GMG Listening Group — Stravinsky's Agon :: 22 May - 4 June 2011

[karlhenning]

Thanks, (poco) Sfz!

The music is 12-tone for strings playing without meter or pulse.

"Without meter or pulse," eh? Was Alastair listening? ; )

[Mn Dave]

Thanks, (poco) Sfz!

Was Alastair listening?[/font] ; )

No.

[karlhenning]

To be fair, more nearly true of the Pas de deux than of aught else in Agon. The meter is 3/4, it's marked Adagio [eighth-note] = 112, and the writing does not set forth any pulse . . . .

[karlhenning]

"Agon" remains a difficult ballet — I recently watched two American companies dance it — and nobody finds it easy to say what it is about.

[(poco) Sforzando]

Thanks, (poco) Sfz!

"Without meter or pulse," eh? Was Alastair listening? ; )

No question he is on shakier grounds with the music than the choreography in that article, just as I (not knowing the technical vocabulary of dance) would be on shakier grounds with the dance. I nonetheless think the article has more valid insights than not.

[karlhenning]

No question he is on shakier grounds with the music than the choreography in that article, just as I (not knowing the technical vocabulary of dance) would be on shakier grounds with the dance. I nonetheless think the article has more valid insights than not.

Agreed, very much enjoyed the entire article. I didn't mean to come across as a nattering nay-sayer . . . .

[karlhenning]

I have listened to this work many times since it is one of favorite works by Stravinsky.  I always find it surprising when people express difficulty with it since from the first moment I heard it I felt nothing but delight.

This.

I've never seen the dance and would love to attend a performance . . .

And this, too : )

[Scarpia]

I've never seen the dance and would love to attend a performance, and will, I'm sure, some day.

This is a major gripe I have.  We have record labels resurrecting composers who are long forgotten and recording symphonies which may have been performed once in 1905 and never heard again, but it is impossible to see major works of Ballet.   For instance, William Schuman wrote interesting scores for Judith and Undertow (for Martha Graham and for the American Ballet Theater) and it is impossible to see them.  I think they were even shown on Television at the time.  Odd that the market can support a zillion DVDs of Swan Lake but cannot support release archival films of modern ballet.

[Cato]

After listening to the work a second time (the last time until this week was in the 1970's), a few more thoughts occurred about the piece.

Why a Greek title for the work, which uses French dances of the early Renaissance?

In one sense, who cares?      But I suspect that somebody as meticulous as Stravinsky (his color-coded manuscripts are practically artworks themselves) did not choose the title without a reason.

The "contest" can be seen as between Neo-Classicism and 12-tone technique, with the latter (?) winning the compositional struggle.       Knowing that Webern was highly interested in Renaissance polyphony, Stravinsky may have found inspiration in fusing the styles through his own persona.

But something else is happening in Agon.

"Primitivity" so to speak was an aspect of Stravinsky's output, when one considers the prehistoric or folkloric aspects of the Firebird, Rite of Spring, Les Noces, Pribaoutki, etc.   The spare, somewhat primitive nature of Agon would therefore be a logical descendant of this interest, with an ironic twist that of course it uses the "latest advance" in music which, Schoenberg once opined, would give "German music" a certain superiority for the next century!   

Indeed, think how primitive Webern's 12-tone works often are, with their lonely notes paralleling the primitive, abstract art from painters like Mondrian.  Agon would seem to fit in rather neatly with them.

[Palmetto]

Would it be helpful (or 'helpful'), or would it be intrusive if I were to offer sort of a personal "road map" to the music, number by number?
[font]

I would find such an offering helpful.  I've listened to the piece twice but am not finding much I can connect or relate to.  This is my first encounter with Stravinsky and 12 tone / atonal music.

I'm with Cato; I'd love to find videos of this and other ballet scores.  I couldn't find even decent program notes.

[(poco) Sforzando]

I would find such an offering helpful.  I've listened to the piece twice but am not finding much I can connect or relate to.  This is my first encounter with Stravinsky and 12 tone / atonal music.

I'm with Cato; I'd love to find videos of this and other ballet scores.  I couldn't find even decent program notes.

As I've noted before, the VHS tape called "Balanchine Celebration, vol. 2" includes about 15 minutes from the ballet as performed by the City Ballet with Darcy Bussell as guest soloist in the pas de deux. Missing are the opening and closing sections, so you won't see the marvelous effect of the four men standing with their backs to us at stage rear and "starting" the ballet by turning around, as well as the parallel touch at the very end. If you don't want to pay Amazon for a used copy, at least try scouring your public library.

Here at least are some stills:
http://www.shomler.com/dance/agon/index.htm

[karlhenning]

After listening to the work a second time (the last time until this week was in the 1970's) . . . .

Zowie, the second time just this week? I am honored! : )

I would find such an offering helpful.

I'll put this together probably early-ish tomorrow.

[DavidW]

Dave & Davey, have you done, or are you game for more listening to the piece?

Another question, which may or may not be separate: Would it be helpful (or 'helpful'), or would it be intrusive if I were to offer sort of a personal "road map" to the music, number by number?

I don't want to quash other input, nor to have my own impressions 'set the tone' at all.

A road map would be excellent!  I have only listened to the piece twice, saving future listening for exactly this kind of thing.

[karlhenning]

On the principle of Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and his wife won't see him for a week — before we spread out the road map, let's contemplate the first step wherewith the wild journey begins ...

Should even back up to First Principles, really. For some of us, the passion for Agon was instaneous, perhaps to a degree instinctual. Some of us, rather, are finding it a bit slippery. My challenge will be to try to help the latter find some "traction," without spiraling into rarefied theory ...

It's been mentioned that Agon contains elements both tonal and atonal. We should consider a little the former, since with Stravinsky, tonal rarely means Common Practice.

Another distinction which is helpful in digging into Agon: For some while prior to Agon, Stravinsky had been "dabbling" in serialism, but not necessarily atonal serialism. What could "tonal serialism" mean?

[ PS: I've pushed the discussion out . . . no one is obliged, of course.  But since the Listening Group has not been formally re-built, there is not another piece on for next week, so that we should have to "clear out" for it. ]

[Cato]

But something else is happening in Agon.

"Primitivity" so to speak was an aspect of Stravinsky's output, when one considers the prehistoric or folkloric aspects of the Firebird, Rite of Spring, Les Noces, Pribaoutki, etc.   The spare, somewhat primitive nature of Agon would therefore be a logical descendant of this interest, with an ironic twist that of course it uses the "latest advance" in music which, Schoenberg once opined, would give "German music" a certain superiority for the next century!   

Indeed, think how primitive Webern's 12-tone works often are, with their lonely notes paralleling the primitive, abstract art from painters like Mondrian.  Agon would seem to fit in rather neatly with them.

"Dripping water music" is how my wife describes some of the things which emanate from the speakers, and the reference to a fabled Chinese torture is deliberate.   

Certainly as Agon progresses, the "pointillistic" orchestration, which could be seen as extreme antiphony, approaches the Webernian style.

"I could have composed that" (dripping a few dots over music paper) is the parallel to the complaint of the viewer standing before a "drip" painting in the museum: "I could have done that!"

To which the response is: "But you didn't!"   0:)

The idea here for both arts is that a seeming simplicity, a seeming "primitivity" masks something deeper and more mysterious, inchoate, and perhaps even something unsettling.

[karlhenning]

And we draw a distinction between primitivism and archaism ; )

[karlhenning]

On the principle of Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and his wife won't see him for a week — before we spread out the road map, let's contemplate the first step wherewith the wild journey begins ...

Should even back up to First Principles, really. For some of us, the passion for Agon was instaneous, perhaps to a degree instinctual. Some of us, rather, are finding it a bit slippery. My challenge will be to try to help the latter find some "traction," without spiraling into rarefied theory ...

It's been mentioned that Agon contains elements both tonal and atonal. We should consider a little the former, since with Stravinsky, tonal rarely means Common Practice.

Another distinction which is helpful in digging into Agon: For some while prior to Agon, Stravinsky had been "dabbling" in serialism, but not necessarily atonal serialism. What could "tonal serialism" mean?

[ PS: I've pushed the discussion out . . . no one is obliged, of course.  But since the Listening Group has not been formally re-built, there is not another piece on for next week, so that we should have to "clear out" for it. ]

Now I wonder if this post is helpful in even the least . . . a shortcoming of trying to type the post on the bus.

I've got another extract from Walsh, though to judge by the progress of the thread, no one apart from myself finds them of interest . . .

The Suite was in fact one of the few Schoenberg that he claimed to have heard before (in Venice in 1937). But whereas a quarter-century before he had assured readers of the Daily Mail that "Schoenberg is one of the greatest creative spirits of our age," by the late thirties he was describing him as

a chemist of music more than an artistic creator. His investigations are interesting, since they tend to expand the possibilities of auditory pleasure, but just as with Haba, the discoverer of quarter-tones, they have more to do with the quantity than with the quality of music.

In 1936, Stravinsky had almost certainly not heard any of Schoenberg's serial music, but he had had it described to him, mostly by hostile judges such as Lourié. In the circumstances, his opinion is much what one would expect. Schoenberg had devised a method that involved taking the twelve different notes of the octave, arranging them in a certain order, then using that order—or series—as a fixed template for the melodic and harmonic material of an entire work. Put so crudely, it sounded about as pointless atristically as change-ringing. You could play the series forwards, backwards, or upside down, or the upside-down version backwards, and you could do all these things starting on any note you liked. Every music student has experienced that moment of despair on first hearing Schoenberg "explained" in those terms, that feeling of disbelief that anyone would bother to write, listen to, or study music conceived in such a way. What Craft achieved with Stravinsky was simply what any sensible music teacher would at once see as necessary: he transmitted his own enthusiasm for the actual music, and only then, when pressed, showed how the music and the method interacted—how this particular music came out of this particular set of procedures, exactly as one might do in analyzing a Josquin motet ot a Bach fugue. After all, only a simpleton really imagines that large-scale pieces of music can be written without any structural or thematic scaffolding. The one question that matters is whether the music itself makes one want to fnid out how it is made.

Stravinsky never grew to like Schoenberg as much as Craft did, but as regards its musical substance the scales fell from his ears. The Suite, written in the mid-twenties, is a rich, strongly wrought, if sometimes hard-working piece, not always felicitous in its scoring (for three clarinets, piano, and string trio), but, from the very first chord, musicall compelling. Stravinsky knew at once that it could not be ignored. And suddenly its method began to intrigue him. For much of the day after the first rehearsal, he practiced writing canons—a device fundamental to serialism; and the day after that they dined with Thomas Mann and surely discussed Schoenberg. "Tradition," Stravinsky remarked, "carries the good artist on its shoulder as St Christopher carried the Lord," an observation that fits Schoenberg at least as well as himself. The following Sunday (the 17th of February), he drafted part of the canonic setting of the penultimate verse of "Tomorrow shall be my dancing day," then went to another rehearsal of the Suite. Musically, there is not even a remote similarity between Schoenberg's work and what Stravinsky was writing, yet there cannot be any doubt that Stravinsky was in a sense using the Suite as a model. Soon afterwards, the main theme of the opening emerged, apparently spontaneously, from a phrase of "The maidens came," and for some reason Stravinsky decided to treat it as a series. It has eleven notes, including several duplicates (unlike a true Schoenberg "row," in which there are always twelve different notes), and this lends it a simple, tonal flavor completely unlike any serial melody by Schoenberg. By the time Craft conducted his performance of the Suite on the 24th, the long carol setting, for tenor, two flutes, and a cello, was practically complete in outline. Stravinsky still had no clear idea of what he was writing. He had one three-minute song, one fifteen-minute one, and a fragment of a third, and he had been so absorbed in the intricacies of the work that he had not even noticed, for instance, that his flautists were being expected to play for a quarter of an hour almost without drawing breath. He ahd not decided whether he was writing a song cycle or, if so, how many songs it would contain. Never in his life had he been so detached from any idea of the final product.

"Tomorrow shall be my dancing day" would be the centerpiece of the Cantata, of course.

On the whole, though . . . I'd like to concentrate on the Prelude to Agon, its similarities to the long-before-composed Symphonies of Wind Instruments, and the ways in which it points to the later numbers in the ballet, both "tonal" and atonal.

Is the Prelude tonal? Why or why not?

[DavidW]

On the whole, though . . . I'd like to concentrate on the Prelude to Agon, its similarities to the long-before-composed Symphonies of Wind Instruments, and the ways in which it points to the later numbers in the ballet, both "tonal" and atonal.

Is the Prelude tonal? Why or why not?[/font]

I've listened to it a few times, and I think that Prelude is tonal.  The reason that I think that the Prelude is tonal is that I hear melodies, how can atonal music be melodic?  And also it sounds structured. While 12 tone music is highly structured, to the ear (or my ear specifically) it doesn't sound structured but almost random.  The Prelude doesn't sound that way.  Well there might be certain passages that do sound that way, but most of the prelude has that coherent tonal sound to it.

[karlhenning]

I've listened to it a few times, and I think that Prelude is tonal.  The reason that I think that the Prelude is tonal is that I hear melodies, how can atonal music be melodic?

Certainly it can! Though the question of how it can is a tangent . . . .

Do we hear any triads in the Prelude?

[karlhenning]

Interesting comparison to Symphonies of Wind Instruments - another Stravinsky work that ranks very high in my estimation.  Regarding the tonal center of the Prelude, I have seen analyses which consider it in C Major (of course, C Major shining through the Stravinsky prism) - but without the score in front of me I cannot support that claim with anything more concrete.

Score or no . . . do you hear any triads in the Prelude, Leon?  I think one could argue that it is "in C" . . . .