Formalism Essay

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did not hesitate to retract his original statement. This knowledge alone provides a tremendously dark political and historical undertone to Stravinsky’s music.

Another perfect example of this would be Richard Wagner’s ‘Tristan und Isolde’, which exists in the exact same way as ‘The Rite of Spring’ in terms of it being composed for a ballet and later on being taken completely out of context. However, if we look at Wagner’s music in general, Alfred Lorenz analysed it in a very scientific manner in the 1920’s, bringing up many political principles along with the general public’s reaction to his works. Politically, Wagner’s music can be seen as very anti-semantic, with his ideas sometimes being very anti-Jewish. An example of this can be seen in ‘The Ring Cycle’ in which one of the characters, ‘Alberich’, is portrayed as an evil, loveless character who enslaves gnomes of the underworld and forces them to mine gold for his treasury. It has been interpreted that this character in particular portrays many Jewish mannerisms, subtly bringing to light Wagner’s anti-Jewish ideas. With this background knowledge, it can cause a direct affect on the music itself and one’s perception of Wagner’s intentions. Wagner himself, through no direct intention of his own, was adopted as a symbol of the Nazi Party, creating a direct affect and contaminating his music with anti-semantic qualities, as a result, causing it to be banned in a number of countries including Israel. Without this socio-historical understanding of the music, the origins would be ignored and the way it is received today, in a sense would not be fully esteemed.

Back to Stravinsky, Richard Taruskin provides useful insight into ‘The Rite of Spring’ in his ‘Biography of the works’ (1996) in which he studies the contextual and historical elements surrounding the music. He demonstrates a divided identity between formalism and contextual elements. As previously mentioned, the piece was originally a Russian ballet, with strong elements of Russian folk music. In the creation of this masterpiece, Stravinsky worked with a stage designer who had great ethnical understanding in order to make the music as culturally accurate as possible. Stravinsky was “merely the vessel through which the music passed” (Chanan, 1981) as it was known that Stravinsky had stated that the ideologies for the music came to him in the form of a dream. Unfortunately, the premier of the ballet was poorly received at which point Stravinsky’s views on the piece completely changed; he completely aborted the idea of a ballet and re-assigned the music to be performed in a concert hall. The first ballet performance ended in riot as a result of much offensive content within. It musically demonstrated the violence in Russia at the time with fierce and brutal sounds. This caused a disruptive reaction by those who were there to see it. This also had a long-term effect as it altered Stravinsky’s ideas on rhythm and structure. Later, he went on to deny his original claim of the music being inspired by a dream and tried to claim his ideas now came from a polychord (two or more chords on top of each other – i.e. D major in the treble and D minor in the bass) through which he developed a rhythmic understanding, at which point he described the work as being “ un oeuvre architectonique et non anecdotique” (Taruskin, 1996), a literal translation of this being “an architectural work and not anecdotal”, in other words, saying that the work is scientific and mathematical, taking a completely formalist approach rather than having a historical or personal aspect to it. If it were not for Richard Taruskin, all contextual understanding of Stravinsky’s work would be lost due to the fact that Stravinsky ignorantly denied these elements that Taruskin has given us an understanding of.

In general, Stravinsky has been very influential on 20th century composers. Taruskin claims that Stravinsky’s ideas are “so influential that one could almost say that twentieth-century European and Euro-American musical culture has been created in the image of Stravinsky”. Stravinsky has had a huge, controversial impact on history with many cultural aspects brought to light.

I have demonstrated the benefits and limitations of contextual and formalist analysis with historical and biographical reference to musical works, and whilst it appears that contextual analysis is a better form to formalism, contextual analysis still has its limitations. Subjective to the interpreter, a full understanding still may not be gained due to the fact that we as listeners are not in the original setting for the original intentions of the composer, which poses many historical and social differences with an altered mind-set to those at the time.

With the assistance of Taruskin’s ‘Biography of the Works’, broader ideas are present when analysing to assist understanding of musical works, allowing us to appreciate it on a more developed level.