Review of Gretchen Horlacher, Building Blocks: Repetition and Continuity in the Music of Stravinsky (Oxford University Press, 2011)

[1] In the field of Stravinsky studies, there has recently been a growing trend toward the use of sketches as an aid to music analysis, due in no small part to the increased availability of the composer's manuscripts and source materials.(1) Drawing upon her extensive experience with Stravinsky's compositional materials, Gretchen Horlacher has found consistencies in the composer's creative process, deftly reconstructing how he began with brief musical models ("blocks") that served as points of departure for numerous methods of development and variation.(2) In Building Blocks, Horlacher presents this research, setting forth an inventive analytical method for Stravinsky's music with meticulous readings of the composer's sketches and scores.[2] Building Blocks is centered around pieces from Stravinsky's early ("Russian") and middle ("Neoclassical") periods, ranging from The Rite of Spring (1913) to the Symphony in Three Movements (1946). Throughout the works surveyed, Horlacher focuses on two contrasting attributes of Stravinsky's music: repetitive musical techniques that embody the qualities of discontinuity and stasis (such as ostinati, superimposition, and the assemblage of musical fragments, practices designated by the author as "radical"), versus the more continuous procedures that engage conventions in common-practice tonal music (such as melodic linearity and phrase syntax, traits Horlacher describes as "traditional" [33]). The author argues that previous studies have focused excessively on one extreme versus the other, and as an alternative, she develops these two operational strands into a holistic and balanced approach. Termed "ordered succession," Horlacher's analytical method draws attention to the threads of continuity in Stravinsky's repetitive musical materials, a perspective that she contends is essential for understanding the many ways in which Stravinsky's music challenges traditional conceptions of temporality.[3] Building Blocks is organized into five chapters, each of which fleshes out the notion of ordered succession in a variety of musical contexts. Chapter 1 informally rehearses the book's analytical method by highlighting how the seeming repetitiveness in the first movement of Stravinsky's Three Pieces for String Quartet (1914) is nevertheless driven by an underlying progressive strategy. Horlacher borrows the chapter's subtitle, "A shaking and cracking of dancing bones," from poet Amy Lowell, who was inspired by this music to imagine peasants dancing awkwardly out of sync with one another. Similarly, Horlacher tracks the playful intrusion of the second violin earlier and earlier into the musical texture, finding in Stravinsky's sketches a process of experimentation with this motive against the other contrapuntal lines. To close the chapter, Horlacher extrapolates from the two defining features of an ostinato-namely, order and repetition-to suggest that Stravinsky's music, which is so highly dependent on ostinati, is ideally suited to engaging in the interplay between connection and discontinuity.[4] Chapter 2 ("Connecting the Blocks") represents the conceptual core of the book, in which Horlacher formally expounds the theory of ordered succession to track the progress of a musical fragment over the course of a piece. She considers how often a fragment is iterated, the order in which its varied reiterations occur, how it alternates with contrasting motives, and when its iterations cease. Ordered succession can also measure the relations between musical fragments, including situations where reiterations are interrupted or noncontiguous, and where boundaries are detached, overlapped, or blurred. Horlacher asserts that ordered succession derives from Stravinsky's own compositional practice, demonstrating how the composer was obsessed with the shaping, order, and assembly of musical fragments in the Rite of Spring sketches.[5] Ordered succession draws upon a long-standing convention of graphic display in Stravinsky studies, but Horlacher's model is certainly the most formalized in this tradition. …