Craft Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-30879-8
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 156 Seiten

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky is the first of the celebrated series of conversation books in which Stravinsky, prompted by Robert Craft, reviewed his long and remarkable life. The composer brings the Imperial Russia of his childhood vividly into focus, at the same time scanning what were at the time the brave new horizons of Boulez and Stockhausen with extraordinary acuity. Stravinsky answers searching questions about his musical development and recalls his association with Diaghilev and the Russian Ballet. There are sympathetic and extraordinarily illuminating reminiscences of such composers as Debussy and Ravel ('the only musicians who immediately understood Le Sacre du Printemps'), while mischievous squibs are directed at others, most notably perhaps against Richard Strauss, all of whose operas Stravinsky wished 'to admit ... to whichever purgatory punishes triumphant banality'. The conversations are by no means confined to musical subjects, ranging uninhibitedly across all the arts: Stravinsky gives unforgettable sketches of Ibsen, Rodin, Proust, Giacometti, Dylan Thomas and T S Eliot. 'The conversations between Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft are unique in musical history. The penetration of Craft's questions and the patience and detail of Stravinsky's answers combine to produce an intimate picture of a man who has sometimes puzzled, often delighted, and always intrigued ...' The Sunday Times

The distinguished conductor, Robert Craft, met Igor Stravinsky in 1948, and developed what proved to be an extraordinarily fruitful artistic partnership from then until the composer's death in 1971. Craft lived with the family in California and later in New York and remained close to the composer's widow Vera, until her death in 1982.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Craft, Robert

Leseproben

ABOUT COMPOSING AND COMPOSITIONS

R.C. When did you become aware of your vocation as a composer?

I.S. I do not remember when and how I first thought of myself as a composer. All I remember is that these thoughts started very early in my childhood, long before any serious musical study.

R.C. The musical idea: when do you recognize it as an idea?

I.S. When something in my nature is satisfied by some aspect of an auditive shape. But long before ideas are born I begin work by relating intervals rhythmically. This exploration of possibilities is always conducted at the piano. Only after I have established my melodic or harmonic relationships do I pass to composition. Composition is a later expansion and organization of material.

R.C. Is it always clear in your mind from the inception of the idea what form of composition will develop? And the idea itself: is it clear what instrumental sound will produce it?

I.S. You should not suppose that once the musical idea is in your mind you will see more or less distinctly the form your composition may evolve. Nor will the sound (timbre) always be present. But if the musical idea is merely a group of notes, a motive coming suddenly to your mind, it very often comes together with its sound.

R.C. You say that you are a doer, not a thinker; that composing is not a department of conceptual thinking; that your nature is to compose music and you compose it naturally, not by acts of thought or will. A few hours of work on about one-third of the days of the last fifty years have produced a catalogue which testifies that composing is indeed natural to you. But how is nature approached?

I.S. When my main theme has been decided I know on general lines what kind of musical material it will require. I start to look for this material, sometimes playing old masters (to put myself in motion), sometimes starting directly to improvise rhythmic units on a provisional row of notes (which can become a final row). I thus form my building material.

R.C. When you achieve the music you have been working to create, are you always sure of it, do you always instantly recognize it as finished, or do you sometimes have to try it for a greater period of time?

I.S. Usually I recognize my find. But when I am unsure of it I feel uncomfortable in postponing a solution and in relying on the future. The future never gives me the assurance of reality I receive from the present.

R.C. What is theory in musical composition?

I.S. Hindsight. It doesn’t exist. There are compositions from which it is deduced. Or, if this isn’t quite true, it has a by-product existence that is powerless to create or even to justify. Nevertheless, composition involves a deep intuition of theory.

R.C. Do musical ideas occur to you at random times of the day or night?

I.S. Ideas usually occur to me while I am composing, and only very rarely do they present themselves when I am away from my work. I am always disturbed if they come to my ear when my pencil is missing and I am obliged to keep them in my memory by repeating to myself their intervals and rhythm. It is very important to me to remember the pitch of the music at its first appearance: if I transpose it for some reason I am in danger of losing the freshness of first contact and I will have difficulty in recapturing its attractiveness. Music has sometimes appeared to me in dreams, but only on one occasion have I been able to write it down. This was during the composition of L’Histoire du Soldat, and I was surprised and happy with the result. Not only did the music appear to me but the person performing it was present in the dream as well. A young gypsy was sitting by the edge of the road. She had a child on her lap for whose entertainment she was playing a violin. The motive she kept repeating used the whole bow, or, as we say in French, ‘avec toute la longueur de l’archet’. The child was very enthusiastic about the music and applauded it with his little hands. I, too, was very pleased with it, was especially pleased to be able to remember it, and I joyfully included this motive in the music of the Petit Concert.

R.C. You often speak of the weight of an interval. What do you mean?

I.S. I lack words and have no gift for this sort of thing anyway, but perhaps it will help if I say that when I compose an interval I am aware of it as an object (when I think about it in that way at all, that is), as something outside me, the contrary of an impression.
Let me tell you about a dream that came to me while I was composing Threni. After working late one night I retired to bed still troubled by an interval. I dreamed about this interval.It had become an elastic substance stretching exactly between the two notes I had composed, but underneath these notes at either end was an egg, a large testicular egg. The eggs were gelatinous to the touch (I touched them), and warm, and they were protected by nests. I woke up knowing that my interval was right. (For those who want more of the dream, it was pink—I often dream in colour. Also, I was so surprised to see the eggs I immediately understood them to be symbols. Still in the dream I went to my library of dictionaries and looked up ‘interval’, but found only a confusing explanation which I checked the next morning in reality and found to be the same.)

R.C. While composing do you ever think of any audience? Is there such a thing as a problem of communication?

I.S. When I compose something, I cannot conceive that it should fail to be recognized for what it is, and understood. I use the language of music, and my statement in my grammar will be clear to the musician who has followed music up to where my contemporaries and I have brought it.

R.C. Have you ever thought that music is as Auden says ‘a virtual image of our experience of living as temporal, with its double aspect of recurrence and becoming’?

I.S. If music is to me an ‘image of our experience of living as temporal’ (and however unverifiable, I suppose it is), my saying so is the result of a reflection, and as such is independent of music itself. But this kind of thinking about music is a different vocation altogether for me: I cannot do anything with it as a truth, and my mind is a doing one. Auden means ‘Western’ music or, as he would say, ‘music as history’; jazz improvisation is the dissipation of the time image and, if I understand ‘recurrence’ and ‘becoming’, their aspect is greatly diminished in serial music. Auden’s ‘image of our experience of living as temporal’ (which is also an image) is above music, perhaps, but it does not obstruct or contradict the purely musical experience. What shocks me, however, is the discovery that many people think below music. Music is merely something that reminds them of something else—of landscapes, for example; my Apollo is always reminding someone of Greece. But in even the most specific attempts at evocation, what is meant by being ‘like’, and what are ‘correspondences’? Who, listening to Liszt’s precise and perfect little Nuages gris, could pretend that ‘grey clouds’ are a musical cause and effect?

R.C. Do you work with a dialectical conception of form? Is the word meaningful in musical terms?

I.S. Yes to both questions, in so far as the art of dialectics is, according to the dictionaries, the art of logical discussion. Musical form is the result of the ‘logical discussion’ of musical materials.

R.C. I have often heard you say ‘an artist must avoid symmetry but he may construct in parallelisms’. What do you mean?

I.S. The mosaics at Torcello of the Last Judgment are a good example. Their subject is division, division, moreover, into two halves suggesting equal halves. But, in fact, each is the other’s complement, not its equal nor its mirror, and the dividing line itself is not a perfect perpendicular. On the one side skulls with, in the sockets, lightning-shaped snakes, and on the other, Eternal Life (those white figures, I wonder if Tintoretto didn’t know them), are balanced, but not equally balanced. And, the sizes and proportions, movements and rests, darks and lights of the two sides are always varied.
Mondrian’s Blue Façade (composition 9, 1914) is a nearer example of what I mean. It is composed of elements that tend to symmetry but in fact avoids symmetry in subtle parallelisms. Whether or not the suggestion of symmetry is avoidable in the art of architecture, whether it is natural to architecture, I do not know. However, painters who paint architectural subject matter and borrow architectural designs are often guilty of it. And only the master musicians have managed to avoid it in periods whose architecture has embodied aesthetic idealisms, i.e., when architecture was symmetry and symmetry was confused with form itself. Of all the musicians of his age Haydn was the most aware, I think, that to be perfectly symmetrical is to be perfectly dead. We are some of us still divided by an illusory compulsion towards ‘classical’ symmetry on the one hand, and by the desire to compose as purely non-symmetrically as the Incas, on the other.

R.C. Do you regard musical form as in some degree mathematical?

I.S. It is at any rate far closer to mathematics than to literature—not perhaps to mathematics itself, but...