| Ritual and Alienation, Two Themes in the Music of Stravinsky and Its Reception | ||
| Professor Margaret
Notley
MUMH 5200, Fall 2003 (may be taken as a 6000-level course with the permission of the instructor) Mondays and Wednesdays, 1:00-2:20, MU 295 |
From
such early works as Rite of Spring and The Wedding
to one of the very last, Requiem
Canticles, Stravinsky showed a marked interest in overtly
ritualistic subject matter, both sacred and secular.
Throughout his life, he also showed a preference for an aura of
distance and denaturalization in his compositions, drawing in his works
for stage on such diverse sources as innovations in Russian theater and
the masks of ancient Greek tragedy.
Even in instrumental compositions, he achieved similar effects of
alienation by, for example, separating a tonal idiom from settings in
which it had seemingly natural meaning and then emphasizing the lack of
fit between it and the new context that he had created for it. This course will cover a great deal of repertory by Stravinsky, treating both the techniques employed in the service of an aesthetic that favored ritual and alienation and the cultural sources of that aesthetic.
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