Some Characteristics of Stravinsky's Diatonic Music

Stravinsky’s music has seemed stubbornly to resist binding theoretical legislation. That this may be considered curious is owing to the conviction—voiced by those familiar with the literature—that there is a consistency, an identity, or distinctiveness here that certainly ought to lend itself to such legislation. Curious, too, because the attention accorded this music over the past fifty years has been staggering: the elusive (if at times highly suggestive) imprint of tonally functional relations has been circumvented in appeals to a “basic cell” rationale whereby “coherence” is attributed to the unfolding of some intervallically conceived cohesiveness; “neo-Classical” ventures have been juxtaposed with models drafted from Baroque and Classical C-scale literature in an effort to track down the contamination, the departure from traditional (tonal) form, or the “impurities” or “wrong notes” with which Stravinsky has been cited. Roy Travis, apropos the first pages of the Introduction to Le Sacre, has suggested that, by substituting “tonic sonority” for “tonic triad”, we might find techniques analogous to those of tonal practice (as interpreted by Heinrich Schenker); and Allen Forte has subjected the whole of Petroushka (with its sizable “chunks” of diatonic material) to a Schenker-type analysis. 1 But I think it questionable whether the analytical methods in even the most revealing of these and similar endeavors can be considered all that appropriate with respect to the bulk of Stravinsky’s work (or with respect to any concern for consistency, identity, or distinctiveness), whether, respecting the last of these, the transfer of terms and concepts intimately associated with tonal practice to a music which is at least problematic in this respect does not confuse rather than illuminate, jeopardizing at the same time any binding, “particularizing” understanding this analytic-theoretical reckoning might have afforded the literature for which it was intended. Moreover, apart from the philosophical or psychological understanding to which some have addressed themselves, existing attempts to bind in semi-technical terms have had the most frightful of results, a dialogue so misleading, so full of contradiction as to stupefy, frighten, or otherwise offend the most conscientious of readers. And we might cite the general confusion which permeates the pages of Paul Collaer’s discussion as exemplary in this respect. 2 For here, as in other such documents, a bewildering succession of descriptive terms and explanatory notions, invariably left un- or under-defined, deprives the undertaking of all meaning and consequence: Stravinsky’s music, everywhere and at once, is made to represent or encompass every conceivable technique. And the descriptive terms and explanatory notions associated with this literature may now seem symptomatic of confusion rather than of any understanding or coming to terms: “pantonality” and “pandiatonicism” appear, in the presence of “diatonicism”, merely to suggest the absence of tonally functional relations; and “poly-” or “bi-tonality”—horrors of the musical imagination—have widely (and mercifully) been dismissed as too fantastic (unreal) or too illogical to warrant serious consideration. 3