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A Serial Passage of Diatonic Ancestry in Stravinsky's The Flood

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Lynne Rogers
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Abstract

When Stravinsky composed The Flood in 1961–2, he was already an experienced practitioner of serialism. It is undeniably noteworthy, then, that compositional documents for the work include two diatonic sketches, presumably the earliest versions of a passage from the Prelude. Later serial versions of the passage, which differ significantly from the diatonic sketches, nonetheless retain numerous important features introduced at that initial stage. The existence of the diatonic sketches suggests that even late in his career, Stravinsky harboured diatonic and tonal impulses. Taking into account the audible results of these impulses will contribute substantially to an understanding of his last works.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 129 , Issue 2 , 2004 , pp. 220 - 239
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Musical Association (2004)

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References

Earlier versions of this article were presented at colloquia of the Paul Sacher Foundation (Basle, April 1999) and the University of Colorado-Boulder (December 2000), at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Music Theory (Philadelphia, November 2001) and at the University of British Columbia Stravinsky Symposium (Vancouver, April 2002). Generous financial support for the research that resulted in this article was provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Oberlin College and the Paul Sacher Foundation. I wish to thank Profs. Poundie Burstein, David H. Smyth and Joseph N. Straus, and the anonymous reviewers for this journal, for their excellent advice regarding revisions. I am grateful to the Sacher Foundation, where the Igor Stravinsky Collection is preserved, for access to that collection in January–April 1999, for the assistance of its exceptionally helpful and knowledgeable staff, and for permission to include in this article transcriptions and a reproduction of sketches for The Flood.Google Scholar

1 The earliest date found on any working materials for The Flood is 1 or 7 February 1961 (notation of the day is ambiguous), which appears on a sketch leaf for the opening bars (Paul Sacher Foundation microfilm 218, frame 0007). The autograph clean copy of the full score is dated 14 March 1962 (218–0176).Google Scholar

2 For the fascinating story behind Stravinsky's composition of a work for television, see Joseph, Charles, Stravinsky Inside Out (New Haven, 2001), 132–61.Google Scholar

3 For Stravinsky's explanation of his representation of Chaos, see Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Expositions and Developments (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1981), 124.Google Scholar

4 Except for substituting the more conventional ‘P’ for Stravinsky's ‘O’ to denote the prime form, I have labelled row forms in The Flood in accordance with Stravinsky's row charts. His P0 does not appear until bars 68–9. On his sketch of bar 6 (218–0008), Stravinsky writes the labels ‘O’ and ‘R’ along with the statement ‘Transposition in a 5th’. Stravinsky's labels for row forms are discussed in David Smyth, ‘Stravinsky as Serialist: The Sketches for Threni’, Music Theory Spectrum, 22 (2000), 205–24 (p. 211); and Susannah Tucker, ‘Stravinsky and his Sketches: The Composing of Agon and Other Serial Works of the 1950s’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Oxford University, 1992), i, 120–2.Google Scholar

5 Basses do not participate in the chorus; rather, two solo basses are reserved for the voice of God.Google Scholar

6 Although compositional materials for The Flood include charts of transposed hexachordal rotations, they do not include charts or matrices containing a systematic arrangement of all possible transformations (transpositions, inversions, retrogrades and retrograde inversions) of the entire 12-note row. Instead, sketches show that Stravinsky derived each such transformation individually as needed. Stravinsky's derivation of R10 appears on a sketch leaf in the Igor Stravinsky Collection of the Paul Sacher Foundation (218–0003).Google Scholar

7 Stravinsky's habit of composing at the piano is documented by, among others, Samuel Dushkin, ‘Working with Stravinsky’, Igor Stravinsky, ed. Edward Corle (New York, 1949), 179–92 (p. 184); Nicolas Nabokoff, ‘Christmas with Stravinsky’, ibid., 123–68 (p. 146); and Robert Craft in Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Dialogues (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1982), 14. Numerous statements attributed to the composer support these accounts (see, for example, Igor Stravinsky, An Autobiography, New York, 1962, 5, 82; and Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1980, 15); however, it should be noted that some scholars have recently questioned the veracity of assertions in the conversation books and in writings bearing the composer's byline. For further discussion of Stravinsky's use of the keyboard to compose, see Joseph, Stravinsky Inside Out, 80, 280–1n.; Lynne Rogers, ‘Rethinking Form: Stravinsky's Eleventh-Hour Revision of the Third Movement of his Violin Concerto’, Journal of Musicology, 17 (1999), 272–303 (p. 275); Joseph Straus, Stravinsky's Late Music (Cambridge, 2001), 42–3, 48–9; Tucker, ‘Stravinsky and his Sketches’, i, 23–7; Pieter van den Toorn, The Music of Igor Stravinsky (New Haven, 1983), 211; idem, Stravinsky and ‘The Rite of Spring’: The Beginnings of a Musical Language (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1987), 34, 37; and Stephen Walsh, Stravinsky: A Creative Spring (New York, 1999), 27, 414.Google Scholar

8 See Tucker, ‘Stravinsky and his Sketches’, i, for discussion of dating and compositional order in Stravinsky's sketch materials for the serial music (pp. 30–1, 34) and for his habit of composing on individual scraps of paper (pp. 27–8).Google Scholar

9 The role of the will be discussed shortly.Google Scholar

10 Margarita Mazo, interview with the author, Columbus, Ohio, 21 June 1999.Google Scholar

11 Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works through ‘Mavra‘ (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1996), ii, 1486–93.Google Scholar

12 For giving so generously of their expertise in the area of Russian chant, I am grateful to Prof. Mazo, Ohio State University; Prof. Rosemary Dubowchik, Southern Connecticut State University; Michael Malloy, Ohio State University; Prof. Kurt Sander, Indiana University Southeast; and Dr Nicolas Schidlovsky, Westminster Choir College.Google Scholar

13 Stravinsky's interest in early Western music has been noted by Robert Craft, Present Perspectives: Critical Writings (New York, 1984), 311; Joseph, Stravinsky Inside Out, 251–2; Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, ii, 1623; Tucker, ‘Stravinsky and his Sketches’, i, 137; van den Toorn, The Music of Igor Stravinsky, 382–3; and Glenn Watkins, ‘The Canon and Stravinsky's Late Style’, Confronting Stravinsky: Man Musician, and Modernist, ed. Jann Pasler (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1986), 217–46 (pp. 227, 229, 234–5).Google Scholar

14 See, for example, letters written in 1947 to Ralph Hawkes and in 1954 and 1955 to Edgar Bielefeldt in Robert Craft, Stravinsky: Selected Correspondence (New York, 1985), iii, 319, 382, 393.Google Scholar

15 Using numerals indicating semitones from a starting point (0), the terms (0,2,5) and (0,2,7) represent the most compact arrangements of two types of trichord, a pitch-class set containing three different pitch classes. In (0,2,5), then, the second and third pitch classes are two and five semitones from 0 respectively, while in (0,2,7) the second and third pitch classes are two and seven semitones from 0 respectively. Since both (0,2,5) and (0,2,7) are subsets of the major scale and its rotations, they are sometimes referred to as ‘diatonic’ trichords.Google Scholar

16 I wish to thank Prof. Pieter van den Toorn for his helpful observations regarding (0,2,5) trichords and Stravinsky's Russian music.Google Scholar

17 Since there is only one dated leaf among those on which work for bars 1–15 appears, a chronology for these bars cannot be established firmly. Thus, it is possible that the diatonic sketches actually predate the creation of bar 6, or even of The Flood's row, and that the compositional influence flowed from – and not to – the sketch. With regard to the possibility that the diatonic sketches may predate the work's row, David Smyth ('Stravinsky at the Threshold: A Sketch Leaf for Canticum sacrum’, Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung, 10 (1997), 21–6; and ‘Stravinsky as Serialist’, 206–11) and Joseph Straus (Stravinsky's Late Music, 47–54) show for several of Stravinsky's other serial works that composition began with a melodic idea which, after a series of transformations, emerged as a work's row. Working materials for The Flood do not document the genesis of its row; nonetheless, pitches and intervallic patterns shared by P0 (C#, B, C, F#, D#, F, E, D, A#, A, G, G#) and the top line of the diatonic sketch suggest that a scenario in which the sketch is compositionally prior must at least be considered.Google Scholar

18 I wish to thank Prof. John Roeder, University of British Columbia, for pointing out this inversional relationship.Google Scholar

19 For references to ‘Landini figures’ in Cantata, see Christoph Neidhöfer, ‘An Approach to Interrelating Counterpoint and Serialism in the Music of Igor Stravinsky, Focusing on the Principal Diatonic Works of his Transitional Period’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1999), 86; and in Canticum sacrum, see Wolterink, Charles Paul, ‘Harmonic Structure and Organization in the Early Serial Works of Igor Stravinsky, 1952–57‘ (Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1978), 191.Google Scholar

20 An interval class (abbreviated ‘ic‘) is a class or category of intervals that are related by inversion and differ by one or more octaves. An ic is represented by the number of semitones, ranging from one to six, encompassed by the smallest interval in the class.Google Scholar

21 The omission of the ‘m’ from ‘confitemur’ was Stravinsky's.Google Scholar

22 Wolterink, ‘Harmonic Structure and Organization’, 91, comments on the preponderance of ics 1 and 2 between adjacent pcs in Stravinsky's rows.Google Scholar

23 Stravinsky describes the habit of oscillation as ‘a recurring stutter in my musical speech’ in Igor Stravinsky, Themes and Conclusions (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1982), 61. For discussion of oscillation in relation to Stravinsky's serial music, see Straus, Stravinsky's Late Music, 90, 228–31; Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, ii, 1650; and van den Toorn, The Music of Igor Stravinsky, 439–40.Google Scholar

24 Stravinsky and Craft, Expositions and Developments, 124.Google Scholar

25 For further discussion of The Flood's opening sonority, see Smyth, David, ‘Stravinsky's Second Crisis: Reading the Early Serial Sketches’, Perspectives of New Music, 37/2 (1999), 117–46 (pp. 140–1); Straus, Stravinsky's Late Music, 228; and Wolterink, ‘Harmonic Structure and Organization’, 56–61. In addition, above the score on p. 1 of the short score for the work, Stravinsky notated other representations of the derivation of the opening chords. A reproduction of a portion of this page is shown in Straus, Stravinsky's Late Music, 229. A facsimile of the entire page is reproduced in Strawinsky: Sein Nachlass, sein Bild, ed. Hans Jörg Jans and Christian Geelhaar (Basle, 1984), 172.Google Scholar

26 Also of note with regard to this relationship is the F#/C# fifth that is literally the centre of the opening chord – and Example 5 – and centric in the diatonic sketch.Google Scholar

27 Since empty space at the bottom of piece A covers staff 3 on piece B, Stravinsky's vertical lines connect the two notes at the end of staff 2 directly to the three notes on staff 4.Google Scholar

28 Stravinsky's short scores contain all parts at pitch, with instrumentation marked. On each page, staves are drawn only as needed. Two or more instruments may share a staff. Stravinsky occasionally included analytical markings. Evidence indicates that Stravinsky's notation of a section or movement in short-score format signified that he considered composition of that portion to be complete. For discussion of the significance of the short score as a stage in Stravinsky's compositional process, see Rogers, ‘Rethinking Form’, 280n., and Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, i, 173.Google Scholar

29 Stravinsky and Craft, Dialogues, 72.Google Scholar

30 Smyth, ‘Stravinsky's Second Crisis’, 126, finds a similar situation in the composition of Agon's ‘Triple Pas-de-Quatre Coda’, in which Stravinsky used only those transformations of a hexachord that preserved particular boundary dyads.Google Scholar

31 does not appear until the fourth and final serial sketch, the first in which altos and tenors complete their row forms. In its first appearance, E appears in its ultimate register (e′) as a quaver in both parts simultaneously.Google Scholar

32 Neidhöfer, ‘An Approach to Interrelating Counterpoint and Serialism’, passim, discusses Stravinsky's use of parallel voice-leading in neoclassical and early serial compositions.Google Scholar

33 For discussion of examples of Stravinsky's serial music incorporating ic 5, see Smyth, ‘Stravinsky as Serialist’, 211ff., and Straus, Stravinsky's Late Music, 195–201.Google Scholar

34 Lynne Rogers, ‘Varied Repetition and Stravinsky's Compositional Process’, Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung, 7 (1994), 22–6; eadem, ‘Stravinsky's Break with Contrapuntal Tradition: A Sketch Study’, Journal of Musicology, 13 (1995), 476–507; and Joseph Straus, ‘The Progress of a Motive in Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress’, Journal of Musicology, 9 (1991), 165–85.Google Scholar

35 A notable exception is described by Straus, Stravinsky's Late Music, 42–54, who proposes for the early serial ‘Full Fadom Five’, one of Three Songs from William Shakespeare (1954), that Stravinsky began with an minor scale when devising the row for this work.Google Scholar

36 A number of scholars have begun to address the issue of diatonicism and references to tonality and modality in Stravinsky's serial music. With regard to the early serial music, see Gerhard, Roberto, ‘Twelve-Tone Technique in Stravinsky’, The Score and I. M. A. Magazine (1957), 38–43 (p. 40); Smyth, ‘Stravinsky's Second Crisis’, 126, and ‘Stravinsky as Serialist’, 211, 215, 221; Straus, Stravinsky's Late Music, 13–15, 18, 119, 121, 122, 143; Tucker, ‘Stravinsky and his Sketches’, i, 194, 205–6, 234, 253–4; and Wolterink, ‘Harmonic Structure and Organization’, passim. With regard to the later serial music, see Babbitt, Milton, ‘Remarks on the Recent Stravinsky’, Perspectives on Schoenberg and Stravinsky, ed. Benjamin Boretz and Edward T. Cone (rev. edn, New York, 1972), 165–85 (pp. 173, 184–5); Martin Boykan, ‘“Neoclassicism” and Late Stravinsky’, Perspectives of New Music, 1 (1963), 135–69 (passim); Claudio Spies, ‘Notes on Stravinsky's Abraham and Isaac’, Perspectives on Schoenberg and Stravinsky, ed. Boretz and Cone, 186–209 (p. 207); and Charles Wuorinen and Jeffrey Kresky, ‘On the Significance of Stravinsky's Late Works’, Confronting Stravinsky, ed. Pasler, 262–70 (pp. 264–7, 270). Last, such references to the past constitute the subject of Edward Berlin, ‘Tonality and Tonal References in the Serial Music of Igor Stravinsky’ (unpublished master's thesis, Hunter College, City University of New York, 1965). A copy of this thesis, which belonged to Stravinsky's library, now resides at the Sacher Foundation. Found inside the front cover of the thesis is a letter from Mr Berlin, indicating that he sent the thesis to Stravinsky, and what appears to be a draft of a response in Stravinsky's hand, dated 23 July 1965, in which the composer thanks Berlin for his analyses which ‘“succeeded in illuminating” the approach to my music’.Google Scholar