The Birth of the Modern
As the Bard Music Festival gets ready to celebrate “Stravinsky and His World” beginning this weekend, I found my thoughts turning to painting.
A relatively unheralded young Spanish artist completed a large canvas in the year 1907. He called it “The Bordello of Avinyó Street” (an address in Barcelona); it has come down to us as “The Young Ladies of Avignon.” It depicts five women, prostitutes presumably, head-on, but in no way recognizable to us or anyone who saw it at the time.
The women’s nude bodies are flattened on the canvas, fractured as if seen through prisms. Their faces are angular with wide, dislocated, staring eyes; two appear to have African tribal masks superimposed over them. The entire impression is tortured, confrontational, and deeply disturbing – exactly as the artist intended.
Between the time Pablo Picasso painted his “Demoiselles d’Avignon” and its first widely-seen exhibition in 1916, another relative unknown, the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, witnessed the sensational, riot-inducing debut of his ballet score for “The Rite of Spring,” in 1913. Like Picasso’s masterpiece (which, incidentally, should be viewed with a simple trip to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City), Stravinsky’s shocked the world, and for not dissimilar reasons.
While it sometimes can be complicated to compare movements in art and music (the musical “Impressionism” of Debussy and Ravel, for example, took place decades after the Impressionist artists had disbanded), it is almost impossible to avoid the parallels between Picasso and Stravinsky.
Both reached back to primitive sources and injected them into a thoroughly modern framework, in the process breaking all the rules and cultural expectations that had prevailed for generations. Each had a lengthy career propelled by a single, defining masterwork. Instead of beauty or easy pleasure, they gave us violent emotions, irony, detachment, and even ugliness as art.
In short, they gave us the modern.
As tempting as it is to focus on Stravinsky’s seminal work (along with the inevitable indulgence in his pre-Rite favorite, “The Firebird”), he produced a vast, chameleon-like oeuvre, not unlike Picasso. Stravinsky at various times dabbled in Neo-Classicism, Romanticism, and even that most austere of modernist practices, serial, or twelve-tone, music (which had been “invented” by Schoenberg). But although Stravinsky’s music covers a wide range, it also has certain identifiable qualities, often a kind of astringency, with spare orchestration and reedy winds in his mature works.
Fortunately, the Bard Music Festival is offering a bracingly diverse and abundant trove of riches. So much so that it is difficult to recommend any one program in the two-week extravaganza. The opening night is as good a place to start as any. It features Stravinsky’s Neo-Classic masterpiece, the “Symphony of Psalms,” composed in 1930 for chorus and orchestra. This haunting, mysterious three-movement work has as its middle movement a truly awesome double-fugue.
The final concert on the second weekend is devoted to two of Stravinsky’s exceptional choral works, the “opera-oratorio” Oedipus Rex and the “melodrama” Persephone. In between these first and last concerts is a cornucopia of great music, much, though not all, from the 20th century. Highlights include the rarely heard Schoenberg vocal piece “Pierrot Lunaire,” Stravinsky’s delightful Symphony in Three Movements, choral music by Bach, Gesualdo, Poulenc, and others, and of course, the “Rite.”
A relatively unheralded young Spanish artist completed a large canvas in the year 1907. He called it “The Bordello of Avinyó Street” (an address in Barcelona); it has come down to us as “The Young Ladies of Avignon.” It depicts five women, prostitutes presumably, head-on, but in no way recognizable to us or anyone who saw it at the time.
The women’s nude bodies are flattened on the canvas, fractured as if seen through prisms. Their faces are angular with wide, dislocated, staring eyes; two appear to have African tribal masks superimposed over them. The entire impression is tortured, confrontational, and deeply disturbing – exactly as the artist intended.
Between the time Pablo Picasso painted his “Demoiselles d’Avignon” and its first widely-seen exhibition in 1916, another relative unknown, the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, witnessed the sensational, riot-inducing debut of his ballet score for “The Rite of Spring,” in 1913. Like Picasso’s masterpiece (which, incidentally, should be viewed with a simple trip to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City), Stravinsky’s shocked the world, and for not dissimilar reasons.
While it sometimes can be complicated to compare movements in art and music (the musical “Impressionism” of Debussy and Ravel, for example, took place decades after the Impressionist artists had disbanded), it is almost impossible to avoid the parallels between Picasso and Stravinsky.
Both reached back to primitive sources and injected them into a thoroughly modern framework, in the process breaking all the rules and cultural expectations that had prevailed for generations. Each had a lengthy career propelled by a single, defining masterwork. Instead of beauty or easy pleasure, they gave us violent emotions, irony, detachment, and even ugliness as art.
In short, they gave us the modern.
As tempting as it is to focus on Stravinsky’s seminal work (along with the inevitable indulgence in his pre-Rite favorite, “The Firebird”), he produced a vast, chameleon-like oeuvre, not unlike Picasso. Stravinsky at various times dabbled in Neo-Classicism, Romanticism, and even that most austere of modernist practices, serial, or twelve-tone, music (which had been “invented” by Schoenberg). But although Stravinsky’s music covers a wide range, it also has certain identifiable qualities, often a kind of astringency, with spare orchestration and reedy winds in his mature works.
Fortunately, the Bard Music Festival is offering a bracingly diverse and abundant trove of riches. So much so that it is difficult to recommend any one program in the two-week extravaganza. The opening night is as good a place to start as any. It features Stravinsky’s Neo-Classic masterpiece, the “Symphony of Psalms,” composed in 1930 for chorus and orchestra. This haunting, mysterious three-movement work has as its middle movement a truly awesome double-fugue.
The final concert on the second weekend is devoted to two of Stravinsky’s exceptional choral works, the “opera-oratorio” Oedipus Rex and the “melodrama” Persephone. In between these first and last concerts is a cornucopia of great music, much, though not all, from the 20th century. Highlights include the rarely heard Schoenberg vocal piece “Pierrot Lunaire,” Stravinsky’s delightful Symphony in Three Movements, choral music by Bach, Gesualdo, Poulenc, and others, and of course, the “Rite.”