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And how often does he not point the direction in which Russian music has subsequently advanced! His latter style, with its mottled chromatic and Oriental modes, its curious and bewildering intervals, is the veritable link between the music of the older Russian group to which he, roughly, belongs and that of the younger, newer men, of Strawinsky in particular.
Igor Fedorovitch Strawinsky was born at Oranienbaum near Petrograd, June 5th, 1882. His father was a bass singer attached to the court. Igor was destined for a legal career. But in 1902 he met Rimsky-Korsakoff in Heidelberg, and abandoned all idea of studying the law. He studied with Rimsky till 1906.
His art succeeds to that of Moussorgsky and Debussy quite as much as does that of Strawinsky and Ravel; he rests quite as heavily on the great European traditions of music as he does on his own hereditary strain. Indeed, he is of the modern masters one of those the most conscious of the tradition of his art. He falls heir to Bach and to Haydn and to Beethoven quite as much as any living musician.
The stream has commenced setting since the Arabian Nights, the Persian odalisques, the Tartar tribesmen became music. And the Chinese sensibility of Scriabine, the Oriental chromatics of the later Rimsky-Korsakoff, the sinuous scales and voluptuous colors and silken textures of Debussy, the shrill fantastic Japanese idiom of Strawinsky, have shown us the fusion was near.
Beside the Doctor of Music there stands the Talmudic Jew, the man all intellect and no feeling, who subtilizes over musical art as though it were the Law. The compositions of this period constitute an artistic retrogression rather than an advance. They are not "modern music" for all their apparent stylistic kinship to the music of Strawinsky and Scriabine and Ornstein.
The concert-room has succeeded in making music a drug, a sedative, has created a "musical attitude" in folk that is false, and robbed musical art of its power. For Strawinsky music is either an infection, the communication of a lyrical impulse, or nothing at all.
He comes to his art without prejudice or preconception of any kind, it appears. He plays with its elements as capriciously as the child plays with paper and crayons. He amuses himself with each instrument of the band careless of its customary uses. There are times when Strawinsky comes into the solemn conclave of musicians like a gamin with trumpet and drum.
But through Strawinsky, there has come to be a music stylistically well-nigh the reverse of that of the impressionists. Through him, music has become again cubical, lapidary, massive, mechanistic. Scintillation is gone out of it. The delicate, sinuous melodic line, the glamorous sheeny harmonies, are gone out of it.
If there is a single modern orchestral work that can be compared to either of the two great ballets of Strawinsky for rhythmical vitality, it is "Daphnis et Chloé," with its flaming dionysiac pulses, its "pipes and timbrels," its wild ecstasy. The same delicate clockwork mechanism characterizes "L'Heure espagnol," his opera bouffe, that characterizes "Petruchka" and "Le Rossignol."
Had the new time produced no musical art, had no Debussy nor Scriabine, no Strawinsky nor Bloch, put in appearance, one might possibly have found oneself compelled to believe the mournful decadence of Richard Strauss the inevitable development awaiting musical genius in the modern world.
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