Hey All,
First off, if you look at Guy's opening statement, he's actually telling you how uncomfortable he is with previous statements made about Stravinksy (a composer he admires), and generalisations about modernists being 'loathsome'... So, go easy on him, as he's basically just responding to the negativity he's already observed. Also, he continues to make it very clear that he's only stating his personal opinions and tastes. (BTW, I agree about singers, Guy. It's not so much that I "hate" the 'LFO' on the big Operatic Voice, but rather that I adore a simpler, cleaner production -- check out Sister Marie Keyrouz sometime (I hope I spelled it right!), she's breath-taking.)
Anyway... I've become very interested (once again) in this famous quote of Stravinsky's, since the original posting of this thread. From what I've been able to understand of him, over a long period of interest in his work and thought (a period which ended several years ago, I should add), Stravinsky was really most annoyed by the idea of 'Kunstreligion', epitomized by the worship of Wagner. It was not just the music itself (although he obviously had little time for it), but rather the ideology which arose around the obsession with its Maker, bestowing upon him a God-like status. So in stating that music expresses only itself, I think he was really just trying to extract the physical phenomenon of music from the interpretive influence of the listener, and more specifically, from the emotional relationship the listener might have with the individual "Genius" who composed it (or, in the case of Bernstein, who was currently performing it). So, this does not necessarily need to be seen as a blanket statement about music, per se, but rather as one composer's way of paring down a wild infinitude of almost supernatural influences to get at the central problem of composition: how to arrange notes and sounds in time.
If I remember some of our discussions from previous posts correctly, many of us were in agreement that the actual ACT of composition is basically a highly demanding process of problem solving -- we are largely occupied with what happens next, or with how to make a passage "work". At the actual moment we are composing, this is often our biggest question: "how does this work?". So, with such a statement, Stravinsky really did nothing more than switch chronological positions between composition and listening, between the question and the answer. That is, if the central question of a composer is "how does this work?", then the answer to that question, as expressed in the music itself is just "like this!" Obviously, there are social, ideological, and political influences at play in resolution of this question -- resulting in the fact that Stravinsky sounds different from Mahler -- but the question itself remains essentially the same. So if the question stays the same, but the answers appear markedly different, something must be happening in between -- something we have little control over. And THAT, I suspect, is the music "expressing itself", which is to express the social, ideological, and political influences of its time. [edit: and yes, of course, personal influences too! [:)]]
I certainly know that I'm often suprised by the emotional "drift" of a passage of music I've composed. If the affect is not what I'm after, I simply scrap it and try again. But that doesn't mean there was anything wrong with the first draft -- that it didn't "work", internally -- but simply that my relationship to the result was not what I was after. I twisted and tweaked until everything fell into place. The music spoke. And it wasn't what I wanted to hear! :-0
More often, however, I accept the outcome. Because I know by now that it is generally more honest than I would ever care to be, if I thought over the emotional content of every phrase before committing it to paper!
cheers,
J.
