Confronting Stravinsky

📖 The Scoop

Confronting Stravinsky: Man, Musician, and Modernist offers a groundbreaking exploration of Igor Stravinsky’s dynamic career, delving into his stylistic transformations and the broader cultural forces that shaped his influential works. Emerging from the seminal 1982 International Stravinsky Symposium, this collection assembles insights from leading global scholars and Stravinsky’s contemporaries, encompassing perspectives from music theory, aesthetics, performance practice, and cultural history.

Stravinsky’s legacy as a pivotal force in 20th-century music—spanning from Russian nationalism and neoclassicism to serialism—offers a fertile ground for examining the tensions between innovation and tradition. Each essay addresses this interplay, exploring questions around his use of folk influences, reinvention of classical forms, and evolving approaches to serialism. The volume illuminates how Stravinsky maintained his identity across distinct musical phases, revealing threads of continuity in his harmonic techniques, rhythmic innovations, and distinctive use of visual and theatrical elements.

With a focus on Stravinsky’s creative process, adaptations, and collaborations, this anthology not only enhances understanding of Stravinsky’s compositions but also underscores his broader impact on the arts. This essential resource invites scholars, musicians, and cultural historians alike to engage with the many dimensions of Stravinsky’s artistry and the ongoing reevaluation of his contributions to modernist thought and practice.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1986.

Genre: Music / History & Criticism (fancy, right?)