Stravinsky Inside Out

Rating:
Summary: Thoughtful, fresh, and controversial
Review: I found this book to be an extremely new and interesting look into the mind and personal life of Igor Stravinsky. Understanding the artist as a person helps us to understand and appreciate the art he creates.

In response to Craig Matteson... everyone is entitled to their opinon (and of course, no better place to put one's opinon but in a review). However, Mr. Matteson was off on one point (well, in my opinon, he was off on MANY points, but I'll only discuss one). Joseph has written a very thorough book entitled Stravinsky and the Piano in which he studies Stavinsky's "actual piano music performance scores" in detail - fingerings and markings included. Maybe Mr. Matteson is unaware of this book because it is only available to music scholars, which quite obviously, he is not. So it makes perfect sense to me why Joseph did not include such information in this book. A) he already wrote a book about this, and B) this book is about Stravinsky's split lives (the person vs. the public composer) - therefore the scores and fingerings are obtuse.

Rating:
Summary: He was his own greatest composition
Review: Stravinsky, whether you like him or not, was one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. Alternately deified by his collaborators (like Ballanchine, W.H. Auden, and Robert Craft), or villified as a worthless hack by Schoenberg and his accolytes, the truth lies somewhere in between those extremes. While the composer has not lacked for documentation of his life (notably his own Autobiography, and the "conversation books" edited by Robert Craft), there's still a need to balance facts with Stravinsky's own carefully constructed fictions. Few artists in any discipline have been more self-conscious of their public image than Stravinsky, and there is a real need to sort out how much of the composer's lifestory was his own invention. Joseph's well-written, meticulously researched book stops short of being a hatchet-job, but isn't afraid to display the idol's clay feet. (If fact, there's a nude photo of the composer in the book, so you'll see more than just his feet!) Joseph leaves the musicological analysis to others, and provides an engaging, provocative look at the man behind the hype. Turns out, like most human beings, he had his share of flaws as well as moments of genius.

Rating:
Summary: Fluff
Review: This book is remarkably light. It is a breezy discussion of Stravinsky from the viewpoint of a fan interested in the man more in terms of gossip than insight, with a big mis-step in its irrelevant focus on Stravinksy's son and the hardships of being Stravinsky's son. Does this have anything to do with Stravinsky's music. It is gossip, trite.

Rating:
Summary: Worth reading, some great points, but ...
Review: We seem to be at an unfortunate stage of music history writing. The approach of many books, including this one, is the antithesis of the hero worship books written by the shelf-full not too many decades ago. Do we really need this style of book as an antidote? To me, it seems to belabor the obvious that composers, even the very greatest, such as Brahms, Mahler, and Stravinsky, should be mere mortals after all.

Why is it important at all that we point out moments or even decades of pettiness, vainglory, or difficult family relations? How exactly is that supposed to help us understand the art? Why not write a book about a fellow named Bob who lives down your down the street and his ordinary to miserable life?

Of course, we don't write about Bob down the street because he is ordinary and he isn't Stravinsky. Haven't we long ago realized that even Stravinsky the composer is something other than Stravinsky the husband, father, or businessman. Of course extraordinary people have much about them that is quite ordinary.

Some feel that knowing the artist as a human being helps us understand his art. Maybe on the margins it could, but only children believe that a composer was necessarily sad when writing a sad piece or happy when writing a happy piece and so on. Nothing Mr. Joseph tells us about the composition of The Flood helps us understand how it comes out of a Stravinsky. (Even if the author is trying to put forward that in this case it DIDN'T come out of Stravinsky).

Don't get me wrong, this book by Charles Joseph isn't bad. Really, it has much to recommend it and I am glad that I read it and hope you do too. But I was frustrated by the mixing in of well known stories and photographs into a book that claimed to be revealing new things based upon new access to Stravinsky's papers and artifacts in Basel. It isn't that there isn't anything new or semi-new, it is that it isn't set apart from the ho-hum there's that old chestnut again regurgitation of Stravinsky tales.

It is like going to a dinner party and listening across the table to a very knowledgeable guest who tells a few enthralling tales about a very interesting subject, but then spoils the enchantment by going on too long by telling a few too many tales that have no spark or wit about them.

Joseph also doesn't follow up on things that ARE really interesting. For example, when he discusses the actual piano music performance scores that Stravinsky used and the interesting fingerings the composer used as a performer. But we don't get a picture of even one page of those piano scores nor do we get even a hint as to why Stravinsky's written in fingerings are telling. As a pianist of sorts, I can surmise why Stravinsky's fingerings would be interesting, but it would be nice to get even a bit of discussion on such an interesting topic. I would have traded all of those re-printed pictures for one or two of the actual new material and one page of the marked-up piano music.

Yes, there is a 1983 text available through ProQuest that talks about Stravinsky's piano music, but Mr. Joseph indicates in the book that there were new things learned from his seeing the materials in Switzerland. In any case, this book is generally available and his 1983 book is not. Again, why reprint the nude photo of Stravinsky that is NOT original to this book and leave out something that would be valuable and a real contribution such as Stravinsky's piano fingerings?

It would be a real service if Mr. Joseph (or SOMEONE) put together an edition of the piano works with those fingerings in them. Not that pianists will necessarily use those precise fingerings, but they would certainly aid in understanding how the composer himself interpreted the piece.

Especially annoying to me was yet another tired discussion about Robert Craft. Mr. Joseph does demonstrate that Mr. Craft did play a significant role in the genesis of Stravinsky's work "The Flood". The author approaches the point of almost intimating that Craft is at least the co-composer of "The Flood", but never is bold enough to make that accusation. My guess is because for all the support and creative priming that Craft provided for Stravinsky, the evidence is that the composer did indeed compose the music himself. For heaven's sake, every composer since music began based it on some other creative spark or borrowed a theme from another work or even included suggestions from performers for whom the work was written. Composition is not done in a vacuum chamber on the dark side of the moon!

However, anyone who knows anything at all about Stravinsky's output from the fifties onward knows that Craft did us all a tremendous service. Why anyone wants to criticize Craft is beyond me. Unless someone wants to make the case that Stravinsky simply signed his name to Craft's scores and present real evidence they should either whine to people who care or thank Craft for the music he enabled Stravinsky to make in the fifties and sixties.

All in all, it easy for us in our age of sarcasm and witless irony to see the flaws of books that extol our favorite composers as heroes or as flawless paragons of humanity. My suspicion is that it won't take too many more years for people to turn their backs on the recent spate of books that take as their mission the whittling down of the tree of the great artist to a toothpick of a human. It is just too easy to write about human failings. We don't learn much at all about the art from such books and they are tiresome to read.

Finally, I am curious about the surmise that I am not a music scholar? By what definition? In europe a student is a scholar. Over here, what is the definition of a scholar? One who agrees with your points of view? I happen to have spent seven years at the University of Michigan School of Music and have a degree in music theory and several years of graduate school before my life took a different direction. But I have always played my piano and kept up on music. So, my views are not uninformed.