Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons

by Igor Stravinsky, George A. Seferis (Preface by), Arthur Knodel (Translator), Ingolf Dahl (Translator)

Overview

One of the greatest of contemporary composers has here set down in delightfully personal fashion his general ideas about music and some accounts of his own experience as a composer. Every concert-goer and lover of music will take keen pleasure in his notes about the essential features of music, the process of musical composition, inspiration, musical types, and musical execution. Throughout the volume are to he found trenchant comments on such subjects as Wagnerism, the operas of Verdi, musical taste, musical snobbery, the influence of political ideas on Russian music under the Soviets, musical improvisation as opposed to musical construction, the nature of melody, and the function of the critic of music. Musical people of every sort will welcome this first presentation in English of an unusually interesting book.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674678569
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	02/26/1970
Series:	The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures , #30
Edition description:	Revised Edition
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.25(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) was one of the twentieth century’s most admired and influential composers, conductors, and music theorists. His ballets and symphonies, including The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring, cemented his central place in the evolution of musical modernism.

George Seferis (1900–1971) was a Nobel Prize–winning Greek poet, essayist, and diplomat. One of the most influential Greek authors of his generation, he received honorary doctorates from Cambridge, Oxford, and Princeton, and was made an honorary foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. From 1957 to 1962, he served as Greek Ambassador to the United Kingdom.

Table of Contents

Preface by George Seferis

1. Getting Acquainted

2. The Phenomenon of Music

3. The Composition of Music

4. Musical Typology

5. The Avatars of Russian Music

6. The Performance of Music

Epilogue

Editorial Reviews

A quintessence of Stravinsky's reactions to the phenomenon of music. Poetics of Music offers the most coherent statement of the unchanging values behind Stravinsky's many apparent shifts of manner: his insistence, for example, that music should be a revelation of a higher order to be faithfully executed by the performer, rather than a medium of self-expression to be interpreted. Above all, the composer must submit to rules, no matter how arbitrary, for ‘the more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self of the chains that shackle the spirit.’

Musical Times - G. W. Hopkins

[These lectures] provide penetrating glimpses into the thought processes of Stravinsky's mind. While dealing with his chosen topics—the phenomenon of music, the composition of music, musical typology, the avatars of Russian music, and the performance of music—he reveals his reverence for tradition, order and discipline.

The American Recorder