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Updated: May 21, 2025
They gauged correctly from which direction the wind was blowing. They probably heard, faintly piping in the distance, the pentatonic scales of Moussorgsky and Debussy, the scales of Scriabine and Strawinsky and Ornstein, the barbarous, exotic and African scales of the future, the one hundred and thirteen scales of which Busoni speaks.
It is the machine, enemy of man, that is pictured by "The Nightingale," that curious work of which one act dates from 1909, and two from 1914. Strawinsky had the libretto formed on the tale of Hans Christian Andersen which recounts the adventures of the little brown bird that sings so beautifully that the Emperor of China bids it to his court.
It is the rhythm of machinery that has set Strawinsky the artist free. All his life he has been conscious of these steel men. Mechanical things have influenced his art from the beginning.
When they introduce a pianoforte into the orchestra, they either, like Brahms, treat it as the premier instrument, and write symphonies, or, like Scriabine and Strawinsky, reduce it to the common level. But M. Rachmaninoff has not participated in this change of attitude. He is still content with music that toys with the pianoforte. And he writes concerti of the old type.
For with Strawinsky, the rhythms of machinery enter musical art. With this his magistral work a new chapter of music commences, the spiritualization of the new body of man is manifest. Through Debussy, music had liquified, become opalescent and impalpable and fluent.
At moments one can even smell the sausages frying. For Strawinsky is one of those composers, found scattered all along the pathway of his art, who augment the expressiveness of music through direct imitation of nature. His imagination seems to be free, bound in nowise by what other men have adjudged music to be, and by what their practice has made it seem.
Existence for the man who could write such music, in which unearthly rapture contrasts with unearthly suffering, must have been a sort of exquisite martyrdom. The man must have been indeed a nerve exposed. And, like a fragile thing suddenly ignited, he flared up, fiercely, magnificently, and went out. Strawinsky The new steel organs of man have begotten their music in "Le Sacre du printemps."
The angular, wooden gestures of the dolls, their smudged faces, their entrails of sawdust, are in the music ten times as intensely as they are upon the stage. In the score of "Petruchka" music itself has become a little mannikin in parti-colored clothes, at which Strawinsky gazes and laughs as a child laughs at a funny doll, and makes dance and tosses in the air, and sends sprawling.
And as the years pass, the man's stature and mind become more immense, more prodigious. One has but to hearken to the accent of the greater part of modern music to gauge in whose shadow we are all living, how far the impulse coming from him has carried. The whole living musical world, from Debussy to Bloch, from Strawinsky to Bartok, has been vivified by him.
In "Le Tombeau de Couperin," Ravel is the old clavecinist become contemporary of Scriabine and Strawinsky, the old clavecinist who had seen the projectiles fall at Verdun and lost a dozen friends in the trenches. He finds it easy, as in some of his recent songs, to achieve the folktone.
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