Reassessing The Rite:
A CENTENNIAL CONFERENCE OCT 25 – OCT 28, 2012 UNIVERSITY ROOM | HYDE HALL THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL
• 1 Reassessing The Rite is made possible by a generous grant fromTheRiteofSpringat100.org The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Memorial Hall, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
2 • Reassessing The Rite: A Centennial Conference
Carolina Performing Arts and The Department of Music at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill welcome you to “Reassessing The Rite: A Centennial Conference.” This event is part of The Rite of Spring at 100, our 2012-13 year-long centenary celebration of the Paris premiere of The Rite of Spring. Carolina Performing Arts is presenting 12 newly commissioned works this season. Through partnerships this year with the Institute for the Arts and Humanities, the College of Arts and Sciences, the Departments of Music, Communication Studies, Art, English, and History, and the Ackland Art Museum, The Rite of Spring at 100 also incorporates faculty fellowships, visiting professorships, and nineteen courses that focus on the musical, artistic, historical, and literary impacts of The Rite of Spring.
Reassessing The Rite represents the first of two conferences in our celebration. The second will take place in May 2013 at the Moscow State Conservatory in Moscow, Russia. At The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the performing arts extend beyond the stage and into classrooms, laboratories, practice rooms, and studios. As we honor the centennial of The Rite of Spring, we also celebrate the interdisciplinary and innovative bonds this seminal work has created within us. We thank you for joining us for this year of discovery, debate, inspiration, and practice.
Severine Neff, Eugene Falk Distinguished Professor of Music The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Emil J. Kang, Executive Director for the Arts and Professor of the Practice of Music The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Co-Directors, The Rite of Spring at 100
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This conference has received the generous support of the following organizations and individuals: The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; Institute for the Arts and Humanities at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, John McGowan, Director; The Ackland Art Museum, Peter Nisbet, Chief Curator; Carolina Performing Arts: Reed Colver, Director of Campus and Community Engagement; Marnie Karmelita, Director of Artist Relations and Elizabeth Joyner, Project Coordinator; Duke University Dance Program; Brigid Cohen, Assistant Professor of Music, New York University; and at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: Terry Rhodes, Senior Associate Dean, College of Arts and Sciences; Donald J. Raleigh, Jay Richard Judson Distinguished Professor, Department of History; The Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies; Department of Music: Mark Katz, Chair, John Nรกdas, Gerhard L. Weinberg Distinguished Professor, Professors Allen Anderson, David Garcia, Lee Weisert, and Clara Yang; recent graduates Letitia Glozer and Daniel Guberman; doctoral students Christopher Reali and William Robin; and all of the graduate students of the Music Department who have so generously given their time and services to this event.
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SCHEDULE
THU, 25 OCTOBER
5-6PM
OPENING RECEPTION at the Ackland Art Museum
6:30PM WELCOME at Gerrard Hall Emil J. Kang, Executive Director for the Arts (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) Severine Neff, Eugene Falk Distinguished (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Professor of Music
6:45-7:45PM KEYNOTE ADDRESS Richard Taruskin (University of California at Berkeley) “Resisting The Rite”
8-9PM CONCERT at Memorial Hall
Studio for New Music Ensemble (Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory)
Igor Dronov, conductor
ZHIVOTOV
Fragments for nonet (1929)
MOSOLOV
Newspaper Advertisement (1926) arr. for soprano and ensemble by Edison Denisov (1981) Svetlana Savenko, soprano
SIDELNIKOV
Russian Tales for large ensemble (1968)
SCHNITTKE
Serenade (1968)
SERGEI SLONIMSKY Novgorod Dance (1981)
FRI, 26 OCTOBER
HYDE HALL, INSTITUTE FOR THE ARTS AND HUMANITIES
9:30AM WELCOME Terry Rhodes, Professor of Music and Senior Associate Dean, College of Arts and Sciences (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Mark Katz, Professor of Music and Chair of the Department of Music
(The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Donald J. Raleigh (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) “Stravinsky’s Russia: The Politics of Cultural Ferment”
Peter Nisbet (Ackland Art Museum, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) “Violence (Symbolic) and Violation (Stylistic) in the Visual Arts: The Case of the Russian Avant-Garde”
Kevin Bartig (Michigan State University) “Stravinsky, The Rite, and Prokofiev”
Mary Davis (Fashion Institute of Technology) “Styling Le Sacre: The Rite’s Role in French Fashion”
9:45AM NOON SESSION 1: The Rite in Russian History and Culture Matthew Franke (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), chair
LUNCH
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FRI, 26 OCTOBER CONT. 2-3PM SESSION 2: Keynote Address on Dance and The Rite Chris Wells (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), chair Lynn Garafola (Barnard College, Columbia University) “A Century of Rites: The Making of an Avant-Garde Tradition”
3PM BREAK
3:30-5:30PM SESSION 3: Dancing The Rite After Its Premiere Gina Bombola (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), chair Gabriele Brandstetter (Freie Universität, Berlin, Institute of Theater Research) “Resourcing The Rite: Le Sacre du Printemps and Yvonne Rainer’s RoS Indexical” Millicent Hodson (London, UK) “Death by Dancing in Nijinsky’s Rite” Stephanie Jordan (University of Roehampton, UK) “Sacre as a Dance: Recent Re-Visions or How to Make It New” Lynn Garafola (Barnard College, Columbia University), respondent
SAT, 27 OCTOBER
HYDE HALL AND PERSON HALL
8:45 10:30AM SESSION 4 (1): The Rite: Analysis and Compositional Practice (Hyde Hall) Daniel Guberman (East Carolina University), chair Severine Neff (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) “How Not to Hear Le Sacre du Printemps?: Schoenberg’s Theories, Leibowitz’s Recording” Gretchen Horlacher (Indiana University at Bloomington) “Rethinking Blocks and Superimposition: Form in the ‘Ritual of the Two Rival Tribes’” Stephen Walsh (Cardiff University) “The Rite of Spring: Dionysos Monometrikos” 10:30AM BREAK
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SCHEDULE CONT. SAT, 27 OCTOBER CONT.
10:45AM 12:30PM SESSION 4 (2): The Rite: Analysis and Compositional Practice (Hyde Hall) Christopher Bowen (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), chair Lynne Rogers (William Paterson University) “Revisiting The Rite in Stravinsky’s Later Serial Music” Ildar Khannanov (The Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University) “Rimsky-Korsakov to Stravinsky: Gifts Other than Octatonicism” Maureen Carr (Pennsylvania State University) “Stravinsky at the Crossroads after The Rite: Jeu de Rossignol Mécanique [Performance of the Mechanical Nightingale] (1 August 1913)” LUNCH 1:30-3:00PM SESSION 5 (1): PANEL DISCUSSION: Stravinsky and The Rite in Twentieth-Century Russia (Hyde Hall) Kevin Bartig (Michigan State University), chair Svetlana Savenko (Moscow State Conservatory) “Le Sacre du Printemps at Home” Elena Vereschagina (Musical College, Moscow State Conservatory) “I’ve Penetrated the Mystery of Spring Lapidary Rhythms’: Stravinsky and Baroque Topoi in The Rite” Tatiana Vereschagina (Musical College, Moscow State Conservatory) “‘The Great Sacrifice’: Contextualizing the Dream” 3:00-4:15PM SESSION 5 (2): Tribute to the Late Russian Theorist Yuri Kholopov (1932–2003) (Hyde Hall) Oren Vinogradov (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), chair Grigoriy Lyzhov (Moscow State Conservatory) “The Rite of Spring in the Analytical Essays of Yuri Kholopov” Valentina Kholopova (Moscow State Conservatory) “‘I Am in Everybody, and Everybody Is in Me:’ Stravinsky in the Musical Texts of his Time” (paper read by Ildar Khannanov)
4:15PM BREAK
4:30-5:30PM SESSION 6: KEYNOTE PANEL (Person Hall) Will Robin (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), chair Michael Beckerman (New York University) Vladimir Tarnopolski (Moscow State Conservatory) Richard Taruskin (University of California at Berkeley) Pieter van den Toorn (University of California at Santa Barbara)
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SUN, 28 OCTOBER
HYDE HALL, INSTITUTE FOR THE ARTS AND HUMANITIES
9:30-10:15AM SESSION 7: KEYNOTE LECTURE ON MUSIC THEORY David VanderHamm (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), chair Pieter van den Toorn (University of California at Santa Barbara) “The Physicality of The Rite and Its Source: Remarks on the Forces of Meter and their Disruption” 10:30AM 12:30PM SESSION 8: Locating The Rite: Cultural Perspectives Naomi Graber (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), chair Annegret Fauser (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) “Le
Sacre du Printemps: Un Ballet…Français?”
Brigid Cohen (New York University) “The Rite on the Road: Travel, Displacement, and the Ballets Russes” Marianne Kielian-Gilbert (Indiana University at Bloomington) “Experiencing Sex-Gender Dissonance in The Rite” Tamara Levitz (University of California at Los Angeles) “Why 1913?” LUNCH 1:45-2:45PM PLENARY DISCUSSION: “The Rite Today” Severine Neff (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), chair Lynn Garafola (Barnard College, Columbia University) Gabrielle Brandstetter (Freie Universität, Berlin, Institute of Theater Research) Millicent Hodson (London, UK) Maureen Carr (Pennsylvania State University) Svetlana Savenko (Moscow State Conservatory) Vladimir Tarnopolski (Moscow State Conservatory) Richard Taruskin (University of California at Berkeley) Pieter van den Toorn (University of California at Santa Barbara) Stephen Walsh (Cardiff University)
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ABSTRACTS “STRAVINSKY, THE RITE, AND PROKOFIEV” Kevin Bartig, Michigan State University Just days after the premiere of The Rite of Spring, Sergei Prokofiev embarked on his first trip outside of Russia. Stravinsky’s ballet was still fresh news when Prokofiev arrived in Paris, and the young composer immediately sought out the impresario behind the succès de scandale. Prokofiev soon gained entry to Diaghilev’s circle, and subsequently began a two-decade-long acquaintance with Stravinsky. Scholars have typically characterized the pair’s relationship as unequal, with the younger Prokofiev either imitating or rejecting Stravinsky’s musical models. But a wealth of newly available source material reveals that Prokofiev held far more nuanced opinions of his compatriot’s work. In this presentation, I revisit their creative friendship in light of this evidence, giving particular attention to how musical and audiovisual aspects of The Rite shaped Prokofiev’s creative outlook in different and occasionally contradictory ways.
“RESOURCING THE RITE: LE SACRE DU PRINTEMPS AND YVONNE RAINER’S RoS INDEXICAL” Gabriele Brandstetter, Freie Universität, Berlin, Institute of Theater Research What does it mean today for a choreographer to accept the challenge of producing a new version of Le Sacre du Printemps? How would a new production refer to the tradition of Sacre choreographies since 1913 or possibly re-trace the sources of the Stravinsky/Nijinsky masterpiece? My lecture will consider such questions in light of Yvonne Rainer’s production of RoS Indexical (2007). How does Rainer, a postmodernist dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker, reinvent Nijinsky’s choreography? Specifically, how is she interpreting the riot at Le Sacre’s premiere by evoking the work’s performance history in her rethinking of The Rite?
“STRAVINSKY AT THE CROSSROADS AFTER THE RITE: JEU DE ROSSIGNOL MÉCANIQUE [PERFORMANCE OF THE MECHANICAL NIGHTINGALE] (1 AUGUST 1913)” Maureen Carr, Pennsylvania State University “He says that he has tried to continue the work in the older style, and that where differences are found they must be taken as the result of unconscious forces which are too strong for him.” – Igor Stravinsky (1914) Soon after the first performance of Le Sacre du Printemps (29 May 1913) at the Théâtre des Champs Élysées in Paris, Stravinsky resumed work on Le Rossignol [The Nightingale] – an
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opera that he started in 1908 but abandoned in 1910 when he began working on The Rite. He completed Le Rossignol [The Nightingale] in 1914 – the first performance taking place on 26 May 1914 at the Théâtre de l’Opéra in Paris. Evidence that Stravinsky was mediating between the strident nature of The Rite and the mellifluous quality of passages written for The Nightingale before The Rite, is found in a definitive musical sketch (Paul Sacher Stiftung) for “Jeu du rossignol mécanique” [“Performance of the Mechanical Nightingale”] in which Stravinsky wrote Очень доволен! [I am very satisfied!] 19 vii 1 viii 1913 [7/19 8/1 1913]. A PowerPoint presentation will show how Stravinsky moved from sketch to score for this passage, in comparison with earlier sketches for The Nightingale, some of which are interspersed with those for The Rite.
“THE RITE ON THE ROAD: TRAVEL, DISPLACEMENT, AND THE BALLETS RUSSES” Brigid Cohen, New York University The Rite of Spring has understandably invited a nationally oriented interpretation in light of its stylized construction of a primitive Russian past, created for the delectation and scandal of Parisian audiences. Yet the estranging multimedia innovations of The Rite also call out for less “rooted” interpretive perspectives. Among other relevant circumstances, the ballet’s rehearsals took place in Budapest and Monte Carlo before the group finally returned to Paris – an itinerary that speaks to the restlessly mobile conditions of the troupe’s existence. More to the point, the Ballets Russes and its creative associates (including Igor Stravinsky) exemplify the kind of geographically unsettled, vanguardist community that Raymond Williams identified as engaging in “endless border-crossing at a time [in the early twentieth century] when frontiers were starting to become much more strictly policed.” By Williams’s account, such border-crossings – and the cosmopolitan experience they fostered – contributed to the transformation of formal conventions in the arts. They “naturalized the thesis of the non-natural status” of language and other modes of signification, fostering a heightened consciousness of aesthetic forms as both arbitrary and changeable. In this talk, I question the extent to which this understanding of vanguard cosmopolitanism enhances or constrains historical interpretations of The Rite and its formal experimentations. Drawing on historically situated, close readings of The Rite as a multimedia collaboration, I also consider whether the “national” fixations of The Rite might be seen less as a natural expression of national identity and more as an effect of repeated uprooting.
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ABSTRACTS CONT. “STYLING LE SACRE: THE RITE’S ROLE IN FRENCH FASHION” Mary Davis, Fashion Institute of Technology From its earliest days in Paris, Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes was a fashion sensation, sparking new trends in haute couture, popular dress, and interior design. Looks featured in Diaghilev’s productions migrated from the stage to the street, communicated in collaborations that involved his artists with top couturiers such as Jeanne Paquin and Coco Chanel, and became popularized via the more conventional routes of media coverage and celebrity emulation. The presentation of Russian identity was crucially important to the Ballets Russes, and to this end costumes provided an immediate and compelling means of exposing an excavated past. The translation of these stage looks into wearable clothing created as an expedient way of constructing a “Russian” style that could in turn be integrated into the lexicon of Parisian fashion. This paper explores the ways in which the Paris fashion enterprise absorbed and re-conceptualized the deep Russian past – as represented in the historicizing costumes, coiffures, and cosmetics of The Rite of Spring – to create looks considered to be au courant, tasteful, and appropriate in the French capital. Drawing on evidence including commentaries, illustrations, and photographs published in contemporary fashion and style journals, it illuminates the development of French chic around a Russian core and traces the evolution of this sensibility – and its resonance with shifting conceptions of modernism – from the ballet’s 1913 premiere to its 1921 Chanel-financed revival.
“LE SACRE DU PRINTEMPS: UN BALLET…FRANÇAIS?” Annegret Fauser, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill It has become a commonplace to read Stravinsky’s and Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring as a work defined by its Russianness, whether in terms of its staging and its choreography, or with respect to its music. Yet for all the painstaking detective work that traces its Russian sources and for all the unspoken essentialism this entails, this mythologizing interpretation of the work often ignores the local context of the work’s genesis and reception. By re-locating Le Sacre du Printemps in 1913 Paris, I propose a view of the ballet as a French production steeped in local specificity. Drawing on recent theories of cultural mobility and translation studies, research on French ballet and music halls, and publications on such spectacles as world’s fairs and so-called “zoos humains,” I read Le Sacre as a quintessentially Parisian artifact, tailored to an elite audience that valued the exotic as a marker of cosmopolitan nationalism. Seen in this light, the apparent scandal of the premiere had less to do with “shocking” sights and sounds than with mixed messages and missing signposts.
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KEYNOTE ADDRESS ON DANCE “A CENTURY OF RITES: THE MAKING OF AN AVANT-GARDE TRADITION” Lynn Garafola, Barnard College, Columbia University Since the premiere of The Rite of Spring in 1913, scores of choreographic works to the celebrated Stravinsky music have seen the light of day. Most have vanished as quickly as Nijinsky’s original ballet. But they keep coming; seemingly the idea of the now-legendary work coupled with its memorable score poses a challenge few can resist. What accounts for the ballet’s staying power? What ideologies and impulses do these Rites seem to espouse, what conventions do they reject, and why have they retained their imaginative force? I argue that The Rite of Spring, precisely because it is a lost ballet, comprises a body of ideas rather than a detailed choreographic script, and that this conceptual freedom allows both for the ballet’s reinvention and for the persistence of ideas associated with the original. One group of ideas centers on the ballet’s transgressiveness – its primitivism, violence, modernity, and repudiation of traditional ballet aesthetics. From this perspective The Rite is a model of formal radicalism, a dance that says “no” to the status quo. At the same time The Rite belongs to ballet’s canon. It was produced by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, an heir to the nineteenthcentury Franco-Russian tradition and the progenitor of its twentieth-century descendants. It was produced on a grand scale, and its central conceit – the death of the maiden – has a long ballet history. From the first, The Rite declared its centrality to ballet history, even as it rejected the conventions of the past. Since 1913, choreographers have approached The Rite from numerous vantage points. Some have emphasized its violence, others its sexuality, primitivism, and terror. A few have thrown out the original scenario and the full score; most have discarded its ethnographic trimmings. Although most productions stress the ensemble, there has been at least one heroic solo version. Initially, ballet choreographers, albeit those identified as modernists, created the versions that followed Nijinsky’s Rite. Subsequently, most of the ballet’s choreographers were associated with modern dance. But whatever the choreographer’s aesthetic position, The Rite continues to be a work that insists upon its modernity, its engagement with the contemporary world. For, ultimately, what each new version seeks to resurrect is the ballet’s original transgressive moment, its modernist persona, both as an act of resistance and as a means of claiming membership in a performance tradition that defies the ephemeral nature of dance through continuous reinvention.
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ABSTRACTS CONT. “DEATH BY DANCING IN NIJINSKY’S RITE” Millicent Hodson, London, UK In this talk, I shall present video extracts from my reconstruction with Kenneth Archer of the 1913 Rite of Spring. In relation to these performance extracts from companies in Russia, Finland, Poland, Monaco, Japan, and the U.S., I will raise the following issues about Nijinsky’s dance: the ethics of sacrifice in the ballet, isolation and collective action as organizing principles of the body, and the ensemble and rhythmic formalism as the key to what Nijinsky called “new dance.” Our culture regularly sends its young to die in brutal battle. Jean Cocteau and other contemporaries of Nijinsky claimed that Le Sacre du Printemps prefigured the sacrifice of their generation in what they called “The Great War.” What are the ethics of sacrifice revealed in the ballet? What was Nijinsky’s role in shaping the ethics demonstrated on stage? What is the nature of responsibility in The Rite? Individuality and collective action are in constant tension in this ballet. Nijinsky pointed the way to modern dance with his redefinitions of the body, stage space, and the very subject of dance. He pointed further to postmodernism by making every dancer a soloist in The Rite. It is a ballet about massed energy, but isolation is as fundamental to the choreography as communal effects: movement of one part of the body while the rest is static; movement of one group while all others remain still; deepening degrees of separation for the Chosen One as the sacrificial solo approaches. I will discuss choreographic methods used by Nijinsky to achieve these effects. But the focus will be on the significance for audiences then and now of Nijinsky’s methods. The Chosen One’s solo is an ordeal of exhaustion, not physical attack. Does it tell us something about his own life as an artist? Why did The Rite provoke chauvinistic responses about Russia, not only in France but also in England, in the run-up to the war? Was the Ballets Russes a forerunner of cultures made migratory by social upheaval in the twentieth century? Why was there a riot at the premiere, and can we decode its progress during the performance? What is the brutality of Le Sacre? The purpose of our reconstruction was to turn the legend of this ballet back into an artifact. The presentation will not focus on choreographic proof of the reconstruction, on which Archer and I have widely published. Instead it will consider the resulting artifact and ask what it means.
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“RETHINKING BLOCKS AND SUPERIMPOSITION: FORM IN THE ‘RITUAL OF THE TWO RIVAL TRIBES’” Gretchen Horlacher, Indiana University at Bloomington “Form is taking shape out of the synthesis of rhythms; and the thing formed produces a new rhythm.”– Igor Stravinsky We often describe Stravinsky’s formal innovations as blocks and layered superimpositions. In some cases, contrasting blocks alternate in unpredictable ways, challenging common tonal notions of form as continuous and directed. In others, contrasting layers of melodic fragments and ostinato repeat simultaneously, challenging common tonal notions about the interrelations of a contrapuntal fabric. These techniques abound in The Rite; consider the alternating blocks in “Naming and Honoring of the Chosen One,” versus the superimposed voices that conclude the “Procession of the Oldest and Wisest One.” But more often than not, Stravinsky’s textures are considerably more complex than these examples; blocks may be short or long, fragmented or compressed, and may be complicated by the addition of new voices. The voices of a superimposition often enter and exit, sometimes seemingly at will and at others in the precisely controlled playing out of a larger pattern. In other words, blocks and superimpositions form the outer ends of a spectrum of repetition-driven formal schemes, and their textural manipulations are endlessly inventive. I will trace the various textural manipulations of blocks and layers in the particularly driven “Ritual of the Two Rival Tribes.” At its opening, separate groups of dancers constantly change size and movements; but subsequently they join in one larger circle whose inward movement surrounds the arriving Sage in a very tight space. Stravinsky’s music mirrors this process of compression, moving from separate musical blocks to those which overlap and interrupt each other, gradually culminating in a superimposition whose repetitions become increasingly strict. I will trace this emerging form – Stravinsky’s “synthesis of rhythms” and the production of a “new rhythm” – through his manipulations of melody, counterpoint, register, and instrumentation.
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ABSTRACTS CONT. “LE SACRE AS A DANCE: RECENT RE-VISIONS, OR HOW TO MAKE IT NEW” Stephanie Jordan, Roehampton University No score other than Le Sacre du Printemps can boast such a tradition of dance productions. Hundreds of choreographers over the century have been both thrilled by the power and energy of Stravinsky’s score and shocked by its statement. Fascination with that ambiguity has given rise to a range of treatments: casts both large and small, period as well as contemporary settings, different narrative approaches, and cultural diversity. Perhaps prompted by the 1987 Nijinsky reconstruction and a surge of interest in the Sacre legacy, some choreographers, especially since the 1980s, have explored its theme with a new sense of irony and fresh awareness of the burden of its past. According to their terms, no longer can this score be danced “straight.” It is perhaps, too, as if Pina Bausch’s 1975 Sacre, which has achieved classic status, represented the end of a line. Using Bausch’s landmark initiative as a point of contrast, the paper discusses Sacres by such choreographers as Paul Taylor, Jérôme Bel, and Xavier Le Roy, works that explore identity, relations between audience and performers, authorial power, and dark humor. New ways of asserting the physicality of the score are also considered, such as taking machine motion to an absurd extreme as well as experimenting with a more flexible, or even entirely negative, musicality: not being motorized by Stravinsky.
“RIMSKY-KORSAKOV TO STRAVINSKY: GIFTS OTHER THAN OCTATONICISM” Ildar Khannanov, The Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University Both the formalist teachings of American music theorists and the cultural studies of musicologists have failed to acknowledge a uniquely Russian music theory – one based upon a confluence of theoretical and historical study. Such a rich theory is strongly articulated in the teachings and writings of Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov. Thus, his music-theoretical wisdom offered his student, Igor Stravinsky, more theoretical gifts than octatonicism. Rimsky’s teachings on motivic-thematic structure, melodic strategies, formal function, harmonic idioms, rhythm and meter, and, ultimately, large-scale formal solutions, impacted numerous aspects of Stravinsky’s early style. My lecture will specifically show how Stravinsky’s education under Rimsky influenced these early works, including The Rite of Spring.
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“EXPERIENCING SEX-GENDER DISSONANCE IN THE RITE” Marianne Kielian-Gilbert, Indiana University at Bloomington Over the course of a century Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring has evoked conflicting discourses on its role as concert music (“for its own sake”), its multiple choreographies, its nationalistic versus cosmopolitan expressions, and its ritualized sex-gender portrayals, especially in varying contexts of their reception. I will focus specifically on sexual-gender dissonance as a productive idea for a complex range of music-cultural experiences embodied in interpreting The Rite. Have The Rite’s stylized, ritualized, exoticized, or agrarian contexts rendered sex-gender dissonance naturalized and functional, by which I mean assumed or taken as “given,” and thus unquestioned, without impact, or out of bounds as a valuable way of experiencing the work? How or do changing perceptions of sexuality, gender difference, and woman’s roles impact the enduring potential of The Rite of Spring? Or, do the work’s conflicting discourses obscure or inscribe that dissonance on personal sex-gender experience (or vice versa)? Writers such as Judith Butler, Elisabeth Grosz, and Elizabeth Wilson have argued for the complex interaction of gender (as social-political) and sex (as biological) construction. What values of sexuality and gender are in play as the “Sacrificial Maiden” dances herself to death (whether through external or internal forces)? How does her dancing resonate with the “Sabine-type mass rape” of the “Dance of the Abduction” or the ecstatic/passionate character of the “Dance of the Earth”? I argue that questioning sex-gender implication and specificity (e.g., music and woman’s body as participant, as victim) – but not from positions that are fixed or unmediated – has potential to deepen music experience by critiquing both the tendencies of modernism to universalize or essentialize man or woman and the skepticisms of postmodernism to disavow the sex-gender specificities of the subject/self.
“‘I AM IN EVERYBODY, AND EVERYBODY IS IN ME’: STRAVINSKY IN THE MUSICAL TEXTS OF HIS TIME” Valentina Kholopova, Moscow State Conservatory Stravinsky’s motto is, “I am in everybody, and everybody is in me.” This assertion alone suggests a different view of the impact of Stravinsky’s music on twentieth-century music, especially in Russia. As an introduction, I will summarize Stravinsky’s influence on musicians of the first half of the twentieth century as evinced by letters and articles of composers. For example, I will consider Anton Webern’s letter to the composer Alban Berg, in which he expresses his fascination with Pribaoutki. Moreover, I will point out quotations of Stravinsky’s scores in the music of Debussy, Hindemith, Orff, and Prokofiev. In the second half of the twentieth century in Russia, Stravinsky’s impact is a matter of “following the classical tradition.” It is especially featured in the music of the Soviet composers Sergey Slonimsky, Boris Tishchenko, Nikolay Sidel’nikov, Nikolayh Korndorf, Edison Denisov, and Alfred Schnittke.
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ABSTRACTS CONT. “WHY 1913?” Tamara Levitz, University of California at Los Angeles In this talk I will explore the historiographic question of how the premiere of Le Sacre du Printemps at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris on 29 May 1913 came to symbolize the tumultuous birth of musical modernism, and why the centenary of this event is being celebrating around the world. It is rare for the premiere of a musical work to be commemorated in this way. I will examine historical sources to determine first the process by which music critics and historians established the Parisian premiere of Le Sacre as an iconic event in the history of musical modernism, and especially why they favored the Parisian premiere over historic first performances elsewhere. Perhaps their choice related to the violence historically connected to the Parisian performance, or to the place France held and still holds in the North American and European musicological imagination? By critically investigating the question of how the premiere of Le Sacre came to occupy such a unique place in North American and European narratives of the twentieth century, I hope to shed light on what it is that we are actually celebrating at this conference.
“THE RITE OF SPRING IN THE ANALYTICAL ESSAYS OF YURI KHOLOPOV” Grigoriy Lyzhov, Moscow State Conservatory In choosing contemporary music as a subject of serious study in the 1960s, Yuri Kholopov removed himself from the ideological sphere of the Soviets – and he was one of the first of his generation to make this choice. He overcame methodological vacuums of such times by using the power of his intuition and intellect to reinvent forgotten traditions of Russian and European music theory. Indeed, Kholopov’s scholarly and analytical apparatus is a synthesis of seemingly conflicting ideas of Hugo Riemann, Sergey Taneyev, Boleslav Yavorsky, Heinrich Schenker, Arnold Schoenberg, and Hermann Erpf. Kholopov’s conflation of these divergent analytic methodologies grew contextually out of the needs of analyzing particular works. Le Sacre was among the provocative works constantly attracting his analytic concerns, and he based most of his thoughts about it on a developing theory of modality. Thus my paper will discuss Yuri Kholopov’s analytical approach to The Rite based on his published and unpublished on mode.
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“HOW NOT TO HEAR LE SACRE DU PRINTEMPS?: SCHOENBERG’S THEORIES, LEIBOWITZ’S RECORDING” Severine Neff, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Stravinsky’s epochal Sacre du printemps premiered in Paris on 29 May 1913. Its 50th anniversary in 1963 was marked by, among other things, a recording of the piece by the London Philharmonic Orchestra for Readers’ Digest/RCA conducted by René Leibowitz. The recording is curious and intriguing for many reasons, not least because Leibowitz – as both composer and conductor – was a deeply devoted Schoenbergian who made the recording at the time when twelve-tone composition was coming to the fore everywhere. The LP, re-issued as a Chesky compact disc in 1990, is also remarkable in that it likely constitutes the only audio documentation of a connection between Schoenberg’s artistic credo and the phenomenon that was Le Sacre. Convinced as Leibowitz was of Schoenberg’s outlook on musical performance, as both formulated and expressed by the composer’s student and brother-in-law Rudolf Kolisch, he thus contrived – however recklessly – to apply Austro-German musical principles to Stravinsky’s essentially foreign music. Whereas countless scholars have written about the Schoenberg-Stravinsky polemics in the 1920s and analyzed Schoenberg’s Drei Satiren, Op. 28, my lecture will begin with Schoenberg’s apprehension of Stravinsky’s early works instead – specifically, the aesthetic, technical, and compositional principles by which he highly praised and severely criticized them. Leibowitz espoused many of Schoenberg’s beliefs about Stravinsky’s music, and they affected his approach to Le Sacre. Influenced, in addition, by the performance tenets of Kolisch, Leibowitz would have had to interpret Le Sacre with a Schoenbergian analysis in his mind’s ear. I will offer such an analysis of the Introduction to Part I as a case study showing the insights it offers about the piece and Leibowitz’s reading of it. Crucially, this analysis takes into account Le Sacre’s lack of developing variation, which Schoenberg would of course have deplored, as well as the structuring and formal role of Stravinsky’s orchestration, which, by contrast, he held in high regard.
“VIOLENCE (SYMBOLIC) AND VIOLATION (STYLISTIC) IN THE VISUAL ARTS: THE CASE OF THE RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDE” Peter Nisbet, Ackland Art Museum, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill The relationship of modernist transformations in the arts to the rhetoric of belligerence and aggression has long been acknowledged and studied. My contribution to our proceedings will take the case of Russian avant-garde visual art of the early decades of the last century to explore various connections between violence (as theme or image) and the stylistic transgressions (or violations) of the period.
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ABSTRACTS CONT. “STRAVINSKY’S RUSSIA: THE POLITICS OF CULTURAL FERMENT” Donald J. Raleigh, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill In this talk, I will consider how subsequent generations of historians have evaluated the political health and vitality of the Russian Empire between the country’s first revolution of the twentieth century that broke out in 1905 and the February Revolution of 1917 that toppled the Romanov dynasty, in power since 1613. I will privilege not only the politics of socioeconomic change, but also the heady intellectual ferment of the period – a time when Russian visual, literary, and performing arts achieved such creative brilliance that contemporaries described the period as Russia’s “Silver Age.” In placing Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring within the cultural ferment in Russia and Europe at this time, I will suggest how the eschatological mood of Russia’s fin de siècle constrained and enabled politics and the arts as the country entered the Great War and moved ineluctably toward revolution.
“REVISITING THE RITE IN STRAVINSKY’S LATER SERIAL MUSIC” Lynne Rogers, William Paterson College A hallmark of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring is the chromatic harmonization of diatonic melodies. Particularly when found in homophonic and homorhythmic textures, the resulting cross relations and vertical dissonances infuse the diatonic lines with a magical flavor that seems to belong to a differently tuned world existing outside the concert hall. This same compositional fingerprint – that of a diatonic melody set with chromatic harmonies in a note-against-note texture – reappears strikingly in Stravinsky’s later serial works, where the musical language is typically inhospitable to such arrangements. Whereas many of the tunes in The Rite have their origins in folk sources and thus come by their diatonicism naturally, melodies in the serial music must derive from the twelve-tone row. To sift diatonic lines from serial complexes, and then to present these melodies accompanied by the atonal harmonies to which they are intimately related, required ingenious compositional innovations. Although the effect of these passages in the serial music differs strongly from that of their predecessors – as do the compositional techniques required to create them – the transplanting of this distinctive pitch and textural configuration to Stravinsky’s late works nonetheless attests to the long reach of The Rite.
“LE SACRE DU PRINTEMPS AT HOME” Svetlana Savenko, Moscow State Conservatory Sergey Koussevitsky performed the concert version of The Rite in Moscow and St. Petersburg in 1914, a year after its infamous Paris premiere. This version continued to be heard every year in Moscow and St. Petersburg between 1926 and 1930 and became a staple for the concert audiences and young composers. All performances came to a halt for more than two decades from the middle of the 1930s to the end of the 1950s. Only after the 1965 premiere
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of Vesna svyashchennaya as a ballet at the Bol’shoy Theatre in Moscow did the concert version appear again regularly on programs. Throughout the twentieth century, Stravinsky’s presentation of The Rite’s melodic material derived from popevki deeply moved Russian composers and audiences alike. Individuals who also saw the 1965 version of the ballet were further impressed by the choreography at the opening and in the Dance sacrale.
KEYNOTE ADDRESS “RESISTING THE RITE” Richard Taruskin, University of California at Berkeley Near the end of his life, Sergei Diaghilev noted with satisfaction that the Times of London had declared The Rite of Spring to be “to the twentieth century what Beethoven’s Ninth was to the nineteenth.” Time has borne the Times’s pronouncement out. The Rite has indeed achieved that emblematic status, with all that implies. It has been reinterpreted in countless ways, it has been deformed and caricatured, and it has been resisted, especially by those who claim to uphold it. A quarter of a century ago, in an article titled “Resisting the Ninth,” I tried to summarize the status of Beethoven’s masterpiece in contemporary culture. This time I shall try to do the same for Stravinsky’s.
“THE PHYSICALITY OF THE RITE AND ITS SOURCE: REMARKS ON THE FORCES OF METER AND THEIR DISRUPTION” Pieter van den Toorn, University of California at Santa Barbara With the “Evocation of the Ancestors” in Part II as its point of departure, this paper examines the explosive nature of the rhythmic patterning in The Rite of Spring, tracing much of its explosiveness to the underlying metrical forces of parallelism and displacement, forces which, ultimately irreconcilable, lead to disruption. The argument is that these forces play themselves out on the smallest of scales, conspicuously in the “Evocation,” with the main motive of the top layer and its immediate (shortened and displaced) repeat. An irregular seven quarter-note beats in length (although sometimes shortened by a note or two), the main motive is repeated thirteen times in succession. The sort of development that may be inferred from this invention is discussed, along with the requirements for performance. In effect, features of melody, harmony, rhythm, instrumentation, and articulation that might earlier have been subjected to a “developing variation” are kept intact in order that they might serve as a foil for what does change, namely, alignment. The rationale behind this train of thought is one that Stravinsky’s critics, in condemning the repetitious, static, mechanical, and intransigent qualities of The Rite of Spring and other Stravinsky works, have all but ignored.
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ABSTRACTS CONT. “‘I’VE PENETRATED THE MYSTERY OF SPRING LAPIDARY RHYTHMS’: STRAVINSKY AND BAROQUE TOPOI IN THE RITE ” Elena Vereschagina, Musical College at the Moscow State Conservatory The “Augurs of Spring” chord is stated as an ostinato repetition – a topos having a substantial history in the Baroque era. I argue that the chord’s nature and repetition derives from the vibrato technique termed Bebung in Baroque treatises – one designed to represent and testify to catastrophes and earthquakes in the scores of J .S. Bach, Handel, Telemann, Rameau, and others. In Russia’s Silver Age this selfsame technique resonates with the “earthquake” metaphor that Alexander Blok employed in his renowned essay “Stikhiya i kultura” (“Culture and the Elements”) to characterize the spirit of his and Stravinsky’s time. However, in accordance with Debussy’s motto – “Long live Rameau! Down with Gluck!” – my discussion of Baroque topoi related to The Rite will exclusively deal with the music of the French Rameau. Indeed, in beginning with a pastoral scene (described by Stravinsky as “a swarm of the spring pipes”), The Rite recalls other idyll antiques in the ballet repertory of Diaghilev’s Saisons Russes: Daphnis et Chloé and Prélude à L’Après-midi d’un Faune.
“‘THE GREAT SACRIFICE’: CONTEXTUALIZING THE DREAM” Tatiana Vereschagina, Musical College at the Moscow State Conservatory The controversy on the authorship and genesis of The Rite’s narrative is well known. According to Stravinsky, the idea of the sacrificial maiden dancing herself to death was conceived in a dream during his composition of The Firebird in 1909. In my paper I will examine the “dream” in its relations to the Russian literary and theatrical context of the years of the ballet’s genesis (1909-12) and in the Russian context of Stravinsky’s oeuvre of that time. I will focus on two interpretations of the Danse Sacrale: one making reference to the Russian understanding of the character Salome and another to the widely publicized practices of Russian mystical sects at the turn of the last century. The virgin dancer under the gaze of the Elder One in Russian culture of the early twentieth century was unequivocally associated with Salome, even if disguised by different names or deprived of any name whatever (mostly for reasons of censorship). Thus, Salome enters the Diaghilev Saison Russe as Cleopatra in the most successful (according to Alois Benois) production of 1909 (in which the dance of the seven veils is borrowed from the banned performance of Oscar Wilde’s drama staged by Meyerhold and interpreted by Ida Rubinstein); in the production staged by Nikolay Evreinov of the same year, all the names are removed, and Salome is called simply “The Princess.” In 1962, the poetess Anna Akhmatova remembers Salome as one of the main identifiers of the epoch (“Mine lot is…
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to dance with Herod’s daughter”). The iconic, ecstatic female dancer, “praying with her body,” Salome is thematized in all her complexity: at once threatening femme fatale, an erotic object and self-destructive victim of consuming passion. Salome dies in consequence of her dance, but not of the dancing itself. The enactment of the sacrifice in The Rite (i.e., dancing oneself to death) is very specific. It cannot be traced back to Slavic prehistoric times, which bear no evidence of human sacrifice as part of seasonal rites. Striking analogies are to be found in the depictions of ecstatic whirling dances (communal or individual) ending in exhaustion as part of the living religious practice of Russian mystical sects. In the first decade of the twentieth century, these groups attracted exceptional interest among the most sophisticated thinkers and literati of the Silver Age, and they instituted a renaissance in the research of sectarian lore. Accounts of ecstatic kinetic (whirling, spinning, jumping) practices with strict functional division between a female leader and the rest of the community – dances even leading to bloody sacrifice – abound in the ethnographical documents, poetry and fiction, political and crime news of fin-de-siècle St. Petersburg. However, it is not the aim of my paper to discuss the credibility and reliability of these testimonies or to reconstruct the acts of existing ritual practice. I will reconstruct the relevant context for The Rite as it might have been perceived by Stravinsky instead – for he was clearly influenced by the artistic and intellectual trends described above. For example, all vocal works immediately preceding The Rite can be labeled as sectarian (two poems by Balmont, “Zvezdolikiy” and the Old-Believer’s final chorus from Khovanschina); these are rich with corresponding imagery. I will investigate such interconnections of these elements in the The Rite with the structural components of sectarian practices as viewed by ethnographers of the time (e.g., the adoration of the earth, walking in circles, divinations, etc).
“THE RITE OF SPRING: DIONYSOS MONOMETRIKOS” Stephen Walsh, Cardiff University The idea of the single-beat metric unit, which underlies the experimental rhythms of The Rite of Spring, is one of a number of techniques in that ballet that originate in the work of his kuchka predecessors. It can notably be traced back to, or at least compared with, the speech melody in certain vocal works of Musorgsky. Stravinsky seems to have identified it subsequently as an aspect of The Rite that was worth exploring further, and “monometrics,” as he called the technique, figure in sketches of the Swiss years and characterize much of the music of that period. Stravinsky adapted the idea to a concept of metric modulation in major works of the neoclassical period, most notably Oedipus Rex, in which proportional metronome markings control whole scenes through series of complex changes of tempo. These proportions are seldom if ever observed in performance (including by the composer himself), but their existence in the score shows that, at least when composing, he was a true inheritor of the typically Russian love of formulaic background structures.
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BIOGRAPHIES KEVIN BARTIG is Assistant Professor of Musicology at Michigan State University. His research focuses on Russian and Soviet music, with particular interests in film music and transnationalism. He is the author of Composing for the Red Screen: Sergei Prokofiev and Soviet Film, which will be published by Oxford University Press in 2013. His work has been supported by fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress.
MICHAEL BECKERMAN is Milton Petrie Professor and Chair of the Music Department at New York University and Distinguished Professor of History at Lancaster University. He has written books on Janáček, Dvořák and Martinů, is a Laureate of the Czech Music Council, and is completing a book about Gideon Klein’s final Terezin composition.
GABRIELE BRANDSTETTER is widely recognized as a leader in cultural studies and a pioneer in the interdisciplinary study of dance in Germany. She is currently a Professor at the Institute for Theater Research at the Freie Universität in Berlin, where she is also co-director of an international research center, “Interweaving Performance Cultures.” She has written over a hundred articles addressing intersections between music, theater, art, and literature. She has edited and authored many books, including a recent study of The Rite of Spring. Her work has been recognized by numerous prizes, including the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize awarded by the German Research Foundation.
MAUREEN CARR is a Distinguished Professor of Music at Pennsylvania State University. She is currently at work on After The Rite: Stravinsky’s Path to Neoclassicism from 1914 to 1925 (contracted to Oxford University Press). She is the author of Multiple Masks: Stravinsky’s Neoclassicism in His Dramatic Works on Greek Subjects. She is a contributor to the forthcoming Stravinsky and His World (Ed. Tamara Levitz) and has authored two facsimile editions: Stravinsky’s Pulcinella: A Facsimile of the Sources and Sketches and Stravinsky’s Histoire du soldat: A Facsimile of the Sketches.
BRIGID COHEN is Assistant Professor of Music at New York University. Her teaching and research focus on musical avant-gardes, migration, cultural theory, postcolonial studies, and relationships among music, the visual arts, and literature. She is the author of Stefan Wolpe and the Avant-Garde Diaspora. Her research has been supported by the American Academy in Berlin, the American Musicological Society, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Getty Research Institute, the Mellon Foundation, and the Paul Sacher Foundation.
MARY DAVIS is Dean of the School of Graduate Studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology. From 1998-2012, she was a member of the faculty of the Department of Music at Case Western Reserve University, where she served as Chair from 2009-12. Her publications include the books Classic Chic: Music, Fashion, and Modernism and Ballets Russes Style: Diaghilev’s Dancers and Paris Fashion.
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ANNEGRET FAUSER is Professor of Music and Adjunct Professor of Women’s Studies at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research engages with music in France and the U.S. in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her books include Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair, Music, Theater, and Cultural Transfer: Paris, 1830–1914 (co-edited with Mark Everist), and Sounds of War: Concert Music in the U.S. during World War II (in press). The recipient of the 2011 Dent Medal of the Royal Musical Association, she is currently Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Musicological Society.
LYNN GARAFOLA is Professor of Dance at Barnard College. A historian and critic, she is the author of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and Legacies of Twentieth-Century Dance, editor of The Ballets Russes and Its World and other books, and curator of the New York Historical Society’s exhibition Dance for a City: Fifty Years of the New York City Ballet, and several shows at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, including New York Story: Jerome Robbins and His World and, most recently, Diaghilev’s Theater of Marvels: The Ballets Russes and Its Aftermath. She is currently working on a book about the choreographer Bronislava Nijinska.
MILLICENT HODSON, an American choreographer and graphic artist, collaborates with the English scenic consultant and art historian Kenneth Archer to reconstruct and stage modern masterpieces of the ballet. They have worked with major companies worldwide and continue to publish their research,
lecture, and present workshops. Awardwinning documentaries about their reconstructions include films on Nijinsky’s Sacre and Balanchine’s Le Chant du Rossignol. Hodson is author of Nijinsky’s Crime Against Grace: Le Sacre du Printemps and Nijinsky’s Bloomsbury Ballet: Jeux. Her drawings of dance are exhibited and published internationally.
VALENTINA KHOLOPOVA is Distinguished Professor of Music and the Founder/Director of the Interdisciplinary Music Institute at Moscow State Conservatory. She is the author of books on the music of Prokofiev, Gubaidulina, Schnittke, and Webern.
GRETCHEN HORLACHER is Associate Professor of Music at the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University at Bloomington. She is the author of Building Blocks: Repetition and Continuity in Stravinsky’s Music; she has also published on the music of Bartók and Steve Reich, and on issues of rhythm and meter.
STEPHANIE JORDAN is Research Professor in Dance at University of Roehampton, London. She is the author of Striding Out: Aspects of Contemporary and New Dance in Britain, Moving Music: Dialogues with Music in Twentieth-Century Ballet, and Stravinsky Dances: Re-Visions Across a Century. In 2010, Jordan was honored with the award for Outstanding Scholarly Research in Dance from the Congress on Research in Dance (U.S.). Currently, she is writing a book on the dancer/ choreographer Mark Morris and music.
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BIOGRAPHIES CONT. ILDAR KHANNANOV earned his Ph.D. in music theory from the University of California at Santa Barbara and is now Professor of Music Theory at Peabody Conservatory, The Johns Hopkins University. He is Vice-Chair for the Scholarly Council of the Russian Society for Music Theory and is currently the Editor of the Russian journal Problemy Muzykal’noi Nauki.
MARIANNE KIELIAN-GILBERT is Professor of Music at The Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University at Bloomington. Recent publications concern music, philosophy and feminist theory, and music and analysis in different experiential, cultural, material/ media, and philosophical orientations. Her work on Stravinsky has appeared in Perspectives of New Music, Music Theory Spectrum, Theory and Practice, Journal of Musicology, and other essay collections.
TAMARA LEVITZ is a Professor of Musicology at the University of California at Los Angeles. She has published widely on transnational modernism in the 1920s and ’30s, with a focus on music in Germany, Cuba, and France. She has recently completed a monograph entitled Modernist Mysteries: Perséphone. In this book she presents a microhistorical analysis of the premiere of Stravinsky’s melodrama Perséphone at the Paris Opéra on 30 April 1934. As scholar-inresidence for the Bard Festival on Stravinsky in 2013, she is currently editing the volume Stravinsky and His World to be published by Princeton University Press.
GRIGORIY LYZHOV is Associate Professor of Music Theory at Moscow Conservatory. A protégé of the late eminent music theorist Yuri Kholopov, he specializes in Russian music theories of the twentieth century.
SEVERINE NEFF is Eugene Falk Distinguished Professor of Music at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her numerous
writings on Arnold Schoenberg’s theories and works include The Musical Idea and The Logic, Technique and Art of Its Presentation and Schoenberg’s String Quartet in F-Sharp Minor, Opus 10: A Norton Critical Score. Currently she is preparing an edition of his writings on counterpoint for Oxford University Press. Neff is also Editor-in-Chief of Music Theory Spectrum.
PETER NISBET is Chief Curator of the Ackland Art Museum at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A leading expert in Russian and German art of the twentieth century, he has organized several major international traveling exhibitions on European art between the wars. His publications focus on Russian and Soviet Modernism, El Lissitzky, German modernism, contemporary art, and issues of museum history, theory, and practice. Before joining the Ackland Art Museum in 2009, he was Daimler-Benz Curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum/Harvard Art Museums.
DONALD J. RALEIGH is Jay Richard Judson Distinguished Professor of History at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His numerous works include Revolution on the Volga: 1917 in Saratov; Experiencing Russia’s Civil War: Politics, Society, and Revolutionary Culture in Saratov, 1917–1922; and Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia’s Cold War Generation.
LYNNE ROGERS is Associate Professor of Music at William Paterson University and currently serves as Past President of the Society for Music Theory. She has given numerous lectures and seminars on Stravinsky’s music in North and South America and in Europe. Her writings on Stravinsky appear in Music Theory Spectrum, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, The Journal of Musicology, and other periodicals.
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SVETLANA SAVENKO, Professor of Musicology at Moscow State Conservatory, is the premier Russian scholar of Stravinsky’s music. She has also published numerous articles on music of the Russian avantgarde. A renowned soprano specializing in contemporary music, she has made recordings highlighting the works of Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Roslavets, Mosolov, Myaskovsky, Silvestrov, and Schillinger.
VLADIMIR TARNOPOLSKI is Professor of Composition and Director of the Studio for New Music Ensemble, the contemporary performance group of Moscow State Conservatory. He founded the Russian Chapter of the International Society for Contemporary Music.
RICHARD TARUSKIN is The Class of 1955 Professor of Music at the University of California at Berkeley and a frequent contributor to the arts section of The New York Times. He is the author of the texts Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, and the six-volume Oxford History of Western Music. A former director of the Columbia University Collegium Musicum and a viola da gamba player with the Aulos Ensemble, he has written many essays on musical performance, several of which are collected in a volume called Text and Act. His work has received the Noah Greenberg Prize, The Dent Medal of the Royal Musical Association, The ASCAPDeems Taylor Award, and the Alfred Einstein and Kinkeldey Awards from the American Musicological Society.
PIETER VAN DEN TOORN is Professor of Music at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He is the author of The Music of Igor Stravinsky, Stravinsky and “The Rite of Spring,” and Music, Politics and the Academy. His latest book, co-authored with John McGinness, is Stravinsky and the Russian Period: Sound and Legacy of a Musical Idiom.
STEPHEN WALSH is a well-known English critic and writer on music, the author of a large-scale two-volume biography of Stravinsky, and of smaller volumes on Stravinsky’s music, Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex, and the work of Schumann and Bartók. He holds a personal chair in the School of Music, Cardiff University, in South Wales.
ELENA EDUARDOVNA VERESCHAGINA teaches music history and compositional techniques of the twentieth century at the Musical College of the Moscow State Conservatory. She is the author of numerous articles and papers at the musicological conferences on the compositional techniques of the early twentieth-century composers (e.g., Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern) and on the poetics of Baroque music (e.g., the music Handel, Vivaldi, Telemann, Lully, Rameau, Rebel, Marais, and others). She has contributed to the program books of the Moscow State Bol’shoy Theatre (R. Strauss, Der Rosenkavalier, A. Berg, Wozzeck, I. Stravinsky, The Rake’s Progress and others). She is the co-author of a series of radio programs on the history of performance practice aired on State Radio Orpheus, Moscow.
TATIANA EDUARDOVNA VERESCHAGINA, a music historian and critic, is the author and editor of Alban Berg. WOZZECK, a program book for the first performance of the opera in the Moscow State Bol’shoy Theatre. She is the author of numerous articles for program books of the Bol’shoy Theatre, such as I. Stravinsky, The Rake’s Progress; R. Wagner, Der Fliegende Holländer; W. A. Mozart, Don Giovanni; Ph. Fenelon, The Cherry Orchard; R. Strauss, Der Rosenkavalier, and others. Currently she is working on the book Directing Opera to be published by Agraf Publishing House, Moscow.
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