By Jacques Amblard

Theodor Adorno, writing in the early 1940s, identified two composers as the leading lights of “new music”: Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky. Of the two, the former certainly became the more influential as a composer-theorist, attracting criticism from “anti-intellectualists,” as Adorno observes.¹ Schoenberg set Stravinsky’s trademark bold and obstinately repetitive collage — a violent, popular, even simple, vision of musical modernity — into sharp relief. Taking up the opposition between Apollonian and Dionysian art established in Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872), one might say that the Viennese composer, with his perfected method of twelve-tone composition, played Apollo in the century of science, while the Russian embodied the sensual Dionysius.

Stravinsky’s great achievement — a work of his youth no less — made an indelible mark. It is a canonical milestone of music history. The year 1913 brought the demise of the Belle Époque, the wreck of the Titanic, the augurs of the Great War, and music’s entrance into modernity — definitively and with solemnity — by means of a ritual sacrifice, a Rite, not only of Spring, but of the Twentieth Century, of the history of musical “evolution,” and of Stravinsky himself. He created a revolution through a work that was both necessary and sufficient. It was a vortex, hypnotically violent, stabilized through repetition. The Rite of Spring is a rhythmic rebirth of the orchestra — a summit of sonic power, by any definition. It gave rise to another rebirth, that of aesthetics more broadly.

Centripetal Force

“Order has been attained, and there is nothing more to be said,” wrote the Russian composer.² Order? By this he means rhythm. Rhythm is what makes Stravinsky’s style (and it is a matter of style and not procedure, as is the case with Schoenberg, as Boris de Schloezer affirms³). Stravinsky’s style features pulsations in a forte dynamic and accents in novel, seemingly unpredictable places. The resulting dance is at once regular yet incalculable, grinding yet unsteady, and thereby modern. This dancelike style came to blossom over the course of three ballets. To apply the opposition between “smooth time” and “striated time” proposed by Pierre Boulez,⁴ one might describe the Debussy-like Firebird as “smooth” and Petrushka as “striated.” The Rite of Spring, however, explodes out of nowhere in syncopated eighth notes. Ever since, it has become a popular idea that the most fundamental element of music is rhythm. But this idea (since defended in the work and pedagogy of Carl Orff) is born out of the Rite. In isolating and magnifying rhythm, in rediscovering the trance of ancient, magical practices, Stravinsky translates the primitivism of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) into music. This earned him the interest, and later friendship, of Pablo Picasso. They viewed one another as the twinned musical and pictural avatars of a common aesthetic movement and moment in history. The novelty Stravinsky offered — pleasure, ritual, bacchanalia — was easily grasped by his contemporaries.

Stravinsky dissolved key components of music: tonality (in part) and thematicism (especially). The famously “atonal” Viennese did away with most components of musical organization, including pulse, leaving only twelve-tone temperament. But Stravinsky took a more popular and consensual route. He preserved the sense of pulse. In fact, more than preserve it, he revealed it.

This is encapsulated by the “Rite of Spring chord,” a symbol of modernist revolt. The orchestra mechanically repeats this collection of notes, as if in trance, at the beginning of the “Augurs of Spring” in Scene 1 of the ballet. The obstinate repetition of this aggregate magnifies pulse. This ostinato would give rise to one of the most influential, even foundational, tools of twentieth-century music.

This aggregate is, moreover, polytonal. Stravinsky put forward, for an age at last ready for it, the polytonalities ventured in isolation by Charles Ives and by Schoenberg in Verklärte Nacht, op. 4. Stravinsky superposes a tonic triad on F-flat with the dominant seventh of A-flat and repeats them in a dissonant collage (in a truly cubist sense). Neutralized by the abrasive polytonality, what is heard is no longer a chord but a timbre. Eluding melody, Stravinsky fuses harmony and timbre together in the service of rhythm.

Standing apart from Viennese modernity, Stravinsky’s modernity proposes two simplifications: a vertical concentration of one chord on top of another (collage), and a horizontal distillation by means of mechanical repetition (ostinato). It seems that Stravinsky would have agreed with Erik Satie’s intuition that, in the twentieth century, advancement could come by means of subtraction.

It is not hard to find this advance in Stravinsky’s orchestral tutti. The earliest modern ideas of “der kleine Modernsky” (as Schoenberg called Stravinsky in the sung text of his Three Satires, op. 28, 1925) resemble political revolt, with reinforced brass and percussion, fortissimo. This orchestral march would intensify, crescendo, in the first three ballets. But it had already begun in Feux d’artifice, which impressed Sergei Diaghilev and swept him into the procession, as it were. The famed impresario of the Ballets Russes was co-author and flag-bearer of this national demonstration, shepherding the young and unknown Stravinsky toward his Rite.

But after a Parisian critic had mocked that “massacre of eardrums” [translator’s note: the French, “le massacre du tympan,” is a pun on the French title Le Sacre du printemps], was Stravinsky spent? Did he have any further resources left for surprising his audience? Writers of music history and discography have suggested that he, only in his thirties, had said everything he could possibly say.⁵ His achievement seemed irreplicable — unless he were to sacrifice himself. The Rite, as a sacrifice, was an act of destruction, a killing of the orchestra and of the canon.⁶ The work appears as an epitome or even an apocalypse, in the sense of revelation and of end.

1914: A New “Irony”

As World War I broke out, Stravinsky discovered the Schoenberg of Pierrot lunaire. This piece was a rather more modest Dionysius, scaled for chamber music. The new model was timely given the wartime drought of available musicians, even in neutral Switzerland where Stravinsky was residing. Previously, though he had already written abundantly for the piano (or for voice with piano accompaniment), his compositions were still in the vein of Debussy or even (in his earliest works) Tchaikovsky. The war imposed ergonomic efficiency, and thus Stravinsky stripped down his “grand style” for the salon.

He employed polytonality and ostinatos in his Three Pieces for String Quartet, as well as in vocal works accompanied by small ensembles based on texts or translations by his new accomplice, Charles Ferdinand Ramuz (a nationalist writer, as representative of Switzerland in his time as Ernest Hemingway was of the United States). These vocal pieces include Berceuses du chat, Renard, A Soldier’s Tale, and Les Noces, the summit of these “crucial years,” as André Boucourechliev described them.⁷ Like Petrushka and The Rite of Spring, Les Noces makes use of traditional Russian songs (popievka), participating in the widespread movement among composers in the early twentieth century to revisit regional and national folkloric traditions.

From 1914 onwards, Stravinsky’s writing would become increasingly dominated by a contrapuntal ostinato organized in strata, which in turn engendered a form structured around each stratum’s central notes.⁸ Such ostinatos were already present in Petrushka, and they saturated the Introduction of the Rite. Each instrument contributes its own “territorial ritornello,” as has been described elsewhere with regard to Edgard Varèse. Each stratum has two or three elements that repeat, in an apparently aleatoric way, like an animal performing its mating ritual; the ritornelli are thus reterritorialized to their “savage” origins (the realm of not-yet-music, as Gilles Deleuze puts it).⁹

In the wartime works, this poly-ostinato is subtle, sometimes minimal. When the devil in A Soldier’s Tale recites “ça… va… bien-pour-le-mo-ment” (it’s… alright… for the moment), Stravinsky opts for a bare, skeletal structure: the work is reduced to chanting (not even sung), set to rhythm by a meager tziganerie (pizzicato in the bass and violin, not even bowed), and a simple “oom-pah” ostinato (not even varied). The obstinance is regressive, childlike (even explicitly in some titles, such as “Dodo,”¹⁰ the third movement of Berceuses du chat), more humorous than cacophonous. “Igor’s eccentric gestures”¹¹ begin in the Three Pieces for String Quartet (1914). They are spare and economical — but, as Sigmund Freud wrote in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), economy and humor go hand in hand.

These reduced ensembles show a new preference for wind instruments, including brass. The resulting metallic sound-world is less forceful than ironic. But through strict organization of time, this sound-world is still linked to Stravinsky’s earlier work (recall from above, “order has been attained”). The timbre of the cornet in A Soldier’s Tale is irreverent, antimilitaristic. It manifests the rebellious spirit of a composer who had, in 1904, titled a work “How the Mushrooms Went to War.” The cornet quacks, chatters, and grates against the trombone in a semitone cluster that creates the sense that the music is out-of-tune — which is precisely what the skeptical public heard. This new Stravinskian cluster is populist, unlike those of Béla Bartók or Varèse, who nonetheless soon imitated the clusters of the Rite to generate timbres. The trombone is thus thrust into twentieth-century chamber music, as Mark Robert Williams notes, here, in Ragtime, and subsequently in the Octet, to deadpan effect. For Wolfgang Burde,¹² this sense of humor took seed in Petrushka and would bud little by little, culminating in several works commissioned in the United States during the 1930s and ’40s: Praeludium for jazz band, Tango for piano, Circus Polka for orchestra, Scherzo à la russe for jazz band, and the Ebony Concerto.

Woodwinds and brass overtake the strings, which for Stravinsky were too susceptible to Romanticism. He had adopted a manifestly anti-expressive stance: “Music is, by its very nature,” he wrote, “essentially powerless to express anything at all.”¹³ Violins are the most obvious culprits of what his friend Jean Cocteau described in a characteristically dandyish way as “sentimental blackmail.”¹⁴ The public had already shown their ability to do without the string section, especially when they could be seduced by the orchestra’s increasing volume. The Rite had demonstrated this, as would Maurice Ravel in Boléro (1928). The string orchestra of Apollon musagète would be an exception in Stravinsky’s vast output of music for harmonie, fanfare, and even (nominally) circus orchestra. Such popular idioms put forward a Bohemian aesthetic shared by Cocteau and more broadly characteristic of French playfulness, cast in opposition to Germanic seriousness (the French spirit was simultaneously an aesthetic stance against Wagnerism and a political stance against Germans). In the overture to Stravinsky’s opera The Rake’s Progress, strings are only used for the first and last chord — a clear provocation if ever there was one.

Pursuit of dry timbres became textbook. Even Pierrot lunaire was guilty of Germanic “depth”; Boulez thought that “there was still too much Romanticism, too much tradition, too much of the past in the music of the inventor of the series.”¹⁵ Boulez also shunned Stravinsky’s neoclassicism. Even so, Stravinsky prepared the ground for a texture embraced by integral serialism and by art music more broadly from the 1950s forward — timbral pointillism. This texture reached its culmination in Boulez’s Le Marteau sans maître and in the dry, precise approach of Olivier Messiaen from 1949 until Couleurs de la Cité céleste. This aesthetic was both conflicted (a “return to order” for Stravinsky, who as late as 1939 still sympathized with Benito Mussolini¹⁶) and “comical” (so problematic in Adorno’s view).¹⁷ The aesthetic would prevail in Stravinsky’s works from 1914 until his serial period (and sometimes even then).

There was one possible exception: his religious works. In the mid-1920s, alongside his profane irony, Stravinsky experienced an Orthodox Christian awakening. Otche nash (Our Father, for mixed choir), with its triadic chords, was a radical departure from his normal writing. From there followed the Symphony of Psalms, Babel, the Mass, the Canticum Sacrum, and Threni — in which he would again attempt to attenuate his rhythmic style for the voice. Recalling the synchronous quarter-note texture of Bach chorales, or the slow choral measures throughout the music of Messiaen, the choir takes on the voice of the Father in one common intonation and rhythm. Clarity is the order of the day: the choir begins by reciting the text in isorhythmic quarter notes. This recitation, which had previously been exemplified by the devil in A Soldier’s Tale, is turned heavenward forty years later.

“Neoclassicism”

Composed in 1919, Pulcinella ostensibly signals the arrival of Stravinsky’s neoclassical period. Even as it (at least superficially) marks a rupture with his previous style, this ballet-manifesto further clarifies Stravinsky’s earlier leanings through its timbres, its light irony, and above all its discrepancies and reimagination. If the folkloric popievka is the substrate underpinning the first three ballets and Les Noces, in Pulcinella Stravinsky appropriates art music itself, which he now casts as outdated. Sergei Prokofiev had invented his own themes for his Classical Symphony (1916-1917). But Stravinsky, even more provocatively minimalist, claims simply to de-orchestrate themes written by Baroque composers (including Giovanni Battista Pergolesi). There is something here akin to the insolence of Marcel Duchamp’s act of recycling, two years earlier, in the famous Fontaine (1917), a urinal exhibited upside-down, the foundational work of readymade art.

Neoclassicism also infused Stravinsky’s voice as an arranger, starting with his student exercises and later in, for example, his joint orchestration (with Ravel) of Modest Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina and his anti-militaristic transcription of the Marseillaise for solo violin. Both a lover and attacker of national anthems and other such bits of musical populism, the Dadaist Stravinsky seemed to find humor in his Star-Spangled Banner and his distortion of the “Happy Birthday” tune, Greeting Prelude. These arrangements were contradictory; even their aesthetic orderliness is at odds with their disruptive ethos. The first piece led to Stravinsky’s arrest by Boston police in 1941 (just after Pearl Harbor), on the grounds of a law forbidding modifications to the national anthem. Stravinsky thus found the legal limits of his aesthetic of reappropriation, which had crossed into theft, even espionage. He was also taken by surprise when he had to pay out copyright to the authors of “Happy Birthday,” namely the Summy Birchard Music Division, a group of students at Princeton University. He had once already paid out to the author of an urban popular song that he had used for Petrushka. Long before Christian Marclay or the “scratchers” in the early days of hip hop, Stravinsky saw works in found materials. But out of each of these sources, he would produce an organism that would reveal, surrealistically, the nature of the source.

Irreverence, U-turns … Stravinsky looks something like a shrewd trendsetter. At any rate, he was a communication genius, according to Valérie Dufour, who tracked down his “press appearances and interviews that systematically precede his concerts, and the first radio interviews, all of which reflect his constant and serious attention.”¹⁸ He may have been among the first stars who, famous from youth and addicted to success, sought constantly to create a splash in their era. Schoenberg, meanwhile, had the relatively good fortune to unleash negative reviews with each new work.¹⁹

And yet Pulcinella, the foundational work of Stravinsky’s neoclassicism, has been misunderstood: given its framing as an “arrangement,” it is not truly representative of neoclassicism. Stravinsky’s subsequent neoclassicism — that of Oedipus rex, for example — establishes its own language (beyond just timbre), its own code, modern and firmly situated in the twentieth century. The Four Etudes for Orchestra begin with a dissonant interval (a minor ninth, which, emptied of harmony, sounds like an overshot octave). As elsewhere in Stravinsky’s work, but not Pulcinella, the themes, whether borrowed or invented, are shortened and cycled into ostinatos. And finally, using his other tool, polytonality, he superposes the themes in a modernist fashion to create order (and cacophonously to create sarcastic disorder).

Stravinsky’s neoclassical works do more than produce “anti-pathétique allegorical tableaux,” as described by Gianfranco Vinay.²⁰ They rewrite history. When Stravinsky likens his so-called neoclassicism to Bach, the Thomaskantor emerges more youthful than Stravinsky does historical.²¹ The Concerto in E-flat for Chamber Orchestra (“Dumbarton Oaks”) does not so much resemble anything historical as destroy any notion of history. Stravinsky toyed with Bach, revealing the seed of cubism in his music. He highlights the motor, the structure, and the intimate rhythms in Bach’s music, his isorhythmic heartbeat (ostinato), and even his libido, as the Surrealists at that time might have dared imagine.

Lyricism

We have spoken about Stravinsky’s music in terms of rhythm, harmony, and orchestration. What of his melodies? The question concerns most obviously his lyric output — that is, his sole opera The Rake’s Progress (putting to one side the flop that was The Nightingale). Here, his usual economy of means takes a new protean density — in regards to rhythm, orchestration, and now also melody, most notably in Anne and Rakewell’s duet “In a foolish dream,” in the lullaby “Gently, little boat,” and in Anne and Trulove’s duettino “Every wearied body.” Here, conventional dissonances contrast with the angelic voices set in mostly consonant intervals and underlined by the return of the bowed strings — a significant gesture, after such a long absence, more than it would be for any other composer. Alternating or mixing irony with lyricism, Stravinsky gestures toward the twenty-first century, with its economy of expression, its fusions, and its omnivorous ability to digest anything. This approach was no longer neoclassical but postmodern.

The Violin Concerto is marked by traditional isorhythmic ostinatos and neoclassical distortions, but also introduces novel orchestrations in the treble register (see the beginning of the Finale). The third movement fashions this new lyricism within a sparingly dissonant language (as would Messiaen sixty years later, in his last period — see the opening bars of “Demeurer dans l’amour”). These “atonal” melodies, paradoxical fusions, future paradigms of the twenty-first century, are undergirded by string pads to which Stravinsky now yields, rich in meaning and thus reserved for great occasions. He thereby reverses the “shift from the emotional to the functional and objective” that, according to Boris Schwarz, had characterized his use of the violin.²²

Serialism

Stravinsky gradually ceded to serialist pressures, starting with Cantata. According to Eurydice Jousse, in his writings about Movements and Epitaphium, Stravinsky appreciated the “architectural” and “structural” work associated with serialism: again displaying his taste for order. But he knew full well that he would never manage to satisfy the most rigorous serialists.²³ His Eight Miniatures continue to use popular materials, maintaining his habitual neoclassical patchwork and dissimulating the underlying twelve-tone grid. The Requiem Canticles open with ethereal quarter notes in the strings — a swansong of the ostinato, a mocking homage to the Rite. Serialism is here made joyful, even as, in principle, it is the enemy of repetition, and therefore of ostinato, not to mention irony.

And so, he gradually pared back his own style. Composing with series meant selecting timbres, spreading them across the instrumentation. The great univocal Stravinsky is gone, in favor of Klangfarbenmelodie. The dynamism, order, remains, but the ostinato is disturbed as repeated notes are replaced with the disjointed intervals of the old Viennese School. This is the case, for example, in the Variations “Aldous Huxley in memoriam” and Introitus.

Stravinsky embarked on his serial period following the advice of his friend Robert Craft. As Dufour recalls, Stravinsky was a strategist, an attentive architect of his own progress.²⁴ “Neoclassicism,” after thirty years of complacency, could no longer pass for modern in the 1950s, and certainly not for contemporary, that is, in step with the post–World War II avant-garde, with its extreme focus on theory. Agon, one of the summits of his serialism, overall maintains Stravinsky’s voice, with the foreground timbres and rhythms reflecting his characteristic sarcastic winds and rhythmic clarity. As a composer sometimes troubled by melodic line (especially once he departed from the Tchaikovskian style of his Symphony No. 1), the series may have offered a somewhat flexible solution.

Surely it is no coincidence that the high point of Stravinsky’s newer output was once again a ballet. This genre had always shaped him as a composer, just as he shaped it. Imagined as though it were a mountain range viewed from afar, Stravinsky’s career might appear like a chain of ballets from which some of the highest peaks stand out: The Firebird, Petrushka, The Rite of Spring, Pulcinella, and Agon.

Mixed Reception

What should we make of Stravinsky’s habit of absorbing others’ music into his own? Had Freud shown the faintest interest in music, he might have suggested that by seeking out the pulsating ostinatos coursing through each of his referents, Stravinsky revealed their sexuality: the sexuality of Bach, for example. Or, perhaps he was demonstrating their infantilism. An ostinato can have many significations. Applied to a chord, it becomes ritual and myth. Intoned by a choir, it becomes a rosary. Used with classical motifs, it turns them naïve and absurd (order paradoxically becomes sarcasm). This last case, which Adorno and Boulez strongly criticized, recalls how a child might think of art music. Or perhaps it recalls a forgotten, unconscious memory — an obsessive dream in which pieces of music history repeat.²⁵

Stravinsky seems to make fun of the emerging culture industry’s conception of “classical music” in other ways. He interrogates its obsession with patrimony, its way of boiling down historiography to studies of “genius” musicians whom it greedily interprets (a practice irresistible even to avant-garde composers). And so, Stravinsky, rather than composes, de-composes Pulcinella. Manfred Trojahn, later on, would wonder how a composer could write atonally when “consumer society” besieges everyone with tonality at all times.²⁶ If the culture industry has decided to “stop the progression” of history, then no one will be able to stop it from doing that. Not even the first and greatest enemy of the culture industry (Adorno) could. A pessimistic outlook, to be sure.

The long neoclassical period would have its detractors. Adorno saw in it the victory of “restoration.” Was this Stravinsky diluted, a product of Cocteau’s creation? In his Cock and the Harlequin (1918), Cocteau brushed aside the importance of the Rite, a music of “entrails.” As he later stated, he preferred the comic Mavra (1922), in which Stravinsky, as Cocteau dreamed it, “offers lace” and thus distances himself from the “theatrical mysticism of the Rite.” But perhaps the most subtle enemy of the neoclassical Stravinsky was himself — that is the Stravinsky of the Rite.

Rite of the Rite

The Rite has never ceased to overshadow its more delicate successors. In a Faustian sense, its shrieking primitivism was fatal to other composers and was equally fatal to Stravinsky. No other musical approach (with the exception of the equally controversial twelve-tone method) resonated more powerfully than Stravinsky’s ostinato, which so noisily befitted its era. Ravel’s Boléro became the most popular work of modern music²⁷ simply by stubbornly repeating a melody. Prokofiev, Varèse, and Bartók made repetition a cornerstone in their approaches. Postmodernism kept nothing more modern: obstinate ostinatos occur in the music of Arvo Pärt, in his tintinnabula style begun in 1976, and in that of the American minimalists (Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Terry Riley, and John Adams), who could more appropriately be called “repetitives.” House and techno, popular starting in 1987 and throughout the 1990s in Chicago and Detroit, relies heavily on ostinato. At the core of these genres is trance, sacred or otherwise — the magical inspiration for the Rite — that monstrous imaginary rhapsody of litanies repeated by the shamans of ancient Russia and still today all across the world (or so the postmodern, globalized planet likes to believe), and especially in the caricatures of African percussion.

Beyond evoking tribal ritual, to what extent is the ostinato a sonic representation of biology — of a heartbeat, or the in-and-out motions of sex? Is it an echo, following Freud, of the authoritarian metapsychology of the twentieth century? Or did Stravinsky achieve the pure Dionysian, a myth so insatiably desired by his hedonistic century? Before reaching the status of a trance, is ostinato simply the act of ritual repetition, the ceaseless reiteration of prayers, from rosaries to mantras? Is repetition inescapable, intrinsic to the human condition, its daily Promethean torture or its Sisyphean myth?

At the same time, the ostinato is futuristic. This futurism combined with primitivism creates an overarching modernist synthesis. It evokes all historical mechanisms, but especially the mechanical “modern times” mocked by Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 film of the same title. It is initially promising, but before long it becomes concerning, potentially uncontrollable, an industry threatening to extend itself far beyond even Chaplin’s worries and become nonsensical, then a murderous chain of production, and finally the technological genocide of the Final Solution. Even in 1928, the repeated theme of Boléro itself represented for Ravel a somber world; he viewed it as a work of “non-music.”

Might ostinato also be viewed as reflecting an era haunted by mental illness? America became obsessed with the figure of the psychopath, shaken at the end of the twentieth century by Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. Alfred Hitchcock’s use of the ostinato for the shower scene in Psycho, scored by the Stravinskian composer Bernard Herrmann in 1960, would seem to confirm this notion.

If this discussion of the ostinato seems especially obstinate, it is because the ostinato itself spread like a contagion, from music to thought. Strictly speaking, it is not omnipresent in Stravinsky’s work. He preferred to vary motifs indefinitely, creatively, unrecognizably. Moreover, after 1914, it is generally employed contrapuntally (in the manner of a fugue subject and its variations) more than vertically. But the impression of repetition remains, an impression that is all the more obsessive for being about obsession itself. And impression matters more for reception and memory. What work created more of an impression than the Rite, with its violent, hammered repetitions of a distinct “chord”? Has any subsequent work left a deeper mark?

All these questions only lead to others. Was Stravinsky not tied alongside Schoenberg as the most influential musician of the twentieth century? And does the Rite mark the spring, or the winter, of that century? The work was a pronouncement. It was a brutal ritual, conceived to discourage competing works. It was itself a piece of choreography within an aesthetic ballet. It posed, in 1913, as the finale in the history of the orchestra, by means of a sacrifice, not only of the virgin (as the plot goes) but of the orchestra itself, in its apotheosis. From a Hegelian perspective, the work is about the end of history: it aspired to the Romantic position of the final and incontestable masterwork of Western music. But history would not allow it, nor would Stravinsky himself. He would live nearly sixty more years in ambiguous mourning for the orchestra (or art itself) and its association with grandeur and the absolute. For “great music,” as Adorno wrote in the opening of his Aesthetic Theory, is a perishable good.

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<sup>1. “Among the reproaches most obstinately repeated by these critics, the most widely spread is that of intellectualism: modern music has its origins in the brain, not in the heart or the ear; it is in no way conceived by the senses, but rather worked out on paper. The inadequacy of these clichés is evident.” Theodor ADORNO, Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. MITCHELL and Wesley V. BLOMSTER, New York, Seabury Press, 1973, p. 11. ↩
2. Igor STRAVINSKY, Chronicle of My Life, London, Victor Gollancz, 1936, p. 92. ↩
3. Boris DE SCHLOEZER, Igor Stravinsky, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2012, p. 91. ↩
4. Boulez used the terms “striated time” (temps strié) and “pulsed time” (temps pulsé). See Points de repère, Paris, Christian Bourgois, 1981, p. 81. ↩
5. Such is the anathema of modernism; its need to historicize turns even on itself. ↩
6. As Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari write, “Music has a thirst for destruction” (A Thousand Plateaus, 1980, trans. Brian MASSUMI, Minnesota University Press, 1987, p. 299. ↩
7. André BOUCOURECHLIEV, Igor Stravinsky, Paris, Librairie Arthème/Fayard, 1982, p. 137. ↩
8. Gretchen HORLACHER, “The Rhythms of Reiteration: Formal Development in Stravinsky’s Ostinatos,” Music Theory Spectrum: The Journal of the Society for Music Theory 14, no. 2, Autumn 1992, p. 171. ↩
9. DELEUZE, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 372. ↩
10. [Translator’s note: dodo is a word French-speaking children and parents use for “sleep.”] ↩
11. Nicholas MCKAY, “Igor’s Eccentric Gestures: A Semiotic Decoding of Stravinsky’s Syntax with Markedness Theory,” in Musical Semiotics Revisited, ed. Eero TARASTI, Helsinki, International Semiotics Institute, 2003, p. 498. ↩
12. See Wolfgang BURDE, “Divertierende Musik im kompositorischen Oeuvre Igor Strawinskys,” Musiktheorie 10, no. 1, 1995, p. 57. ↩
13. STRAVINSKY, Chronicle of My Life, p. 63. However, Jean-Jacques Nattiez reminds us that with the Rite Stravinsky “wanted to ‘express the rise of self-renewing nature’” (il a voulu “exprimer la montée de la nature qui se renouvelle”) (Fondements d’une sémiologie de la musique, Paris, U.G.E., 1975, p. 132). ↩
14. Jean COCTEAU, The Cock and the Harlequin, in A Call to Order, translated from the French by Rollo H. MYERS, London, Faber and Gwyer, 1926, p. 7 (Le coq et l’Arlequin, Paris, Stock, 1979, p. 47). ↩
15. Quoted by Esteban BUCH, Le cas Schoenberg, Paris, Gallimard, 2006, p. 276. ↩
16. As he declared at a lecture at Harvard. Stravinsky detested having been classed “degenerate” and a “revolutionary” in Hans Ziegler’s Entartete Musik exhibition of 1938. See Laure SCHNAPPER, “La musique ‘dégénérée’ sous l’Allemagne nazie,” Raisons politiques 2, no. 14, 2004, p. 173. ↩
17. Stravinsky’s music, with its regressive and unrelenting ostinato, would consistently and paradoxically get mixed up with the very “comedy it denounced.” ADORNO, Philosophy of Modern Music, p. 214. ↩
18. See Valérie DUFOUR, “Stravinsky stratège? Le compositeur face à l’exégèse de son oeuvre en Europe (1926–34),” Music’s Intellectual History, ed. Zdravko BLAŽEKOVIĆ and Barbara Dobbs MACKENZIE, New York, RILM, 2009, p. 427. ↩
19. On this subject, see Esteban BUCH, Le Cas Schoenberg (Paris, Gallimard, 2006). ↩
20. Gianfranco VINAY, “Permanence et transformation du style stravinskien dit ‘néo-classique’ durant les années françaises (1920-1940),” thesis, Paris, École Pratique des Hautes Études, 1996, back cover. ↩
21. Notwithstanding Adorno’s description of Stravinsky as “restorer” in Philosophy of Modern Music. ↩
22. Boris SCHWARZ, “Stravinsky, Dushkin, and the Violin,” in Confronting Stravinsky: Man, Musician, and Modernist, ed. Jann PASLER, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1986, p. 302. ↩
23. Eurydice JOUSSE, “Stravinsky sériel: Les raisons d’une conversion,” in Sillages musicologiques: Hommage à Yves Gérard, ed. Raphaëlle LEGRAND and Philippe BLAY, Paris, Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse (Association du Bureau des Étudiants), 1997, p. 269. ↩
24. See DUFOUR, “Stravinsky stratège?,” p. 427-442. ↩
25. This gives rise to a critical moment, a sort of neurotic mirror when the time of the unconscious is confronted with the classical canon: that is to say, the unconscious is confronted with the world of sound, and the time of the unconscious is seen through music, as in Adorno’s reading of Schoenberg: “For him [Schoenberg], the truly new aspect is the changed function of musical expression. It is no longer about feigned passions; instead, the medium of the music contains in itself the real movements of the unconscious — its shocks and traumas.” ADORNO, Philosophy of Modern Music, p. 50. ↩
26. Manfred TROJAHN, “Formebegriff und Zeitgestalt in der ‘Neuen Einfachheit’,” Zur neuen Einfachheit in der Musik, Wien, Universal, 1981, p. 87, § 3. ↩
27. According to data from the Société des auteurs, compositeurs et éditeurs de musique. ↩</sup>

© Ircam-Centre Pompidou, 2015

• Solo (excluding voice)
  • Tarantella for piano (1898), Inédit
  • Scherzo for piano (1902), 3 mn, Faber Music
  • Sonate en fa dièse mineur for piano (1903), 14 mn, Faber Music
  • Quatre études for piano (1908), 10 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • L'Oiseau de Feu piano reduction (1909-1910)
  • Polka for cymbalum (1915), 12 mn, autre
  • Souvenir d’une marche boche for piano (1915), 60 s, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Chant du Rossignol piano version (1917), 20 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Study for pianola (1917), Inédit
  • Valse pour les enfants for piano (1916-1917), autre
  • Modest Moussorgsky : chœur ‘Na kogo tï nas pokidayesh′’ (Prologue) piano transcription (1918), Inédit
  • Ragtime for piano (1917-1918), 5 mn, Chester Music
  • Trois Pièces for clarinet (1918), 4 mn, Chester Music
  • Histoire du soldat piano version (1918)
  • La marseillaise for violin (1919)
  • Piano-Rag-Music for piano (1919), 3 mn, Chester Music
  • Concertino for piano (1920), Wilhelm Hansen
  • Les cinq doigts for piano (1921), Chester Music
  • Trois mouvements de Petrouchka for piano (1921), 18 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
  • Sonate for piano (1924), 10 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Sérénade en la for piano (1925), 12 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Apollon Musagète piano transcription (1927-1928)
  • Le baiser de la fée piano transcription (1928, 1950)
  • Jeu de cartes piano transcription (1936), A Tempo
  • Praeludium piano transcription (1936), 2 mn
  • Tango for piano (1940), Mercury Music
  • Circus Polka piano version (1941-1942), Associated Music Publishers
  • Elégie for viola (or violin) (1944), 5 mn, Schott [program note]
• Chamber music
  • Petrouchka reduction for four-hand piano (1910-1911, 1946-1947), 35 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Le Sacre du Printemps reduction for piano four hands (1912-1913), 33 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Trois Pièces for string quartet (1914), 8 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
  • Valse des fleurs for piano four hands (1914), 60 s, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Trois pièces faciles for piano four hands (easy left hand) (1914-1915), 3 mn, Chester Music
  • Cinq pièces faciles for piano four hands (easy right hand) (1917), 9 mn, Chester Music
  • Lied ohne Name for two bassoons (1916-1918), 60 s, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Suite de l'Histoire du Soldat for violin, clarinet and piano (1918-1919), 25 mn, Schott
  • Concertino pour quatuor à cordes (1920), 6 mn, Wilhelm Hansen [program note]
  • Octuor for wind instruments (1922-1923), 15 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
  • Suite based on themes, fragments and pieces by Giambattista Pergolesi, for violin and piano, after Pulcinella (1925), 14 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Berceuse for violin and piano, arrangement of The Firebird (1926, 1931-1932), Chester Music
  • Prélude et Ronde des princesses for violin and piano, arrangement of L'Oiseau de Feu (1929, 1931-1932), Chester Music
  • Chants du rossignol et Marche chinoise for violin and piano, arrangement taken from the Rossignol (1932), Boosey & Hawkes
  • Danse russe for violin and piano, arrangement based on Petrouchka (1932), Boosey & Hawkes
  • Duo concertant for violin and piano (1931-1932), 16 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Scherzo for violin and piano, arrangement taken from L'Oiseau de Feu (1932), Schott
  • Suite italienne for cello and piano, arrangement taken from Pulcinella (1932), 15 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Suite italienne for violin and piano, arrangement taken from Pulcinella (1932), 15 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Ballade for violin and piano, arrangement from Baiser de la fée, collaboration with Samuel Dushkin (1933), Inédit
  • Pastorale version for violin and piano (1933), Schott
  • Divertimento for violin and piano, arrangement of Divertimento from The Fairy's Kiss (1934), 20 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Concerto for two solo pianos (1935), 20 mn, Chester Music [program note]
  • Chanson russe for violin and piano, arrangement taken from Mavra (1937), Boosey & Hawkes
  • Tango arrangement for violin and piano (1940), Inédit
  • Sonate for two pianos (1944), 11 mn, Chester Music
  • Double canon for string quartet (1959), 60 s, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Epitaphium for flute, clarinet and harp (1959), 2 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Lullaby for tenor recorder and alto recorder, arrangement from Rake's Progress (1960), Boosey & Hawkes
  • Fanfare for a New Theatre for two trumpets (1964), Boosey & Hawkes
• Instrumental ensemble music
  • Symphony, E♭, Op.1 (1905-1907), 30 mn, Chester Music
  • Pogrebal′naya pesn′ for orchestra (1908), partition perdue
  • Scherzo fantastique, Op. 3 for large orchestra (1907-1908), 12 mn, Schott
  • Feux d'artifice Fantasy for orchestra (1908-1909), 4 mn, Schott
  • Frédéric Chopin : Nocturne en la♭, op.32/2 et Valse brillante en mi♭op.18 orchestration (1909), Inédit
  • L'Oiseau de Feu first suite for orchestra (1910), 28 mn, Schott
  • stage L'Oiseau de Feu ballet in two tableaux, after a Russian fairy tale (1909-1910), 40 mn, Schott [program note]
  • stage Petrouchka burlesque scenes in four tableaux (1946-1947, 1910-1911), 35 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
  • stage Le Sacre du Printemps tableaux de la Russie païenne in two parts (1947, 1911-1913), 33 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
  • Marche for twelve instruments (1915), Inédit
  • stage Chant du Rossignol symphonic poem for orchestra (1917), 20 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Song of the Volga Boatmen transcribed for winds and percussion (1917), 4 mn, Chester Music
  • Ragtime for eleven instruments (1917-1918), 6 mn, Chester Music [program note]
  • L'Oiseau de Feu second suite for orchestra (1919), 20 mn, Schott [program note]
  • Grande suite de l'Histoire du Soldat for clarinet, bassoon, cornet, trombone, percussion, violin and double bass (1918-1920), 25 mn, Chester Music
  • Symphonies d'instruments à vent for twenty-four instrumentalists (1945-1947, 1920), 10 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
  • P. Tchaikovsky : La Belle au bois dormant Variation d´Aurore, transcription for orchestra (1921), 5 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • P. Tchaikovsky : La Belle au bois dormant Bluebird, Pas-de-deux, transcription for chamber orchestra (1921), Boosey & Hawkes
  • Suite n° 2 for small orchestra (1915-1921), 6 mn, Chester Music [program note]
  • Pulcinella - Suite for orchestra (1949, 1922), 22 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Suite n° 1 for small orchestra (1925), 7 mn, Chester Music [program note]
  • stage Apollon Musagète ballet in two scenes for string orchestra (1927-1928), 30 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
  • stage Le baiser de la fée allegorical ballet in four scenes based on songs and piano pieces by Tchaikovsky (1950, 1928), 45 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Quatre Études for orchestra (1952, 1928-1929), 12 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
  • Divertimento symphonic suite based on the ballet The Fairy's Kiss (1950, 1928-1934), 24 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • stage Jeu de cartes ballet in three rounds, for orchestra (1936), 25 mn, Schott
  • Concerto en mi bémol Dumbarton Oaks, for ensemble (1937-1938), 15 mn, Schott [program note]
  • Symphonie en ut for orchestra (1938-1940), 30 mn, Schott
  • The Star-Spangled Banner arrangement for orchestra (1941), Mercury Music
  • stage Circus Polka (for a young elephant) for circus orchestra (1944, 1942), 4 mn, Schott
  • Danses concertantes for chamber orchestra (1940-1942), 20 mn, Schott
  • Four Norwegian Moods for orchestra (1942), 8 mn, Schott
  • Ode elegiac song in three parts (1943), 11 mn, Schott
  • Scènes de ballet for the review The Seven Lively Arts, for orchestra (1944), 18 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Scherzo à la russe for jazz orchestra (1943-1944), 4 mn, Schott
  • L'Oiseau de Feu third suite (in ballet) (1945), 28 mn, Schott [program note]
  • Scherzo à la russe symphonic version (1944-1945), 4 mn, Schott
  • Symphonie en trois mouvements for orchestra (1942-1945), 24 mn, Schott
  • Concerto en ré for string orchestra (1946-1947), 12 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • stage Orpheus ballet in three scenes, for orchestra (1947), 30 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Concertino pour douze instruments arrangement of the Concertino for string quartet (1952), 6 mn, Wilhelm Hansen [program note]
  • Praeludium for jazz ensemble (1936, 1953), 2 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Septuor (1952-1953), 11 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
  • Tango for nineteen instruments (1953), 3 mn, Chester Music
  • Greeting Prelude after C.F. Summy Happy Birthday to you, for orchestra (1955), 60 s, Boosey & Hawkes
  • stage Agon ballet for twelve dancers, for orchestra (1953-1957), 23 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
  • Monumentum pro Gesualdo da Venosa ad CD annum madrigal arrangements by Gesualdo for chamber orchestra (1960), 7 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
  • Eight Instrumental Miniatures for fifteen instruments (1962), 8 mn, Chester Music [program note]
  • Jean Sibelius : Canzonetta, Op. 62a arrangement for ensemble (1963), 4 mn, Breitkopf & Härtel
  • Variations Aldous Huxley in memoriam, for orchestra (1963-1964), 5 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Canon to a Russian folk tune, for orchestra (1965), 60 s, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Jean Sébastien Bach, Quatre préludes et fugues du Clavier bien tempéré arrangement for woodwind instruments and strings (1969), Inédit
• Concertant music
  • P. Tchaikovsky : La Belle au bois dormant Entr'acte, transcription for violin and orchestra (1921), 5 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Concerto for piano and wind ensemble (1950, 1923-1924), 20 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
  • Capriccio for piano and orchestra (1949, 1928-1929), 17 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Concerto pour violon en ré (1931), 22 mn, Schott
  • Pastorale transcription of the Romance sans paroles for violin and woodwind (1907-1933), 4 mn, Chester Music [program note]
  • Ebony concerto for clarinet and jazz band (1945), 11 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Movements for piano and orchestra (1958-1959), 10 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
• Vocal music and instrument(s)
  • Tucha romance for voice and piano (1902), 2 mn, Faber Music
  • Kak gribi na voynu sbiralis' song for bass and piano (1904), 8 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Konduktor i tarantul for voice and piano (1906), partition perdue
  • Faune et bergère for mezzo-soprano and orchestra (1907), 10 mn, Chester Music
  • Pastorale song without words for soprano and piano (1907), 4 mn, Chester Music [program note]
  • Dva romansa - Deux mélodies for mezzo-soprano and piano (1907-1908), 8 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Beethoven, Mephistopheles' Lied vom Floh, op. 75 3 arrangement for bass and orchestra (1909), 3 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Modest Moussorgsky : Chanson de Méphistophélès dans la cave d'Auerbach arrangement for baritone or bass and orchestra (1909), 3 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Deux Poèmes de Balmont for soprano and piano (1911-1912), 3 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
  • Le roi des étoiles for two tenors, two basses and orchestra (1911-1912), 6 mn, Chester Music
  • Trois Petites Chansons 'Souvenirs de mon enfance' for high voice and small orchestra (1906-1913, 1929-1930), 3 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
  • Trois Poésies de la lyrique japonaise for soprano and ensemble (or piano) (1912-1913), 4 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
  • stage Le Rossignol lyrical tale in three acts (1962, 1908-1914), 45 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
  • Pribaoutki pleasant songs, for voice and ensemble (or piano) on popular Russian texts (1914), 6 mn, Chester Music
  • Kolïbel′nïye - Berceuses du chat suite of songs for contralto and three clarinets, on Russian folk texts (1915), 5 mn, Chester Music [program note]
  • Detskiye pesenki - Trois histoires pour enfants for voice and piano (1915-1917), 12 mn, Chester Music
  • stage Renard burlesque story sung and performed (1915-1917), between 16 mn and 20 mn, Chester Music [program note]
  • stage Histoire du soldat read, played and danced in two parts (1918), 35 mn, Chester Music [program note]
  • Quatre Chants russes for voice and piano (1918-1919), 6 mn, Chester Music
  • stage Pulcinella ballet with singing in one act, music after Pergolesi (1919-1920), 40 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
  • stage Mavra opera bouffe in one act (1947, 1921-1922), 26 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
  • Chanson de Paracha for soprano and orchestra, excerpt from the opera Mavra (1922-1923), 3 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Pastorale 1923 version for soprano and woodwind (1907-1923), 4 mn, Chester Music [program note]
  • Tilimbom for mezzo-soprano and orchestra (1923), 3 mn, Chester Music [program note]
  • stage Les Noces four Russian choreographic scenes with song and music (1914-1917, 1919-1923), 25 mn, Chester Music [program note]
  • stage Oedipus rex opera-oratorio (1948, 1926-1927), 53 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Symphonie de psaumes for mixed choir and orchestra (1948, 1930), 23 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • stage Perséphone melodrama in three scenes, for solo tenor, narrator, mixed choir, children's choir and orchestra (1949, 1933-1934), 56 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Tango arrangement for voice and piano (1940), Inédit
  • Babel cantata for narrator, male choir and orchestra (1944), 7 mn, Schott [program note]
  • Messe for children and men's choir and wind ensemble (1944-1948), 18 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
  • Deux Poèmes de Paul Verlaine for baritone and orchestra (1910-1951), 5 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
  • stage The Rake's Progress three-part opera and epilogue (1947-1951), 2 h 30 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Cantata for solo soprano and tenor, female choir and ensemble (1951-1952), 30 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Three Songs from William Shakespeare for mezzo-soprano, flute, clarinet and viola (1953), 7 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
  • Dva stikhotvoreniya Konstantina Bal′monta - Deux Poèmes de Balmont for high voice and ensemble (1954), 3 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
  • In Memoriam Dylan Thomas funeral song and song for tenor, string quartet and 4 trombones (1954), 8 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
  • Quatre Chants for voice, flute, harp and guitar (1953-1954), 5 mn, Chester Music [program note]
  • Quatre Chants paysans russes Les Soucoupes, version for equal voices with accompaniment of 4 horns (1954), 5 mn, Schott [program note]
  • Canticum Sacrum ad honorem Sancti Marci nominis for tenor, baritone, choir and orchestra (1955), 17 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Variations chorales sur sur " Vom Himmel hoch da komm' ich herr'" de J.S. Bach for choir and orchestra (1956), 15 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Threni id est Lamentationes Jeremiae prophetae, for solo voices, choir and orchestra (1957-1958), Boosey & Hawkes
  • A Sermon, a Narrative and a Prayer cantata, for contralto, tenor, narrator, choir and orchestra (1960-1961), 16 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • stage The Flood musical play (1961-1962), 24 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Abraham and Isaac a sacred ballad for baritone and orchestra (1962-1963), 12 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
  • Elegy for J.F.K. for medium voice and three clarinets (1964), 2 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Introitus T.S. Eliot in memoriam, Requiem mass, for male choir and ensemble (1965), 4 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Requiem Canticles for solo voices, choir and orchestra (1965-1966), 15 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • The Owl and the Pussy-Cat for voice and piano (1966), Boosey & Hawkes
  • Hugo Wolf, deux chants sacrés from Spanisches Liederbuch, transcribed for mezzo-soprano and ten instruments (1968), 5 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
• A cappella vocal music
  • Cantata for choir (and piano?) (1904), partition perdue
  • Quatre Chants paysans russes The Saucers, version for a cappella women's choir (1914-1917), 6 mn, Chester Music [program note]
  • Pater Noster for four-part mixed choir (1949, 1926), 60 s, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Credo for four-part a cappella choir (1949, 1932), 3 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Ave Maria for mixed choir a cappella (1949, 1934), 60 s, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
  • Petit Ramusianum harmonique for a voice or choir in unison (1937), autre
  • Hommage a Nadia Boulanger petit canon pour la fête de Nadia Boulanger, for two voices (1947), Boosey & Hawkes
  • Tres Cantiones sacres for six voices, after Carlo Gesualdo (1957-1959), 10 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
  • Anthem The Dove Descending Breaks the Air, for mixed choir a cappella (1962), 2 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
• Unspecified instrumentation
  • Edvard Grieg : Kobold, op.71, n° 3 arrangement (1910), partition perdue
  • Modest Moussorgsky : chœur final et air de la Khovanshchina arrangement of the final choir (1913)

Catalog sources and details

• Grove, Oxford University Press, 2007-2009
• éditions Boosey & Hawkes
• éditions Schott
• éditions Chester music
• éditions Faber music
• éditions Breitkopf & Härtel

• 1969
  • Jean Sébastien Bach, Quatre préludes et fugues du Clavier bien tempéré arrangement for woodwind instruments and strings, Inédit
• 1968
  • Hugo Wolf, deux chants sacrés from Spanisches Liederbuch, transcribed for mezzo-soprano and ten instruments, 5 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
• 1966
  • Requiem Canticles for solo voices, choir and orchestra, 15 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • The Owl and the Pussy-Cat for voice and piano, Boosey & Hawkes
• 1965
  • Canon to a Russian folk tune, for orchestra, 60 s, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Introitus T.S. Eliot in memoriam, Requiem mass, for male choir and ensemble, 4 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
• 1964
  • Elegy for J.F.K. for medium voice and three clarinets, 2 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Fanfare for a New Theatre for two trumpets, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Variations Aldous Huxley in memoriam, for orchestra, 5 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
• 1963
  • Abraham and Isaac a sacred ballad for baritone and orchestra, 12 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
  • Jean Sibelius : Canzonetta, Op. 62a arrangement for ensemble, 4 mn, Breitkopf & Härtel
• 1962
  • Anthem The Dove Descending Breaks the Air, for mixed choir a cappella, 2 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
  • Eight Instrumental Miniatures for fifteen instruments, 8 mn, Chester Music [program note]
  • stage The Flood musical play, 24 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
• 1961
  • A Sermon, a Narrative and a Prayer cantata, for contralto, tenor, narrator, choir and orchestra, 16 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
• 1960
  • Lullaby for tenor recorder and alto recorder, arrangement from Rake's Progress, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Monumentum pro Gesualdo da Venosa ad CD annum madrigal arrangements by Gesualdo for chamber orchestra, 7 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
• 1959
  • Double canon for string quartet, 60 s, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Epitaphium for flute, clarinet and harp, 2 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Movements for piano and orchestra, 10 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
  • Tres Cantiones sacres for six voices, after Carlo Gesualdo, 10 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
• 1958
  • Threni id est Lamentationes Jeremiae prophetae, for solo voices, choir and orchestra, Boosey & Hawkes
• 1957
  • stage Agon ballet for twelve dancers, for orchestra, 23 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
• 1956
  • Variations chorales sur sur " Vom Himmel hoch da komm' ich herr'" de J.S. Bach for choir and orchestra, 15 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
• 1955
  • Canticum Sacrum ad honorem Sancti Marci nominis for tenor, baritone, choir and orchestra, 17 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Greeting Prelude after C.F. Summy Happy Birthday to you, for orchestra, 60 s, Boosey & Hawkes
• 1954
  • Dva stikhotvoreniya Konstantina Bal′monta - Deux Poèmes de Balmont for high voice and ensemble, 3 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
  • In Memoriam Dylan Thomas funeral song and song for tenor, string quartet and 4 trombones, 8 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
  • Quatre Chants for voice, flute, harp and guitar, 5 mn, Chester Music [program note]
  • Quatre Chants paysans russes Les Soucoupes, version for equal voices with accompaniment of 4 horns, 5 mn, Schott [program note]
• 1953
  • Praeludium for jazz ensemble, 2 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Septuor, 11 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
  • Tango for nineteen instruments, 3 mn, Chester Music
  • Three Songs from William Shakespeare for mezzo-soprano, flute, clarinet and viola, 7 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
• 1952
  • Cantata for solo soprano and tenor, female choir and ensemble, 30 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Concertino pour douze instruments arrangement of the Concertino for string quartet, 6 mn, Wilhelm Hansen [program note]
• 1951
  • Deux Poèmes de Paul Verlaine for baritone and orchestra, 5 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
  • stage The Rake's Progress three-part opera and epilogue, 2 h 30 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
• 1948
  • Messe for children and men's choir and wind ensemble, 18 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
• 1947
  • Concerto en ré for string orchestra, 12 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Hommage a Nadia Boulanger petit canon pour la fête de Nadia Boulanger, for two voices, Boosey & Hawkes
  • stage Orpheus ballet in three scenes, for orchestra, 30 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
• 1945
  • Ebony concerto for clarinet and jazz band, 11 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • L'Oiseau de Feu third suite (in ballet), 28 mn, Schott [program note]
  • Scherzo à la russe symphonic version, 4 mn, Schott
  • Symphonie en trois mouvements for orchestra, 24 mn, Schott
• 1944
  • Babel cantata for narrator, male choir and orchestra, 7 mn, Schott [program note]
  • Elégie for viola (or violin), 5 mn, Schott [program note]
  • Scherzo à la russe for jazz orchestra, 4 mn, Schott
  • Scènes de ballet for the review The Seven Lively Arts, for orchestra, 18 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Sonate for two pianos, 11 mn, Chester Music
• 1943
  • Ode elegiac song in three parts, 11 mn, Schott
• 1942
  • Circus Polka piano version, Associated Music Publishers
  • stage Circus Polka (for a young elephant) for circus orchestra, 4 mn, Schott
  • Danses concertantes for chamber orchestra, 20 mn, Schott
  • Four Norwegian Moods for orchestra, 8 mn, Schott
• 1941
  • The Star-Spangled Banner arrangement for orchestra, Mercury Music
• 1940
  • Symphonie en ut for orchestra, 30 mn, Schott
  • Tango for piano, Mercury Music
  • Tango arrangement for violin and piano, Inédit
  • Tango arrangement for voice and piano, Inédit
• 1938
  • Concerto en mi bémol Dumbarton Oaks, for ensemble, 15 mn, Schott [program note]
• 1937
  • Chanson russe for violin and piano, arrangement taken from Mavra, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Petit Ramusianum harmonique for a voice or choir in unison, autre
• 1936
  • Jeu de cartes piano transcription, A Tempo
  • stage Jeu de cartes ballet in three rounds, for orchestra, 25 mn, Schott
  • Praeludium piano transcription, 2 mn
• 1935
  • Concerto for two solo pianos, 20 mn, Chester Music [program note]
• 1934
  • Ave Maria for mixed choir a cappella, 60 s, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
  • Divertimento for violin and piano, arrangement of Divertimento from The Fairy's Kiss, 20 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Divertimento symphonic suite based on the ballet The Fairy's Kiss, 24 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • stage Perséphone melodrama in three scenes, for solo tenor, narrator, mixed choir, children's choir and orchestra, 56 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
• 1933
  • Ballade for violin and piano, arrangement from Baiser de la fée, collaboration with Samuel Dushkin, Inédit
  • Pastorale version for violin and piano, Schott
  • Pastorale transcription of the Romance sans paroles for violin and woodwind, 4 mn, Chester Music [program note]
• 1932
  • Chants du rossignol et Marche chinoise for violin and piano, arrangement taken from the Rossignol, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Credo for four-part a cappella choir, 3 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Danse russe for violin and piano, arrangement based on Petrouchka , Boosey & Hawkes
  • Duo concertant for violin and piano, 16 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Scherzo for violin and piano, arrangement taken from L'Oiseau de Feu, Schott
  • Suite italienne for cello and piano, arrangement taken from Pulcinella, 15 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Suite italienne for violin and piano, arrangement taken from Pulcinella, 15 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
• 1931
  • Concerto pour violon en ré, 22 mn, Schott
• 1930
  • Symphonie de psaumes for mixed choir and orchestra, 23 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
• 1929
  • Capriccio for piano and orchestra, 17 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Prélude et Ronde des princesses for violin and piano, arrangement of L'Oiseau de Feu, Chester Music
  • Quatre Études for orchestra, 12 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
• 1928
  • Apollon Musagète piano transcription
  • stage Apollon Musagète ballet in two scenes for string orchestra, 30 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
  • Le baiser de la fée piano transcription
  • stage Le baiser de la fée allegorical ballet in four scenes based on songs and piano pieces by Tchaikovsky, 45 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
• 1927
  • stage Oedipus rex opera-oratorio, 53 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
• 1926
  • Berceuse for violin and piano, arrangement of The Firebird, Chester Music
  • Pater Noster for four-part mixed choir, 60 s, Boosey & Hawkes
• 1925
  • Suite based on themes, fragments and pieces by Giambattista Pergolesi, for violin and piano, after Pulcinella, 14 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Suite n° 1 for small orchestra, 7 mn, Chester Music [program note]
  • Sérénade en la for piano, 12 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
• 1924
  • Concerto for piano and wind ensemble, 20 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
  • Sonate for piano, 10 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
• 1923
  • Chanson de Paracha for soprano and orchestra, excerpt from the opera Mavra, 3 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • stage Les Noces four Russian choreographic scenes with song and music, 25 mn, Chester Music [program note]
  • Octuor for wind instruments, 15 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
  • Pastorale 1923 version for soprano and woodwind, 4 mn, Chester Music [program note]
  • Tilimbom for mezzo-soprano and orchestra, 3 mn, Chester Music [program note]
• 1922
  • stage Mavra opera bouffe in one act, 26 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
  • Pulcinella - Suite for orchestra, 22 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
• 1921
  • Les cinq doigts for piano, Chester Music
  • P. Tchaikovsky : La Belle au bois dormant Variation d´Aurore, transcription for orchestra, 5 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • P. Tchaikovsky : La Belle au bois dormant Bluebird, Pas-de-deux, transcription for chamber orchestra, Boosey & Hawkes
  • P. Tchaikovsky : La Belle au bois dormant Entr'acte, transcription for violin and orchestra, 5 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Suite n° 2 for small orchestra, 6 mn, Chester Music [program note]
  • Trois mouvements de Petrouchka for piano, 18 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
• 1920
  • Concertino for piano, Wilhelm Hansen
  • Concertino pour quatuor à cordes, 6 mn, Wilhelm Hansen [program note]
  • Grande suite de l'Histoire du Soldat for clarinet, bassoon, cornet, trombone, percussion, violin and double bass, 25 mn, Chester Music
  • stage Pulcinella ballet with singing in one act, music after Pergolesi, 40 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
  • Symphonies d'instruments à vent for twenty-four instrumentalists, 10 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
• 1919
  • L'Oiseau de Feu second suite for orchestra, 20 mn, Schott [program note]
  • La marseillaise for violin
  • Piano-Rag-Music for piano, 3 mn, Chester Music
  • Quatre Chants russes for voice and piano, 6 mn, Chester Music
  • Suite de l'Histoire du Soldat for violin, clarinet and piano, 25 mn, Schott
• 1918
  • Histoire du soldat piano version
  • stage Histoire du soldat read, played and danced in two parts, 35 mn, Chester Music [program note]
  • Lied ohne Name for two bassoons, 60 s, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Modest Moussorgsky : chœur ‘Na kogo tï nas pokidayesh′’ (Prologue) piano transcription, Inédit
  • Ragtime for piano, 5 mn, Chester Music
  • Ragtime for eleven instruments, 6 mn, Chester Music [program note]
  • Trois Pièces for clarinet, 4 mn, Chester Music
• 1917
  • Chant du Rossignol piano version, 20 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • stage Chant du Rossignol symphonic poem for orchestra, 20 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Cinq pièces faciles for piano four hands (easy right hand), 9 mn, Chester Music
  • Detskiye pesenki - Trois histoires pour enfants for voice and piano, 12 mn, Chester Music
  • Quatre Chants paysans russes The Saucers, version for a cappella women's choir, 6 mn, Chester Music [program note]
  • stage Renard burlesque story sung and performed, between 16 mn and 20 mn, Chester Music [program note]
  • Song of the Volga Boatmen transcribed for winds and percussion, 4 mn, Chester Music
  • Study for pianola, Inédit
  • Valse pour les enfants for piano, autre
• 1915
  • Kolïbel′nïye - Berceuses du chat suite of songs for contralto and three clarinets, on Russian folk texts, 5 mn, Chester Music [program note]
  • Marche for twelve instruments, Inédit
  • Polka for cymbalum, 12 mn, autre
  • Souvenir d’une marche boche for piano, 60 s, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Trois pièces faciles for piano four hands (easy left hand), 3 mn, Chester Music
• 1914
  • stage Le Rossignol lyrical tale in three acts, 45 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
  • Pribaoutki pleasant songs, for voice and ensemble (or piano) on popular Russian texts, 6 mn, Chester Music
  • Trois Pièces for string quartet, 8 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
  • Valse des fleurs for piano four hands, 60 s, Boosey & Hawkes
• 1913
  • Le Sacre du Printemps reduction for piano four hands, 33 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • stage Le Sacre du Printemps tableaux de la Russie païenne in two parts, 33 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
  • Modest Moussorgsky : chœur final et air de la Khovanshchina arrangement of the final choir
  • Trois Petites Chansons 'Souvenirs de mon enfance' for high voice and small orchestra, 3 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
  • Trois Poésies de la lyrique japonaise for soprano and ensemble (or piano), 4 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
• 1912
  • Deux Poèmes de Balmont for soprano and piano, 3 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
  • Le roi des étoiles for two tenors, two basses and orchestra, 6 mn, Chester Music
• 1911
  • Petrouchka reduction for four-hand piano, 35 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • stage Petrouchka burlesque scenes in four tableaux, 35 mn, Boosey & Hawkes [program note]
• 1910
  • Edvard Grieg : Kobold, op.71, n° 3 arrangement, partition perdue
  • L'Oiseau de Feu piano reduction
  • L'Oiseau de Feu first suite for orchestra, 28 mn, Schott
  • stage L'Oiseau de Feu ballet in two tableaux, after a Russian fairy tale, 40 mn, Schott [program note]
• 1909
  • Beethoven, Mephistopheles' Lied vom Floh, op. 75 3 arrangement for bass and orchestra, 3 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Feux d'artifice Fantasy for orchestra, 4 mn, Schott
  • Frédéric Chopin : Nocturne en la♭, op.32/2 et Valse brillante en mi♭op.18 orchestration, Inédit
  • Modest Moussorgsky : Chanson de Méphistophélès dans la cave d'Auerbach arrangement for baritone or bass and orchestra, 3 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
• 1908
  • Dva romansa - Deux mélodies for mezzo-soprano and piano, 8 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Pogrebal′naya pesn′ for orchestra, partition perdue
  • Quatre études for piano, 10 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
  • Scherzo fantastique, Op. 3 for large orchestra, 12 mn, Schott
• 1907
  • Faune et bergère for mezzo-soprano and orchestra, 10 mn, Chester Music
  • Pastorale song without words for soprano and piano, 4 mn, Chester Music [program note]
  • Symphony, E♭, Op.1, 30 mn, Chester Music
• 1906
  • Konduktor i tarantul for voice and piano, partition perdue
• 1904
  • Cantata for choir (and piano?), partition perdue
  • Kak gribi na voynu sbiralis' song for bass and piano, 8 mn, Boosey & Hawkes
• 1903
  • Sonate en fa dièse mineur for piano, 14 mn, Faber Music
• 1902
  • Scherzo for piano, 3 mn, Faber Music
  • Tucha romance for voice and piano, 2 mn, Faber Music
• 1898
  • Tarantella for piano, Inédit

Catalog source(s)

• Grove, Oxford University Press, 2007-2009
• éditions Boosey & Hawkes
• éditions Schott
• éditions Chester music
• éditions Faber music
• éditions Breitkopf & Härtel

Bibliographie sélective

• André BOUCOURECHLIEV, Igor Stravinsky, Fayard, Paris, 1982.
• Robert CRAFT, Igor Stravinsky : Chronicle Of A Friendship, Vanderbilt University Press, Nashville, 1994.
• Robert CRAFT (éd.), Stravinsky, selected correspondence, vol. 1 à 3, Faber and Faber, Londres, 1984.
• Jonathan CROSS (dir.), The Cambridge Companion to Stravinsky, Cambridge University Press, 2003.
• Jonathan CROSS, The Stravinsky Legacy, Cambridge University Press, 1998.
• Valérie DUFOUR (éd.), Igor Stravinsky, Confidences sur la musique, propos recueillis (1912-1939), Actes Sud, Arles, 2013.
• Valérie DUFOUR, Stravinsky et ses exégètes, éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 2006.
• François LESURE, Stravinsky : études et témoignages, Jean-Claude Lattès, Paris, 1982.
• Jann PASLER (dir.), Confronting Stravinsky : Man, Musician and Modernist, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1986.
• André SCHAEFFNER, Strawinsky, Rieder, Paris, 1931.
• Joseph N. STRAUS, Stravinsky’s Late Music, Cambridge University Press, 2001.
• Igor STRAVINSKY, Robert CRAFT, Souvenirs et commentaires, Gallimard, Paris, 1970.
• Igor STRAVINSKY, Robert CRAFT, Dialogues, Faber and Faber, Londres, 1968.
• Igor STRAVINSKY, Robert CRAFT, Memories and Commentaries, Faber and Faber, Londres, 1960.
• Igor STRAVINSKY, Robert CRAFT, Expositions and Developments, Faber and Faber, Londres, 1962.
• Igor STRAVINSKY, Chronique de ma vie, Denoël-Gonthier, Paris, 2001.
• Igor STRAVINSKY, Poétique musicale, Flammarion, Paris, 2000.
• Richard TARUSKIN, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1996.
• Pieter C. VAN DEN TOORN, The music of Igor Stravinsky, Yale University Press, 1983.
• Eric Walter WHITE, Stravinsky, le compositeur et son œuvre, Flammarion, Paris, 1981.
• Strawinsky : Sein Nachlass. Sein Bild., catalogue d’exposition, Kunstmuseum Basel, 1984.

Discographie sélective

• Igor STRAVINSKY, « Boulez conducts Stravinsky », 6 cds Deutsche Grammophon, 2010.
• Igor STRAVINSKY, « The ballets », direction : Robert Craft, 6 cds Naxos, 2009.
• Igor STRAVINSKY, « A Portrait », 2 cds Naxos, 2008.
• Igor STRAVINSKY, « Works of Igor Stravinsky », direction : Igor Stravinsky, 22 cds Sony / BMG, 2007.
• Igor STRAVINSKY, « Bernstein conducts Stravinsky », direction : Leonard Bernstein, 2 cds Deutsche Grammophon, 1995.