Stravinsky and the Russian Period: Sound and Legacy of a Musical Idiom

Pieter C. van den Toorn · John McGinness

may 2012 · Cambridge University Press

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Van den Toorn and McGinness take a fresh look at the dynamics of Stravinsky's musical style from a variety of analytical, critical and aesthetic angles. Starting with processes of juxtaposition and stratification, the book offers an in-depth analysis of works such as The Rite of Spring, Les Noces and Renard. Characteristic features of style, melody and harmony are traced to rhythmic forces, including those of metrical displacement. Along with Stravinsky's formalist aesthetics, the strict performing style he favoured is also traced to rhythmic factors, thus reversing the direction of the traditional causal relationship. Here, aesthetic belief and performance practice are seen as flowing directly from the musical invention. The book provides a counter-argument to the criticism and aesthetics of T. W. Adorno and Richard Taruskin, and will appeal to composers, critics and performers as well as scholars of Stravinsky's music.

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Pieter C. van den Toorn is Professor of Music at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of The Music of Igor Stravinsky (1983), Stravinsky and The Rite of Spring (1987) and Music, Politics, and the Academy (1995). Stravinsky and The Rite of Spring won the Deems Taylor Award (1989) and the Outstanding Publication Award of the Society for Music Theory (1990).

John McGinness is an Associate Professor of Music Theory at the Crane School of Music, State University of New York, Potsdam. His essays and articles on topics including the music of Debussy, Stravinsky and Ives have appeared in Musical Quarterly, Music Theory Spectrum and Cahiers Debussy, among other publications. As a pianist specializing in contemporary music, he has premiered over twenty-five new works and has recorded for CRS and Radio Nederland.