

amusement booths, paint to the life the little flying flags, the

gestures of the showmen, the bright balloons, the shooting-galleries,

the gipsy tents, the crudely stained canvas walls, the groups of

coachmen and servant girls and children in their holiday finery. At

moments one can even smell the sausages frying.

For Strawinsky is one of those composers, found scattered all along the

pathway of his art, who augment the expressiveness of music through

direct imitation of nature. His imagination seems to be free, bound in

nowise by what other men have adjudged music to be, and by what their

practice has made it seem. He comes to his art without prejudice or

preconception of any kind, it appears. He plays with its elements as

capriciously as the child plays with paper and crayons. He amuses

himself with each instrument of the band careless of its customary uses.

There are times when Strawinsky comes into the solemn conclave of

musicians like a gamin with trumpet and drum. He disports himself with

the infinitely dignified string-quartet, makes it do light and acrobatic

things. There is one interlude of "Petruchka" that is written for

snare-drums alone. His work is incrusted with cheap waltzes and

barrel-organ tunes. It is gamy and racy in style; full of musical

slang. He makes the orchestra imitate the quavering of an old

hurdy-gurdy. Of late he has written a ballet for eight clowns. And he is

reported to have said, "I should like to bring it about that music be

performed in street-cars, while people get out and get in." For he finds

his greatest enemy in the concert-room, that rut that limits the play of

the imagination of audiences, that fortress in which all of the

intentions of the men of the past have established themselves, and from

which they dominate the musical present. The concert-room has succeeded

in making music a drug, a sedative, has created a "musical attitude" in

folk that is false, and robbed musical art of its power. For Strawinsky

music is either an infection, the communication of a lyrical impulse, or

nothing at all. And so he would have it performed in ordinary places of

congregation, at fairs, in taverns, music-halls, street-cars, if you

will, in order to enable it to function freely once again. His art is

pointed to quicken, to infect, to begin an action that the listener must

complete within himself. It is a sort of musical shorthand. On paper, it

has a fragmentary look. It is as though Strawinsky had sought to reduce

the elements of music to their sharpest and simplest terms, had hoped

that the "development" would be made by the audience. He seems to feel

that if he cannot achieve his end, the communication of his lyrical

impulse, with a single strong _motif_, a single strong movement of

tones, a single rhythmic start, he cannot achieve it at all. So we find

him writing songs, the three Japanese lyrics, for instance, that are

epigrammatic in their brevity; a piece for string-quartet that is played

in fifty seconds; a three-act opera that can be performed in thirty

minutes.

But it is no experiment in form that he is making. He seems to bring

into music some of the power of the Chinese artists who, in the painting

of a twig, or of a pair of blossoms, represent the entire springtide. He

has written some of the freshest, most rippling, delicate music.

Scarcely a living man has written more freshly or humorously. April, the

flowering branches, the snowing petals, the clouds high in the blue, are

really in the shrilling little orchestra of the Japanese lyrics, in the

green, gurgling flutes and watery violins. None of the innumerable

Spring Symphonies, Spring Overtures, Spring Songs, are really more

vernal, more soaked in the gentle sunshine of spring, are more really

the seed-time, than the six naïve piping measures of melody that

introduce the figure of the "Sacre" entitled "Rondes printanières." No

doubt, in venturing to write music so bold and original in esthetic,

Strawinsky was encouraged by the example of another musician, another

Russian composer. Moussorgsky, before him, had trusted in his own

innocence instead of in the wisdom of the fathers of the musical church,

had dared obey the promptings of his own blood and set down chords,

melodies, rhythms, just as they sang in his skull, though all the world

rise up to damn him. But the penning of music as jagged, cubical,

barbarous as the prelude to the third act of Strawinsky's little opera,

"The Nightingale," or as naked, uncouth, rectangular, rocklike,

polyharmonic, headlong, as some of that of "Le Sacre du printemps"

required no less perfect a conviction, no less great a self-reliance.

The music of Strawinsky is the expression of an innocence comparable

indeed to that of his great predecessor. "Le Sacre du printemps" is what

its composer termed it. It is "an act of faith."

And so, free of preconceptions, Strawinsky was able to let nature move

him to imitation. Just as Picasso brings twentieth-century nature into

his still lives, so the young composer brings it into his music. It is

the rhythm of machinery that has set Strawinsky the artist free. All his

life he has been conscious of these steel men. Mechanical things have

influenced his art from the beginning. It is as though machinery had

revealed him to himself, as though sight of the functioning of these

metal organisms, themselves but the extension of human bones and muscles

and organs, had awakened into play the engine that is his proper body.

For, as James Oppenheim has put it in the introduction to "The Book of

Self," "Man's body is just as large as his tools, for a tool is merely

an extension of muscle and bone; a wheel is a swifter foot, a derrick a

greater hand. Consequently, in the early part of the century, the race

found itself with a new gigantic body." It is as though the infection of

the dancing, lunging, pumping piston-rods, walking beams, drills, has

awakened out of Strawinsky a response and given him his power to beat

out rhythm. The machine has always fascinated him. One of his first

original compositions, written while he was yet a pupil of

Rimsky-Korsakoff's, imitates fireworks, distinguishes what is human in

their activity, in the popping, hissing, exploding, in the hysterical

weeping of the fiery fountains, the proud exhibitions and sudden

collapses of the pin-wheels. It is the machine, enemy of man, that is

pictured by "The Nightingale," that curious work of which one act dates

from 1909, and two from 1914. Strawinsky had the libretto formed on the

tale of Hans Christian Andersen which recounts the adventures of the

little brown bird that sings so beautifully that the Emperor of China

bids it to his court. Strawinsky's nightingale, too, comes to the palace

and sings, and all the ladies of the entourage fill their mouths with

water in the hopes of better imitating the warbling of the songster. But

then there enter envoys bearing the gift of the Emperor of Japan, a

mechanical nightingale that amuses the court with its clockwork antics.

Once more the emperor commands the woodland bird to sing. But it is

flown. In his rage the emperor banishes it from his realm. Then Death

comes and sits at the emperor's bedside, and steals from him crown and

scepter, till, of a sudden, the Nightingale returns, and sings, and

makes Death relinquish his spoils. And the courtiers who come into the

imperial bedchamber expecting to find the monarch dead, find him well

and glad in the morning sunshine.

And in his two major works, "Petruchka" and "Le Sacre du printemps,"

Strawinsky makes the machine represent his own person. For the actions

of machinery woke first in the human organism, and Strawinsky

intensifies consciousness of the body by referring these motions to

their origin. "Petruchka" is the man-machine seen from without, seen

unsympathetically, in its comic aspect. Countless poets before

Strawinsky have attempted to portray the puppet-like activities of the

human being, and "Petruchka" is but one of the recent of innumerable

stage-shows that expose the automaton in the human soul. But the

puppet-show of Strawinsky is singular because of its musical

accompaniment. For more than even the mimes on the stage, the orchestra

is full of the spirit of the automaton. The angular, wooden gestures of

the dolls, their smudged faces, their entrails of sawdust, are in the

music ten times as intensely as they are upon the stage. In the score of

"Petruchka" music itself has become a little mannikin in parti-colored

clothes, at which Strawinsky gazes and laughs as a child laughs at a

funny doll, and makes dance and tosses in the air, and sends sprawling.

The score is full of the revolutions of wheels, of delicate clockwork

movements, of screws and turbines. Beneath the music one hears always

the regular, insistent, maniacal breathing of a concertina. And what in

it is not purely mechanistic nevertheless completes the picture of the

world as it appears to one who has seen the man-machine in all its

comedy. The stage pictures, the trumpery little fair, the tinsel and

pathetic finery of the crowds, the dancing of the human ephemeridæ a

moment before the snow begins to fall, are stained marvelously deeply by

the music. The score has the colors of crudely dyed, faded bunting. It

has indeed a servant girl grace, a coachman ardor, a barrel-organ,

tintype, popcorn, fortune-teller flavor.

"Le Sacre," on the other hand, is the man-machine viewed not from

without, and unsympathetically, but from within. So far, it is

Strawinsky's masterwork, the completest and purest expression of his

genius. For the elements that make for the originality of style of

"Petruchka" and the other of Strawinsky's representative compositions,

in this work attain a signal largeness and powerfulness. The rhythmic

element, already fresh and free in the scherzo of "L'Oiseau de feu" and

throughout "Petruchka," attains virile and magistral might in it, surges

and thunders with giant vigor. The instrumentation, magical with all

the magic of the Russian masters in the earlier ballets, here is

informed by the sharpness, hardness, nakedness which is originally

Strawinsky's. Besides, the latter work has the thing hitherto lacking

somewhat in the young man's art--grandeur and severity and ironness of

language. In it he stands completely new, completely in possession of

his powers. And in it the machine operates. Ostensibly, the action of

the ballet is laid in prehistoric times. Ostensibly, it figures the

ritual with which a tribe of stone-age Russians consecrated the spring.

Something of the sort was necessary, for an actual representation of

machines, a ballet of machines, would not have been as grimly

significant as the angular, uncouth gestures of men, would by no means

have as nakedly revealed the human engine. Here, in the choreography,

every fluid, supple, curving motion is suppressed. Everything is

angular, cubical, rectilinear. The music pounds with the rhythm of

engines, whirls and spirals like screws and fly-wheels, grinds and

shrieks like laboring metal. The orchestra is transmuted to steel. Each

movement of the ballet correlates the rhythms of machinery with the

human rhythms which they prolong and repeat. A dozen mills pulsate at

once. Steam escapes; exhausts breathe heavily. The weird orchestral

introduction to the second scene has all the oppressive silence of

machines immobile at night. And in the hurtling finale the music and the

dancers create figure that is at once the piston and a sexual action.

For Strawinsky has stripped away from man all that with which

specialization, differentiation, have covered him, and revealed him

again, in a sort of cruel white light, a few functioning organs. He has

shown him a machine to which power is applied, and which labors in blind

obedience precisely like the microscopic animal that eats and parturates

and dies. The spring comes; and life replenishes itself; and man, like

seed and germ, obeys the promptings of the blind power that created him,

and accomplishes his predestined course and takes in energy and pours it

out again. But, for a moment, in "Le Sacre du printemps," we feel the

motor forces, watch the naked wheels and levers and arms at work, see

the dynamo itself.

The ballet was completed in 1913, the year Strawinsky was thirty-one

years old. It may be that the work will be succeeded by others even more

original, more powerful. Or it may be that Strawinsky has already

written his masterpiece. The works that he has composed during the war

are not, it appears, strictly new developments. Whatever enlargement of

the field of the string quartet the three little pieces which the

Flonzaleys played here in 1915 created, there is no doubt that it was

nothing at all to compare with the innovation in orchestral music

created by the great ballet. And, according to rumor, the newest of

Strawinsky's work, the music-hall ballet for eight clowns, and the work

for the orchestra, ballet and chorus entitled "Les Noces villageoises,"

are by no means as bold in style as "Le Sacre," and resemble "Petruchka"

more than the later ballet. But, whatever Strawinsky's future

accomplishment, there can be no doubt that with this one work, if not

also with "Petruchka," he has secured a place among the true musicians.

It is doubtful whether any living composer has opened new musical land

more widely than he. For he has not only minted music anew. He has

reached a point ahead of us that the world would have reached without

him. That alone shows him the genius. He has brought into music

something for which we had long been waiting, and which we knew must one

day arrive. To us, at this moment, "Le Sacre du printemps" appears one

of those compositions that mark off the musical miles.