The effect of audience reception on Stravinsky’s compositional process

Stravinksy on the public not particularly liking his music:

Their attitude certainly cannot make me deviate from my path. I shall assuredly not sacrifice my predilections and my aspirations to the demands of those who, in their blindness, do not realize that they are simply asking me to go backwards … I could not follow them without doing violence to myself. But on the other hand, it would be a great mistake to regard me as an adherent of “Zukunftsmusik” – the music of the future … I can neither live in the past or in the future. I am in the present. I cannot know what tomorrow will bring forth. I can only know what the truth is for me today. That is what I am called upon to serve, and I serve it in all lucidity.

– Igor Stravinsky. Cited in: Nettl, Paul (1969) The Book of Musical Documents. New York: Greenwood Press, p.326.

Posted

in

by

Greg

Tags:

,

Featured Content

Proportion
“The traditional sense of proportion is a hang-up. The usual Mozartean concept of how long an idea lasts becomes too predictable. Some of the composers who talk the most about avoiding predictability are the ones most victimized by this predictable traditional sense of proportion.” – Morton Feldman, American composer. Cited in: Tom Johnson, Remembrance, September […]
Bassoon and piano
Prokofiev is evicted
Sergey Prokofiev was once evicted from his apartment for playing the same chord 218 times.  A tally was kept by the downstairs tenant. Source: Lawrence, Christopher (2001) Swooning.  Sydney: Random House, p.69.
Glenn Gould on recording
Pianist Glenn Gould discussed the recording process with Yehudi Menuhin completing the playback of a Bach gigue: Now, Yehudi, you’ve got to admit that you would not be likely to encounter a sound like that in the concert hall… The point is that, if I were to play that piece in a concert hall, as […]
Happiness
“Very little indeed is necessary for living a happy life” — Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor from 161-180 Marcus Aurelius (translated by George Long) The Thoughts of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, Book VII, 67.  Digitally archived at: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Thoughts_of_the_Emperor_Marcus_Aurelius_Antoninus/Book_VII, accessed 10 September 2021. 
Schnabel on recording
Having spent five days recording five Beethoven sonatas and two concertos, Schnabel wrote to his wife: This week was an ordeal, a torture chamber. “What does not kill me makes me stronger,” says Nietzsche. Hopefully (probably) this is true. I had no idea of how outrageous a process the recording on discs could be. Like […]
Born for music
“I was born with eyes closed listening to my heartbeat from my mother’s womb… There, without knowing it, I discovered that I would be born and would die for music…” – Alicastro Source: Peer Music.‘
The James Bond theme
John Barry did not get the chance to see any footage and he had not read any of Ian Fleming’s books when he was called in to work on the music for the first James Bond film, Dr No (1962), for which Monty Norman had originally been commissioned to write the score.  “I was just […]
Silence, expression, and music
From pure sensation to the intuition of beauty, from pleasure and pain to love and the mystical ecstasy and death—all the things that are fundamental, all the things that, to the human spirit, are most profoundly significant, can only be experienced, not expressed. The rest is always and everywhere silence. After silence that which comes […]
Men of genius
“Men of genius are often dull and inert in society; as the blazing meteor, when it descends to earth, is only a stone.” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1849), Kavanagh, London: George Slater, p.49.  https://books.google.com.au/books?id=i8ENAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA1#v=onepage&q&f=false, accessed 4 September 2021.