The New Objectivity 389
388 The Twentieth Century
the deliberate movement on the part of musicians, especially in Germany but also to a
certain extent elsewhere, to seek a new relationship with the public and to form a great
variety of new and direct contacts with it. The past ten years have witnessed the
production of a vast quantity of music definitely written for purposes of practical
“consumption,” and though many of those purposes do not offer a precisely new
field for musical production, new, on the other hand, is the scale and extent of the
interest which musicians are taking in them.
The movement is only in a partial sense an artistic one. It originated no doubt during
the economic chaos in Germany just after the war, in the period of “inflation,” when the
economic breakdown of the German bourgeoisie led to a profound modification of
the musical life of Germany, partly by reducing considerably the public able to attend
concerts and operatic performances, and partly by taking the attention of the new
generation away from cultural interests—a situation later made more acute by the
political, intellectual, and moral unrest which followed. It was under the pressure of
such realities that many musicians were forced to take stock of the whole place of music in
present-day society and to seek new channels for their activity. They found these new
channels in the constructive movements of the time, to which they sought to contribute
the energies which music could give. Emphasis was laid above all on the practical purposes
of the music thus produced; music was above all to cease to be an article of the luxury or a
primarily individual self-expression; to serve rather the ends of education, and especially of
political and social propaganda. The same idea, far more drastically applied, will be readily
recognized as that underlying the attitude of Soviet Russia towards art.
On perhaps a higher plane, the movement was undoubtedly in part the beginning
of a renewed search for a fresh and more actively participating public. Composers
busied themselves with the formation of a genuinely popular style, with rendering
their music more accessible through a simplification of technic, with applying them­
selves seriously to the new problems offered by the radio, the cinema and mechanical
means of reproduction. New ideals began to appear in the opera; younger composers
began to produce works designed definitely for momentary consumption, works which
were above all striking and “actual,” designed to fiilfill a momentary purpose and to be
scrapped as soon as that purpose was fulfilled. They recognized, as did Wagner in a
wholly different sense before them, the importance and the possibilities of opera in the
creation of a public capable of the kind of participation which truly binds the composer
to his world and his time.
Roger Sessions, “Music in Crisis: Some Notes on Recent Musical History,” Modern Music, X (1932-33),
63-78. Copyright © 1933 by the League of Composers, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the League of
Composers-lnternational Society for Contemporary' Music.
137
The New Objectivity
With this peremptory manifesto on his actually rather innocuously diverting Octet
(French: Octuor) for wind instruments in three neo-Baroque movements ("Sinfonia,"
'Tema con variazioni," "Finale”), Stravinsky threw down a kind of musical gauntlet.
music was not to traffic in "emotions"; it was not to be "interpreted"; "content" was
only to be described in terms of "form." Although the position is overstated to a point
that is apt to strike one nowadays as belabored if not faintly absurd, in its time (192 )
Stravinsky's squib was an important document of a movement in which Stravinsky
was by no means the only protagonist-the rediscovery of "purely musical values
after the excesses of Romanticism. Somewhat later, Stravinsky was to insist on the
objective "reality" and concreteness of his music in terms even more colorfuHy
extreme: "One's nose is not made: one's nose is. So it is with my art." (To which the
French poet Paul Valery responded, "Vive votre nezl") In all of this we see the
twentieth-century creator characteristically preoccupied with his materials, and jeal­
ous of his rights in the face of a performance tradition that through the nineteent
century had become more and more subjective and indulgent.
Mv Octuor is a musical object.
This object has a form and that form is influenced by the musical matter with which
It is of matter determine the differences of form. One does not do the
same with marble that one does with stone.
My Octuor is made for an ensemble of wind instruments. Wind instruments seem
to me to be more apt to render a certain rigidity of the form I had m mind than ot er
instruments—the string instruments, for example, which are less cold and more vague^
The suppleness of the string instruments can lend itself to more subtie nuances an
can serve better the individual sensibility of the executant m works built on an emo-
bs-Sis • *
My Octuor is not an “emotive” work but a musical composition based on objective
elements which are sufficient in themselves.
The reasons why I composed this kind of music for an octet of flute, clarinet,
bassoons, trumpets and trombones are the following: First, because this ensemb e
forms a complete sonorous scale and consequently fiirmshes me with a sufficien y
rich register; second, because the difference of the volume of these instruments renders
more evident the musical architecture. And this is the most important question m all my
recent musical compositions. , . , tu \ tUt-
I have excluded from this work all sorts of nuances, which I have replaced by the
I have excluded all nuances between the forte and the pmm; I have left only the
ThereforfrheV" and the piano are in my work only the dynamic limit which
determines the function of the volumes in pliy- i • i t u u a
The play of these volumes is one of the two active elements on which I have based
the action of my musical text, the other element being the movements in their
reciprocal connection. . ,
These two elements, which are the object for the musical execution, can only have
a meaning if the executant follows strictly the musical text.
This play of movements and volumes that puts into action the musical text con­
stitutes the impelling force of the composition and determines its form.
A musical composition constructed on that basis could not, indeed, admit the
introduction of the element of “interptetation" in its execution without nstang the
complete loss of its meaning.
390 The Twentieth Century
To interpret a piece is to realize its portrait, and what I demand is the realization of
the piece itself and not of its portrait.
It is a fact that all music suffers, in time, a deformation through its execution; this
fact would not be regretted if that deformation were done in a manner that would not
be in contradiction to the spirit of the work.
A work created with a spirit in which the emotive basis is the nuance is soon
deformed in all directions; it soon becomes amorphous, its future is anarchic and its
executants becom# its interpreters. The nuance is a very uncertain basis for a musical
composition because its limitations cannot be, even in particular cases, established in a
fixed manner.
On the other hand, a musical composition in which the emotive basis resides not in
the nuance but in the very form of the composition will risk little in tlie hand of its
executants.
I admit the commercial exploitation of a musical composition, but I do not admit
its emotive exploitation. To the author belongs the emotive exploitation of his ideas,
the result of which is the composition; to the executant belongs the presentation of that
composition in the way designated to him by its own form.
It is not at all with the view of preserving my musical work from deformation that I
turn to form as the only emotive basis of a musical composition. I turn to form because
I do not conceive nor feel the true emotive force except under coordinated musical
sensations.
These sensations only find their objective and living expression in the form which,
so to speak, determines their nature.
To understand, or rather feel, the nature of these sensations according to that form
(which is, as I said, their expression) is the task of the executant.
Form, in my music, derives from counterpoint. I consider counterpoint as the only
means through which the attention of the composer is concentrated on purely musical
questions. Its elements also lend themselves perfectly to an architectural construction.
This sort of music has no other aim than to be sufficient in itself. In general, I
consider that music is only able to solve musical problems; and nothing else, neither the
literary nor the picturesque, can be in music of any real interest. The play of the musical
elements is the thing.
I must say that I follow in my art an instinctive logic and that I do not formulate its
theory in any other way than ex post facto.
Igor Stravinsky, “Some Ideas About My Octuor,” reprinted in Eric Walter White, Stravinsky: The Composer
and His Wor^r (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 528-31.
138
Anti-Romantic Polemics
from Stravinsky's Autobiography
Reaction to Romanticism seems to lie at the root of many of the controversial pro­
nouncements so liberally strewn throughout Stravinsky's autobiographical Chronicles
of My Life, first published in Paris in 1936. First and foremost among them is the
Anti-Romantic Polemics from Stravinsky’s Autobiography 391
classic, characteristically overstated, and still hotly debated denial of music's expres­
sive powers (which, it should be noted, Stravinsky partly retracted in later years).
Consciously and deliberately placing himself in the tradition of "formalist" musical
aesthetics, Stravinsky delivered himself of a credo that (particularly as expressed in the
last paragraph below) might almost have come from the pen of Hanslick himself (see
p. 343). What is often overlooked, though, is the fact that Stravinsky by no means
excludes emotion from a place of honor in the musical experience. He maintains,
however, that emotion is not embodied in music but produced by it, and that
this emotion is unique to the musical experience. Stravinsky's insistence on order
and structure as the essence of music's "meaning" is connected, obviously, with his
neoclassicism, but also seems motivated in part in response to the frequent charges he
had to endure of being a musical anarchist and revolutionary—an unwanted reputa­
tion that had its origins in the scandalous premiere of The Rite of Spring (see p. 372).
I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to anything at all,
whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature,
etc. Expression has never been an inherent property of music. That is by no means the
purpose of its existence. If, as is nearly always the case, music appears to express
something, this is only an illusion and not a reality. It is simply an additional attribute
which, by tacit and inveterate agreement, we have lent it, thrust upon it, as a label, a
convention—in short, an aspect we have come to confuse, unconsciously or by force of
habit, with its essential being.
Music is the sole domain in which man realizes the present. By the imperfections of
his nature, man is doomed to submit to the passage of time—to its categories of past
and future—^without ever being able to give substance, and therefore stability, to the
category of the present.
The phenomenon of music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an
order in things, including, and particularly, the coordination between man and time.
To be put into practice, its indispensable and single requirement is construction.
Construction once completed, this order has been attained, and there is nothing
more to be said. It would be futile to look for, or expect anything else from it. It is
precisely this construction, this achieved order, which produces in us a unique emotion
having nothing in common with our ordinary sensations and our responses to the
impressions of daily life. One could not better define the sensation produced by music
than by saying that it is identical with that evoked by contemplation of the interplay of
architectural forms. Goethe thoroughly understood that when he called architecture
petrified music.
People will always insist upon looking in music for something that is not there. The
main thing for them is to know what the piece expresses, and what the author had in
mind when he composed it. They never seem to understand that music has an entity of
its own apart from anything that it may suggest to them. In other words, music interests
them in so far as it touches on elements outside it while evoking sensations with which
they are familiar.
Most people like music because it gives them certain emotions, such as joy, grief,
sadness, an image of nature, a subject for daydreams, or—still better—oblivion fi-om
“everyday life^” They want a drug—“dope.” It matters little whether this way of
thinking of music is expressed directly or is wrapped up in a veil of artificial circumlocu­
tions. Music would not be worth much if it were reduced to such an end. When people