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Updated: May 21, 2025
The tone-poems of Debussy and the ballets of Ravel and Strawinsky, the scintillating orchestral compositions of Strauss and Rimsky and Bloch, could scarcely have come to be had not Berlioz called the attention of the world to the instruments in which the colors and timbres in which it is steeped, lie dormant.
If he was less accomplished, less resourceful and magistral an artist than Strawinsky, for instance, whom he resembles in a certain general way, he was at least a more human, a more passionate being.
But the originality and fecundity and inventiveness that he lacked, Strawinsky to great degree possesses. And so it was given to the pupil to enter the chamber outside of which the master stood all his life, and could not enter, and saw only by peering furtively through the chinks of the door. Rachmaninoff
But it is particularly in his science of orchestration, the sense of the instruments that makes him appear to defer to them rather than to impose his will on them, that Strawinsky has achieved the thing that his teacher failed of achieving.
Countless poets before Strawinsky have attempted to portray the puppet-like activities of the human being, and "Petruchka" is but one of the recent of innumerable stage-shows that expose the automaton in the human soul. But the puppet-show of Strawinsky is singular because of its musical accompaniment. For more than even the mimes on the stage, the orchestra is full of the spirit of the automaton.
The characteristic compositions of Strawinsky and Ornstein, too, have no tonality, lack every vestige of a pure chord, and exhibit unanalyzable harmonies, and rhythms of a violent novelty, in the most amazing conjunctions. But they, at least, impart a certain sense of liberation. They, at least, bear certain witness to the emotional flight of the composer.
And in the hurtling finale the music and the dancers create figure that is at once the piston and a sexual action. For Strawinsky has stripped away from man all that with which specialization, differentiation, have covered him, and revealed him again, in a sort of cruel white light, a few functioning organs.
No doubt, in venturing to write music so bold and original in esthetic, Strawinsky was encouraged by the example of another musician, another Russian composer.
Here, before Strawinsky and Ornstein, before Moussorgsky, even, was a music barbarous and radical and revolutionary, a music beside which so much of modern music dwindles. It has, primarily, some of the nakedness, some of the sheerness of contour, toward which the modern men aspire.
The music of Debussy is the magistral and classic picture of this distant and glamorous procession, this illusory and fantastical and transparent show, this thing that changes from moment to moment and is never twice the same, and flows away from us so quickly. But Strawinsky, on the other hand, is in the very midst of the thing so distant from the other man.
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