{"id":2678,"date":"2023-07-13T23:58:46","date_gmt":"2023-07-14T03:58:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?p=2678"},"modified":"2023-07-13T23:58:49","modified_gmt":"2023-07-14T03:58:49","slug":"how-to-ignite-a-standing-ovation-for-a-stravinsky-symphony-or-when-is-it-ok-to-project-moving-images-during-a-concert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2023\/07\/how-to-ignite-a-standing-ovation-for-a-stravinsky-symphony-or-when-is-it-ok-to-project-moving-images-during-a-concert.html","title":{"rendered":"How to Ignite a Standing Ovation for a Stravinsky Symphony;          or: When is it OK to Project Moving Images During a Concert?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-vimeo wp-block-embed-vimeo wp-embed-aspect-4-3 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Stravinsky, Symphony in Three Movements, 3rd Movement\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/31621069?dnt=1&amp;app_id=122963\" width=\"500\" height=\"375\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture; clipboard-write\"><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Readers of this blog, and listeners to my <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.josephhorowitz.com\">NPR shows<\/a><\/strong>, will recall that a <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2023\/04\/shostakovich-in-south-dakota-on-npr-a-new-template-for-orchestras.html\">South Dakota performance of Shostakovich\u2019s Seventh Symphony l<\/a><\/strong>ast February unforgettably galvanized a Sioux Falls audience. A major factor was a 40-minute preamble, with live music, exploring the symphony\u2019s relationship to the Siege of Leningrad and the depredations of Joseph Stalin. I came away from that experience convinced that this is a work that should never be performed in the US without some form of contextualization.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I had a second such experience at the Brevard Music Festival last week: a performance of Stravinsky\u2019s Symphony in Three Movements that ignited a standing ovation. If you know this piece, you will understand that standing ovations are not a likely consequence of any performance. There were two main reasons: a 20-minute preamble including a jazz band, and an accompanying film.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The story of the Symphony in Three Movements \u2013 which I have told before\u00a0<strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2010\/05\/rehearing_stravinskys_war_symp.html\">in this space<\/a><\/strong> \u2013 is so tangled that sharing it with an audience can either result in profound ennui or keen engagement. It includes the Woody Herman Band, a bad Hollywood film about a French peasant girl susceptible to religious visions, and newsreel images the relevance of which Stravinsky both confirmed and denied.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It all amounts to a remarkable study of the creative act \u2013 one which wholly disproves Stravinsky\u2019s notorious insistence that he found inspiration only in his brain, never from outside resources. That this work was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic as a World War II \u201cVictory symphony\u201d was in fact a gift to the composer during a fallow period \u2013 years of diminished inspiration Aaron Copland, for one, blamed on a condition of rootlessness: a \u201cpsychology of exile.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The basic text here is a confession to Robert Craft, long after the symphony\u2019s premiere, that the third movement linked to \u201ca concrete impression of the war, almost always cinematographic in origin.\u201d Stephen Walsh, in his 2008 Stravinsky biography, dismisses the pertinence of this unlikely testimony.. That Walsh is plainly wrong is demonstrated by a \u201cvisual presentation\u201d created years ago (for the Pacific Symphony) by my gifted colleague Peter Bogdanoff, deploying the newsreel imagery Stravinsky specified. His finale in fact plays very credibly as a kind of film score.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Whether that justifies showing Peter\u2019s film is a question that was vigorously debated at Brevard during a post-concert discussion. In general, I think projecting moving images during a symphonic concert is a terrible idea. I oppose showing planets for Holst\u2019s&nbsp;<em>The Planets<\/em>, showing an Appalachian spring for Copland\u2019s&nbsp;<em>Appalachian Spring<\/em>, showing the siege of Leningrad for Shostakovich\u2019s Seventh. All that is kitsch. It confines the listening experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As someone who has produced thematic concerts for over half a century, I have only twice deviated from this conviction: for the finale of\u00a0\u00a0Stravinsky Symphony in Three Movements, and for the Largo and Scherzo of Dvorak\u2019s\u00a0<em>New World<\/em> Symphony. These are both revelatory exercises in discovering what was in the composer\u2019s head. Why is there a triangle in Dvorak\u2019s Scherzo? Because Pau-Puk Keewis, in Longfellow\u2019s\u00a0<em>The Song of Hiawatha<\/em>, had bells on his moccasins. Why all those string tremlolos in the Largo? Because the day Minnehaha died it was bitter cold and Hiawatha, in the forest, was trembling. (Peter\u2019s \u201cvisual presentation\u201d for the Largo and Scherzo, used by dozens of orchestras, may be seen\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/vimeo.com\/13524207\"><strong>here<\/strong>.<\/a> By the way, his visuals are ingeniously keyed to follow the conductor, not the other way around.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I will find myself producing half a dozen Ives festivals for the 2024 Sesquicentenary \u2013 and anticipate working with Peter on visuals for Ives\u2019s astonishing tribute to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw\u2019s Black Civil War Regiment: \u201cThe St. Gaudens at Boston Commons.\u201d Here is iconic American music that means nothing without contextualization \u2013 as I have discovered, eg, at Carnegie Hall performances led by James Levine and Christoph on Dohnanyi. (That American orchestras should awaken to this reality is the topic of my upcoming 6,000-word rant in\u00a0<em>The American Scholar<\/em>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I should add that the Brevard concert \u2013 to be repeated in two seasons by the inimitable <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2018\/11\/how-south-dakota-shows-what-orchestras-are-for.html\">South Dakota Symphony<\/a> <\/strong>&#8212; was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. So will be all those Ives festivals, beginning at Brevard in July 2024. How I wish our orchestras would reinvent themselves as\u00a0<strong>humanities <a href=\"https:\/\/www.neh.gov\/humanities\/2018\/spring\/feature\/can-orchestras-be-reinvented-humanities-institutions\">institutions<\/a><\/strong>. Museums are already there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If you want to know more, I append the script for the second half of the Brevard concert, which was hosted and conducted by Kazem Abdullah.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I also append, in full, Stravinsky\u2019s scenario for the finale of the Symphony in Three Movements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I\u2019ll have more to say about all of this in a subsequent blog about the Brevard festival, and an NPR\u00a0<strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.josephhorowitz.com\">More than Music<\/a><\/strong> show coming up in September.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Here is the script (accompanied throughout by visuals):<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>LIVE MUSIC :&nbsp;<em>Bijou<\/em>, as recorded by Woody Herman<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That was Bijou \u2013 a \u201crumba a la jazz\u201d recorded by the Woody Herman band in 1945. Known as the \u201cThundering Herd,\u201d the Herman band so impressed Igor Stravinsky in LA that he composed a piece for it \u2013 the Ebony Concerto we\u2019re about to hear.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Born in Russia in 1882, Stravinsky was first exposed to American popular music in Paris before World War I. Some years after that, when the Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet toured the US with the Ballet russe, he brought back memories of \u201cincredible\u201d jazz music \u2013 and also sheet music, presumably Dixieland numbers, which he shared with Stravinsky.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Stravinsky composed a \u201cRagtime\u201d of his own in 1918. Later in his long odyssey, landing in Hollywood following years in Switzerland and France, he heard recordings of the Herman band \u2013 including \u201cBijou\u201d \u2013 the Cuban-influenced piece we just heard.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And so Stravinsky\u2019s&nbsp;<strong>Ebony Concerto&nbsp;<\/strong>was dedicated to Woody Herman and premiered by his band in 1946. The result is a compressed, seven-minute \u201cconcerto\u201d in three movements \u2013 of which the second, as in Ravel\u2019s Violin Sonata [heard on part one], is a \u201cBlues.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As it turns out, what Stravinsky admired in Herman\u2019s swing band was not the virtuosity of the individual players, or the tunes they sang. Rather, Stravinsky is entranced by the band\u2019s discipline<strong>,<\/strong>\u00a0its rhythmic zest, its array of instrumental color. As with Berlin\u2019s Neue Sachlichkeit and France\u2019s neo-classicism [discussed in part one], it\u2019s \u201ccool\u201d jazz that matters here, not the hot variety.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Think of the Ebony Concerto as Igor Stravinsky\u2019s personal&nbsp;<strong><em>distillation<\/em><\/strong>&nbsp;of the thundering Woody Herman sound. Our clarinet soloist is David Oh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>LIVE MUSIC: Igor Stravinsky: Ebony Concerto&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>While composing his Ebony Concerto, Stravinsky concurrently worked on a&nbsp;<strong>Symphony in Three Movements<\/strong>&nbsp;\u2013 probably the best-known piece he composed during his thirty years&nbsp;in Los Angeles. The strange story of this piece is a study in cultural exchange between the Old World and the New.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For instance: the second of the three movements in Stravinsky\u2019s symphony began as music for a 1943 Hollywood film:&nbsp;<em>The Song of Bernadette<\/em>, starring Jennifer Jones as a nineteenth century French peasant girl susceptible to miraculous visions. Stravinsky hoped to write the soundtrack \u2013 only to be replaced by Alfred Newman. But in the second movement of his symphony he inserted music he had composed for a scene in which the Virgin Mary materializes. With its meandering flute and slithery harp, this music remains&nbsp;<strong>spooky.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>MUSIC: mvmt 2 excerpt<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The story of the Symphony in Three Movements grows stranger still. It was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic in 1945 as a World War II \u201cVictory Symphony,\u201d celebrating the impending triumph over Germany and Japan.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This was an opportunity Stravinsky could not turn down. But he did not use the word \u201cVictory\u201d in the title because he had long insisted that music could mean nothing but itself. This led to complications when&nbsp;the Philharmonic requested a program note. Stravinsky replied:&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cIt is well known that no program is to be sought in my musical output. . . . Sorry if this is disappointing but no story to be told, no narration and what I would say would only make yawn the majority of your public.\u201d (Letter projected on screen.]<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><br>Eventually, Stravinsky asked the Philharmonic to publish a program note by the composer Ingolf Dahl. Dahl\u2019s note, duly printed in the Philharmonic program book, was certain to \u201cmake yawn the majority.\u201d A specimen: \u201cThe thematic germs of this first movement are of ultimate condensation. They consist of the interval of the minor third (with its inversion, the major sixth) and an ascending scale fragment.\u201d [Program note projected on screen.]<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><br>But Stravinsky did eventually oblige the Philharmonic with a brief \u201cWord\u201d conceding:&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cDuring the process of creation in this our arduous time, time of despair and hope, time of continual torments &#8212; maybe all those repercussions have stamped the character of this Symphony.\u201d [Document projected on screen]<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>To complete this tangled tale: decades later, Stravinsky was asked by his assistant Robert Craft, \u201cIn what ways is the Symphony in Three Movements marked by world events?\u201d Stravinsky answered:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cCertain specific events excited my musical imagination. Each episode is linked in my mind with a concrete impression of the war, almost always cinematographic in origin. For instance, the beginning of the third movement is partly a musical reaction to newsreels I had seen of goose-stepping soldiers. The march music predominates until the fugue, the beginning of which marks the turning point when the German war machine failed at Stalingrad. The final chord is a token of my extra exuberance in the triumph of the Allies.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Stravinsky added, inimitably: \u201cIn spite of what I have admitted, the symphony is not programmatic. Composers combine notes. That is all.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But it\u2019s not all. Some years ago, Joseph Horowitz, the author of tonight\u2019s script, collaborated with Peter Bogdanoff, who created tonight\u2019s visuals, on a \u201cvisual presentation\u201d for the six-minute finale of the Symphony in Three Movements, culling newsreel footage faithfully following Stravinsky\u2019s scenario. Here, for instance, are those goose-stepping soldiers.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>MUSIC: March with visuals (beginning of mvmt 3)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For the performance we\u2019re about to hear, the last of Stravinsky\u2019s symphonic movements will be accompanied by the visual track Horowitz and Bogdanoff created.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Considered as a \u201cwar symphony,\u201d the Symphony in Three Movements registers the \u201cAmerican\u201d perspective of a self-exiled Russian in his Hollywood. As for jazz [the topic of part one of the concert]\u2013 the syncopated kick and swagger of that Woody Herman rumba,&nbsp;<em>Bijou<\/em>, with which we began part two of our concert \u2013 listen to Stravinsky connect to that. And check out the very beginning of Stravinsky\u2019s symphony. It really swings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Please join us after tonight\u2019s concert for a post-concert discussion with me, tonight\u2019s artists, and Joe Horowitz. And now, to close: Igor Stravinsky\u2019s Symphony in Three Movements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>MUSIC: Symphony in Three Movements [with visuals for movement 3]<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>And here, in full , is what Stravinsky said about that finale in&nbsp;<em>Dialogues and a Diary<\/em>&nbsp;(1962):<\/strong><strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&nbsp;The Symphony was written under the impression of world event. I will not say that it expresses my feelings about them, but only that, without participation of what I think of as my will, they excited my musical imagination. And the impressions that activated me were not general, or ideological, but specific: each episode in the symphony is linked in my imagination with a specific cinematographic impression of the war.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The finale even contains the genesis of a war plot, though I recognized it as such only after the composition was completed. The beginning of the movement is partly and in some inexplicable way a musical reaction to the newsreels and documentaries I had seen of goose-stepping soldiers. The square march beat, the brass-band instrumentation, the grotesque crescendo in the tuba, these are all related to those abhorrent pictures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Though what I call my impressions of world events were derived almost entirely from films, the root of my indignation was a personal experience. One day, in Munich, in 1932, I saw a squad of Brown Shirts enter the street&nbsp;&nbsp;below the balcony of my room at the Bayerisches Hof and assault a group of civilians. The latter tried to defend themselves with street benches, but they were soon crushed beneath tose clumsy shields. . . . That same night . . . as we dined, a gang in swastika armbands entered the room. One of them began to talk insultingly about Jews and to aim his remarks in our direction. . . . [The photographer] Eric Schall protested, and at that they began to kick and to hit him . . . We were rescued by a timely taxi . . . . Schall was battered and bloody . . .&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;But to return to the plot of the movement, in spite of contrasting episodes such as the canon for bassoons, the march music is predominant until the fugue, which is the stasis and the turning point. The immobility at the beginning of this fugue is comic, I think \u2013 and so, to me, was the overturned arrogance of the Germans when their machine failed. The exposition of the fugue and the end of the Symphony are associated in my plot with the rise of the Allies, and the final, rather too commercial, D-flat sixth chord \u2013 instead of the expected C \u2013 is a token of my extra exuberance in the Allied triumph. The figure xxxxx was developed from the timpani part in the introduction to the first movement. It is somehow, inexplicably, associated in my imagination with the movements of war machines . . .<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The first movement was likewise inspired by a war film, this time a documentary of scorched-earth tactics in China. . . .&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;In spite of what I have said, the Symphony is not programmatic. Composers combine notes. That is all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Readers of this blog, and listeners to my NPR shows, will recall that a South Dakota performance of Shostakovich\u2019s Seventh Symphony last February unforgettably galvanized a Sioux Falls audience. A major factor was a 40-minute preamble, with live music, exploring the symphony\u2019s relationship to the Siege of Leningrad and the depredations of Joseph Stalin. I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2678","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2QLHN-Hc","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2678"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2678\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2684,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2678\/revisions\/2684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}