Igor Stravinsky Retrospectives and Conclusions

NEW YORK REVIEW: "When you went to Europe, Mr. Stravinsky, we heard that you were intending to go for good."

IS: "For the better anyway. At the time I left Los Angeles, it already seemed too late for a phased withdrawal. The smog was like Mace; but then the air, apart from radioisotopes, must be better anywhere else now, even in a coal mine. A major earthquake was predicted, too, not merely by seismologists but by the religious protection rackets, which were transferring east to pray out the millennium and to await the second option of chiliasm there . . . At about that time, as well, the American Legion opened its campaign against my San Diego neighbor Professor Marcuse, an action I read as a warning to keep my peace about the war or risk being dealt with Chicago-style myself . . . I took the least frequently hijacked run to New York, and then to Zurich."

Igor Stravinsky at eighty-eight is a lean and dragonish filament of a man, small, swift, acerbic, who has with the utmost restraint and greatest reluctance declined the invitation of fate to become the Russian Groucho Marx. His latest conversation book, Retrospectives and Conclusions, is presumably his last, although I suspect he will confound his critics, who have persisted for the last decade in treating him posthumously, by transubstantiating his immortal remains into yet another book, entitled Scances and Exhumations. Stravinsky employs a gleeful and at times parasitic mastery of Americanese to lightly convey his scorn of cultural dipsomania, sentimentality, vulgarity, and mordancy. He despises the orotund, the bucolic, and the self-immolative. His thoughts are not the sorrowful responsory of an embittered or "mightily praisefed" superannuated composer:

Men of my age like to see themselves as the end of culture, and to dramatize themselves as last defenders of true art-in a tone which suggests that their own passing is likely to bring on a winter of Pleistocene duration.

The secret of the man has always been his wit. His sense of humor overcomes the grotesque spectacle of being stranded in Los Angeles, that sub-Fellinian mammalian circus. His wit has also prevented the vegetative decay which afflicts so many old artists. The man who has known and worked with almost every major artist in this country, has lived in Los Angeles with Huxley, Isherwood, Mann, and Schocnberg, and seen all but Isherwood pass away, is essentially a happy spirit.

Stravinsky has never found himself paralyzed by reticence, or embarrassed by garrulity. There is a brisk riot of social opinions, delivered with varying degrees of mockery. He censures the "military version of Manifest Destiny," the "victims of peace scares [stock-market investors]," the punitive assault on drug usage, calls for "an Onassis tax, a tax on tax expatriates, and not-likely-to-get-through-the-eye-of-a-needle-tax." He serves delicious remarks on the moon shot with "our three Astrobards reading Bible poetry to Sabbatarian earthlings," rips into the reptilian dowagers and Saharian financiers who run the orchestras. We hear of a recent concert tour-"a via dolorosa "-which took him (against his will?) to Miami, where "everyone looked like he was fried in butter," and Hawaii, where everyone was addicted to pineapples. He had to bribe a waiter to keep him from dumping the ananas ("the French sounds like a Biblical sin") onto the spaghetti. One of the finest comic moments offers a scenario for the antics of an anonymous conductor, with strong hints that it is "Von Mehta":

It begins with a tableau modeled on the Descent of the Cross. The arms are lifeless, the knees bent, the head (hair artfully mussed) is low, and the whole corpse itself is bathed in perspiration. The first step down from the podium just fails to conceal a totter, but in spite of that the miracle worker somehow manages to reappear forty-six times.

His meticulous, wry ferocity is in full sail in an analysis of Puccini's transoceanic disaster La Fancuilla del West:

The one conspicuous success in the "Fancuilla" is the attempt to make it American-i. e. simple-minded. This is achieved by having the gold miners sing in unison, and by repeating a Grofe-type trot-rhythm to the point of incandescence.

Like a Chekhov character, Stravinsky has "a positive intellect. Can't stand mystics, fantastics, the possessed, lyrical people, bigots." More seriously, he strikes out against the increasing stridency and publicizing of our time, against the mentality which demands that every new work of art be apocalyptically, original, which precludes germinal innovations, and that these doomsday products shatter the benighted with all the force Madison Avenue can summon. Eventually we would need a cathedral to house properly a concert which consisted of one hundred amplifiers tidally shoring up our ruins with the unforgettably moving sound of a single human hair being twisted.

Igor Stravinsky is one of the least bathetic men who has ever lived. He cannot tolerate the placid idiocy and demagogic pollutants of American society. He criticizes, as an American citizen, the corruption of monotone imaginations. He follows an austerely classical sense of art as the discipline of craft. His credo is essentially that of da Vinci: "The only liberty is through discipline." But he is saved from prodigiously sterile, mechanical retrogression by the capriciousness of his intellect.

Like T. S. Eliot, with whom he has a deep affinity, Stravinsky always worked to burn through the opiates and aphrodisiacs which unremittingly encumber clear, precise thought. He reiterates the lesson of all great artists, that vigor comes from continuity, from the regenerative originality which only a sense of history as present in every living moment can nurture. He has been free to pursue his own thought because he has been quick to admit the timeless creativity of Monteverdi, Gesualdo, and Bach. A musical convention is a point of departure rather than a creative surrender. Stravinsky's music has always been imitative in the Aristotelian sense (which is the only sense), and always classical, never "neo-classical." "Neo-classical" is a fruitless neologism, a fetid, indurating bit of synthetic classification which obscures the music as it sustains useless discussion. A work of art, for Stravinsky, is an object to be crafted, expressive of immutable, universal forms, rather than a personal drama of expiation and self-explanation, expressive only of idiosyncrasy. Like all classical artists, he refuses to discuss style. Art must not indulge the consciousness by pandering to its usual experiences and conceptions. It should refine those conceptions, by enlarging the intellect to a higher capacity for complexity and sympathy, through the mental discipline of form.

Since conceptions are structures, the work of art must act upon the intuitive-discursive structures of mind, through its own structures. In literature this process has evolved from the architecture of myth to that of symbol; in music, from the forms of homophony, to sonata, to series. The classical artist does not preoccupy himself with the potentially paralyzing self-conscious effort of contemporancity. All time is present to him at all moments because he sees the world as formal process rather than as an enigmatic cauldron perfused with subjective data. The classical artist's work is to eschew subjectivity in order to illumine in form what changes and does not change in the life of man.

The investing of the musical object with the listener's subjective responses is actually nothing more than a form of the pathetic fallacy.

Music for Stravinsky is speculative volition. The composer controls his art at the level of causality through his choices. This leads Stravinsky to make some forceful remarks on some of the avant-garde habits, particularly the extremes of solipsism and mathematics, as represented by Cage and Xenakis. "I still admit to a need to go from a beginning to an end through related parts."

I still require music, not just sounds; open-ended art does nothing for me, or minimal art, or that glare of publicity and high commerce which calls itself the Underground.

He is equally impatient with computer deism, vomiting forth the new program music in demotic algebra, as with the auto-intoxicating retrograde "modernism" of emotional self-indulgence. He especially abhors the composer-as-publicist, who spins a new notation and broadside for each new work, who strews the years with the wreckage of unperformable, unfashionable breakthroughs. The polemic and evanescence of such music intensely irritates him.

Even while I am talking, the "next" will have become the "former." In short the "no-past" will be a part of the "non-past," except that the past is difficult to deny, the tabula, however looked at, being a long way from rasa.

The non-existence of the past is a necessary hypothesis for those beginning from scratch, but it easily seduces men into the sterile repetition of sensationalist mannerism. To assume the non-existence of the past is to urge the non-existence of the future. It is at this point that Stravinsky's profound sense of vivifying tradition, in which art is created only insofar as it is recreated, emerges passionately. He opposes to the cults, propagandas, and desiccated systematizations of most contemporary music the central classical value of universality, the common dignity of intelligibility.

What, may I ask, has become of the idea of a universality-of a character of expression not necessarily popular, but compelling to the highest imaginations of a decade or so beyond its own time?

Music is being strangled by mechanisms or swirled to pieces by epiphanic happenings. His conclusion is that those who toil most glamorously at self-conscious modernity are those who have the least chance for valuable contribution. Integrity and "modernity," separate from formal exploration, are antagonistic. The past lives in the art which lives. The mainstream flows to Schocnberg and Stravinsky, who are essentially similar in their conception of music, rather than antithetical, as is often assumed. The problem with such composers as Cage and enakis is whether they are belligerent in a healthy manner, whether in their individual attempts at radical changes, they do not really negate innovation, and impose a set of polemical restrictions more arbitrary and impotent than the ones they sought to replace. In his Poctics Stravinsky said, "The danger does not lie in the borrowing of cliches, but in fabricating them, and in bestowing on them the force of law, a tyranny that is merely a manifestation of romanticism grown decrepit." Are we witnessing apocalyptic musical developments, or the destructive machinations of third-rate composers? The artist who delivers us from mannerism and polemic will be an artist who has no need for them. And all the schools, foundations, cults, and mysticisms in the world cannot create, liberate, support, or influence him. For Stravinsky the most perfect art is the most perfectly made. He emphasizes the fact that true Liberality of thought is not liberal, but visionary, in regard to both past and future. For the classical composer, the visionary is the formalist.

Stravinsky's music is characterized by clarity, precision, ruthless concision, wild energy, and gaiety-Eliot's magical condition of complete simplicity. His musical sentences are always composed of complete units, which is why he manipulates prosody by syllable rather than word. He abhors sostenuto music, prefers staccato, the breaks of breath, which render every particle of every line crystalline. He does not admit superfluous notes, dynamic nourishes, believing that "gratuitous excess spoils every substance, every form that it touches." He is most traditional, and most original, in his use of severely-delineated polyphony, rhythm, text, and articulation. Stravinsky has always demanded austere linear counterpoint, a practice which recalls Mahler's dictum that "All music is counterpoint."

He is often accused of emotional aridity, a charge which is beneath contempt. One has only to listen to Persephone, the slow movement of the Piano Concerto, Apollo, Orphcus, or the lullaby of The Rake's Progress. But every bar of his music is lyrical in the highest sense, that of selfless restraint. Chekhov, a similar artist in this and other respects, once wrote to a friend, "The more sensitive the matter in hand, the more calmly one should describe it-and the more touching it will be at last." Stravinsky has composed in the belief that feeling is deepest when least pitiable. "Pleasure in composing, like love, is the waste product of creation."

His music is among the least eviscerate ever written. It is not a subject for words. "Composers combine notes. That is all. How and in what form the things of this world are impressed upon their music is not for them to say." Never has an artist worked so steadily in the austere yet cheerful light of self-scrutiny, with homage to the past, and concern for the future, without servility, repetition, or arrogance. Each composition is a new problem to be solved as well as possible, a new palimpsest of feeling to be disciplined into resonant order. Eliot's lines are absolutely applicable:

And so each venture

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

With shabby equipment always deteriorating

In the general mess of imprecision of feeling . . .

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost

And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions

That seem unpropitious.

Igor Stravinsky despises commentary on himself, which is a final vindication of remarkable sanity. His greatness rests in his classic, harmonious balance of intellect and heart, never false to his craft, his faith. His life and art are a testament to the fecund sanity of stern, uncompromising intellectual hostility toward the world in the creation of beauty. His definition of the intellectual stresses the constructive moral power of analytical discipline and exploration:

Every man who outside of his own job shares a conception of the world, has aconscious line of moral conduct, and so contributes toward maintaining, or changing that conception and encouraging new modes of thought.

Petrospectvies and Conclusions is not a book of self-advertisements, but a precious and noble statement of principle by as great a musician as has ever lived. Those principles come to light most movingly in two brief remarks. "One hopes to worship God with a little art, if one has any. "Then, in a moment of high sobriety and historical cognizance.

"Now will new rules arise through revolution," chants the chorus in a stasimon from the Eumenides.

In all of his very greatest works- Petrouchka. Le Sacre du Printemps, Les Noces, Pulcinella. Apollo, Symphony of Psalins, the Mass, and the incomparable, Igon-Igor Stravinsky never yielded to the "luxurious gloom of choice" which has afflicted so many artists of this century. He pulls the mind of man above itself by the renovation of new rules. In this last book he laughs life into lucidity, he laughs the world into health. It is now an old man's laughter, pungent, compassionate, never self-serving.

Stravinsky is a man of sinewy sagacity, a man who dedicates his monumental energies to the service of humanity through the articulation of art made in scorn of the emotionalism which is the inspiration of lesser artists, in scorn of everything except a sense of truth willed to later men in perfect works. His music is written in humble recompense to God. To create music is to recreate oneself and perhaps, to bring some beauty of order into the world. The harmony of the individual sou? will be the harmony of the earth, and art is the only way. "Myself I must remake, says Yeats's poem, and so must we all."