Igor Stravinsky (1882) has influenced more young musicians than any other living composer! He intended to become a lawyer, but instead studied composition with Rimsky-Korsakov, and his early works reflect his teacher. We never know how meeting someone may change our course in life, and Stravinsky’s meeting with Serge Diaghilev changed his!
Diaghilev, director of the Russian Ballet, recognized a gift in the young Stravinsky, who was busy writing an opera from a fairy tale of Hans Christian Andersen, The Nightingale. He commissioned him to write a ballet on a fairy tale, L’Oiseau de Feu (The Fire Bird) which was produced in Paris (1910) and brought Stravinsky instant fame. The next year this was followed by the delightful Petrouchka. His most famous score Le Sacre du Printemps (Rites of Spring) was produced in Paris in 1913, causing a near-riot, as it was received with hissing and catcalls by a public unprepared for its brutality, its savage rhythm, and raucous dissonance.
In this work Stravinsky went back to primitive times when Russia was pagan, and he explains, “Thus we see Russian peasants dancing in the springtime, accompanying the rhythms by their gestures and their feet.” An English critic Edwin Evans, sees behind the pagan rite, “The marvelous power ... in all Nature to grow, to develop, and to assume new forms.” (We have watched this happen in music.)
After Le Sacre du Printemps, Stravinsky wrote Les Noces a ballet founded on pagan Russian marriage customs. In this work he has used a chorus of voices and four pianos in place of an orchestra. He finished the opera The Nightingale and in 1917 wrote an orchestral poem based on the themes from the opera.
In the short ballet L’Histoire du Soldat (Story of the Soldier), Stravinsky has used popular music of the fair, circus, music hall, not folk music, and we find our jazz and tango in it, as also in his Piano Rag Music and Ragtime for orchestra. His songs composed for the most part to nonsense verses, are among the cleverest things he has done.
Stravinsky wrote a group of string quartet pieces in which he made the violins sound like bells. This was not because he tried to imitate bells but on the strings he uses the harmonics or overtones that are heard in bells. This is one of the secrets of his unusual harmonies.
Overtones
We hear so much about overtones and harmonics that perhaps we can trace for you the growth of music along the path of Pythagoras’ theory, showing how we arrived at this era of dissonance.
Harmonic Series
