Stravinsky’s ear for instruments
Book chapter
Dromey, C. 2020. Stravinsky’s ear for instruments. in: Griffiths, G. (ed.) Stravinsky in Context Cambridge University Press. pp. 170-178
Chapter title | Stravinsky’s ear for instruments |
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Authors | Dromey, C. |
Abstract | Do you remember the first time you heard the music of Igor Stravinsky? Or modernist music? My own teenage introduction to both was Ragtime (1917–18), our music teacher helping us join the dots between its particular strand of twentieth-century classical music and Scott Joplin’s evergreen rag, ‘The Entertainer’ (1902), which the pianists among us would struggle to play.1 Looking back, the muffled giggling which Ragtime provoked was due as much to the jolting introduction of its faint and weird-sounding cimbalom as to the relentless discontinuities that shape its phrasing, melody and timbre. To hear Stravinsky repeatedly is to understand how these innovations relate to one another, but the shock of having to process his music for the first time was real and literally physical. Here were strange folk- and jazz-inspired sounds, far removed from the Classical and Romantic orchestras that had framed our expectations of so-called classical music until that point. Ragtime’s sound was, and remains, quite alien |
Research Group | Music group |
Page range | 170-178 |
Book title | Stravinsky in Context |
Editors | Griffiths, G. |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Series | Composers in Context |
ISBN | |
Hardcover | 9781108422192 |
Electronic | 9781108381086 |
Electronic | 9781108390262 |
Publication dates | |
Online | 03 Dec 2020 |
17 Dec 2020 | |
Publication process dates | |
Deposited | 15 Jan 2020 |
Accepted | 31 Dec 2019 |
Output status | Published |
Accepted author manuscript | |
Copyright Statement | This material has been published in revised form in Stravinsky in Context edited by Graham Griffiths https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108381086. This version is free to view and download for private research and study only. Not for re-distribution or re-use. © Cambridge University Press, 2021 |
Digital Object Identifier (DOI) | https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108381086.024 |
Language | English |
https://repository.mdx.ac.uk/item/88vv4
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