VV(18): The night of the performance ...

[Dave Monroe]

"The night of the performance arrived." (V., Ch. 14,
Sec. ii, p. 412)

>From Paul Mitchinson, "Settling Scores: Richard
Taruskin Explores the Dark Side of Music," Lingua
Franca, (July?August 2001), pp. 34-43 ...

"Taruskin sggests that we should still be protesting
Stravinsky--at least in our hearts.  Early ballets
such as the Rite 'participated in the great stripdown
... from humanism to biologism,' he argues; its
primitivist score 'was originally heard (and is still
easily heard) as the annihilation of teh subject and
the denial of psychology.... Rarely has an
antihumanist message been so irresistibly
communicated.'" (p. 38)

Mitchinson may or may not be citing here ...

Taruskin, Richard.  Stravinsky and the Russian
   Tradition.  Berkeley: U of Cal P, 1985.

Which, unfortunately, I couldn't shell out for
($185.00 list), and I couldn't score in time from a
library intown here.  But I'll keep at it ... or
Mitchinson might be citing the lecture of Taruskin's
he attended.  To continue ...

"Taruskin devotes the second half of his talk to
Stravinsky's 1952 Cantata, which is set to words by
various English poets.  One of the movements, a
setting of the fifteenth-century Christmas carol
'To-morrow shall be my dancing day,' shows the aging
composer's growing interest in serial composition
techniques....  But isn't it starnge, asks Taruskin,
how the greatest minds of music theory have never
managed to address the actual text of the piece? 'The
Jews on me they made great suit,/ And with me made
great variance,/ Because they lov'd darkness rather
than light.'  It is the old libel of Jews as 'Christ
killers.'" (p. 39)

"The point is not that Stravinsky was personally
anti-Semitic, although he certainly wa.  It is that
Stravinsky and his modern defenders are indifferent to
the text or, even worse, believe that respect for a
work's 'artistic integrity' must always supersede
moral qualms.  In insisting on such 'integrity,' we
follow the artistic ethic of Stravinsky himself, who
preached slefless submission to teh composer's wishes.
 But 'how ethical,' Taruskin asks his audience, 'is an
ethic that holds artists and art lovers to be entitled
by their artistic commitment to moral indifference,
and the greater the artist, the greater the
entitlement?'" (ibid.)

Unfortunately not online, but ...

http://www.linguafranca.com/print/index.html

And see also Taruskin's Mussrogsky: Eight Essays and
an Epilogue (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1997) ...




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