In the paragraph preceding his magisterial chapter on The Rite of Spring in Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, Richard Taruskin makes the following rich and conflicting set of observations about Stravinsky’s exile, aesthetic commitments, and national identity:
Precisely because The Rite was neither rupture nor upheaval but a magnificent extension, it revealed to Stravinsky a path that would sustain him through a decade of unimaginable ruptures and upheavals brought on by events far beyond his control. . . . [T]he composer of The Rite became the “grand artiste russe” envisioned by Debussy. And this enabled him to become the composer of Svadebka, the most essentially and exclusively Russian composer the world of art music has ever seen. But in an apparent paradox that has become legend, the same Rite made him a fountain-head of international modernism, an elemental force in the music of all countries—all, that is, except his own.1
Taruskin shows pragmatic and humane insight by recognizing how an exiled creator such as Stravinsky would have needed to hold on to stable musical commitments to “sustain” him in the wake of “unimaginable ruptures and upheavals.” This recognition resonates with widespread observations made in scholarship on migration. As Homi Bhabha explained in conversation with James Clifford, “Refugees and exiles . . . for their survival . . . need to fix upon certain symbols. The process of hybridization which goes on can often represent itself . . . by a kind of survival identified in the holding on to something.”2 Yet it is also important to appreciate the extraordinary paradox Taruskin poses: he describes Stravinsky as “essentially and exclusively Russian” after multiple migrations, during a time when the composer maintained an ambivalent relationship with his national heritage, all the while developing an ostentatiously cosmopolitan persona in the very midst of the “ruptures and upheavals” of exile. What would it mean to describe a composer as permanently Russian to the core—to the exclusion of other possible cultural or national identities—in this context? The labeling of Stravinsky in French as the “grand artiste russe” further highlights the instabilities that characterize Taruskin’s claim of Stravinsky’s “Russianness”—instabilities that indeed bring this claim to life and make it interesting. The question of Stravinsky’s nationality becomes further complicated when considering the different phases of his displacement: first, his pre-exile period of extensive travel and living abroad, when, as Taruskin puts it, “his great neonationalist achievements were actually composed outside of Russia”;3 and second, Stravinsky’s life in permanent exile after the Russian Revolution, when he anxiously and continuously revised mythologies surrounding The Rite of Spring.
Taruskin’s words about Stravinsky’s “magnificent extension” of Russian musical culture raise compelling questions about how Stravinsky may have imagined his national homeland from a distance, both musically and otherwise. They also implicitly interrogate the relationship between a repertoire’s national identity and its international value. In this essay, I begin by exploring the powerful historiographical impulses and institutional histories that motivate and make possible Taruskin’s argument that Stravinsky’s work is essentially Russian in manner, character, and/or identity. Then, I consider The Rite’s status as the imagination of a national homeland envisioned from afar. Toward this end, drawing on Raymond Williams, I explore practices of aesthetic estrangement current within the highly mobile avant-gardes, including the Ballets Russes, in which Stravinsky traveled. These effects of estrangement prove highly relevant to the compositional techniques Taruskin describes as forming the basis for The Rite of Spring’s Russian identity. Without drawing a final conclusion, I close with some open-ended questions about Stravinsky’s Russian period work, conceived specifically within a history of migration.
Taruskin’s quotation above encapsulates the primary thesis of Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions. As he writes in the introduction in volume 1, “Stravinsky was the most completely Russian composer of art music that ever was and, if present trends continue, that ever will be.”4 The final paragraph of volume 2 concludes with an even more vivid assertion of Stravinsky’s Russian legacy: “The force of [Stravinsky’s] example bequeathed a russkiy slog [Russian manner] to the whole world of twentieth-century concert music. To that world Stravinsky related not by any ‘angle.’ He was the very stem.”5 The national quality of Stravinsky’s work thus serves as a precondition to its universal value, to its being “the very stem” of “the whole world of twentieth-century concert music.” Taruskin bases his claims of Stravinsky’s Russianness both on the composer’s association with the artists of the World of Art circle and, more importantly, on Stravinsky’s inventive absorption of “stylistic elements abstracted from Russian folklore” in the development of his style, which played “the traditions of Russian folk music against those of the provincial, denationalized Russian art music in which he had been reared.”6 These most Russian qualities of his music, in Taruskin’s account, are what ultimately made his work a “fountainhead of international modernism.”7
Elsewhere I have explored the historiographical precedents for such assertions of national identity as a precondition for international or universal value, with particular attention to musical histories of exile.8 Following the work of Benedict Anderson, it has become commonplace to recognize the nation as more than a territorial division or political entity but as an imagined community that commands “profound emotional legitimacy” through its cultural symbols and habits.9 While Anderson focused on the role of print media in the imagination of the “horizontal comradeship” of the nation, musical cultures have also played a vital role.10 The musical institutions and repertoires that elaborate these national visions include far more than merely those with explicitly national or nationalist programs. Rather, concert halls, opera houses, and their repertoires have themselves stood as testaments to the cultural lives of their nations. Moreover, as scholars from Pamela Potter and Celia Applegate to Alejandro Madrid remind us, the discipline of musicology arose from the need to tell the history of nations and their cultures.11 Matthew Gelbart has described the role that folk musics played in the development of the idea of national art music, which “served as cultural capital in two ways: as a form of ‘tradition’ (representing the newly conceived national ‘folk’ as a whole), and also as aesthetic achievement—as proof of the existence of individual, synthesizing artistic geniuses within each national populace.”12 In the realm of music, aspirations toward national public significance and universal meaning were deeply entwined, with the first often seen as a gateway to the second.13 This model has even influenced twentieth-century exile studies, which tends to strongly position émigrés in relation either to their nations of origin or to their adopted homelands. Since its development as a discipline in East and West Germany after World War II, exile studies has often worked to rehabilitate exiled composers as historically “central” figures within well-established national genealogies. As Martin Jay, Reinhold Brinkmann, and Florian Scheding have described, this approach proved valuable to competitive national legitimation projects in both Germanys after the war.14
Taruskin’s argument about Stravinsky’s essentially Russian identity and universal value—drawing on the composer’s use of folk materials—thus keeps faith with founding values of historical musicology alongside those that tend to inform twentieth-century musical scholarship on exile. Enormous anxieties, I believe, underlie these impulses to identify displaced composers with a single national identity. What is a composer, after all, without a nation? Nationality works as a strategic (and perhaps in some contexts indispensable) tool for scholarly advocacy. Demonstrating a composer’s vital belonging within a significant national canon all but guarantees the value of that artist’s work. Taruskin’s book represents not only an indispensable intervention for Stravinsky research but also a bold project to legitimize and bring prestige to Russian traditions that had been construed as “minor” in relation to their German neighbors. Moreover, histories of exile such as Taruskin’s own often mirror the national self-presentations of the displaced figures themselves, as demonstrated in Stravinsky’s Russian period work. In the wake of the turbulence of uprooting, displaced individuals often need to “fix upon certain symbols,” including national ones.
Yet some distance must nonetheless be maintained from nation-centered exile narratives. Such studies do little to address the seemingly contradictory mixture of identifications and community affiliations that often characterize lives in displacement, in compensation for their loss of stable national identity, as many studies of migration have shown.15 Contemporary circumstances motivate this historiographical need. As Edward Said noted, we have long been living in “the age of the refugee, the displaced person.”16 This realization compels the creation of a historiography that responds to the complexities of this lived, uprooted reality. It demands that we develop value systems alternative to our inherited national ones through which to stake claims about cultural significance. This project resonates with various humanities research programs of the last two decades, especially in diaspora and migration studies.
At first glance, literary critic and cultural theorist Raymond Williams offers a promising alternative for the historiography of displaced aesthetic modernists such as Stravinsky, especially during the pre-exile phase of his travels when he composed The Rite of Spring. Indeed, Williams speaks directly to the Parisand St. Petersburg–centered vanguardist circles in which Stravinsky moved: he identifies a wave of aesthetic avant-gardes that formed in European capitals from around 1890 onward as “competitively self-promoting,” “defensive cultural groupings.”17 They “variously announced their arrival with a passionate and scornful vision of the new, and as quickly became fissiparous, friendships breaking across the heresies required in order to prevent innovations from becoming fixed as orthodoxies.”18 What defined these fragile aesthetic groupings, full of dissent and drama, were the geographically mobile lives of many of their figures. Williams captures here the kinds of circles that defined the Ballets Russes, with its itinerant lifestyle, extravagant self-promotion founded on continuous proclamations of the new, notorious social intrigues and fallings out, and constant drawing and redrawing of cultural battle lines.19
Williams associates the peripatetic lives of such vanguardists with a denaturalizing approach to the expressive idioms of the arts. He suggests that immigrants and travelers began to see language—and expressive media more generally—as arbitrary with respect to the very conventions that might normally be taken for granted and left unquestioned: “Such endless border-crossing at a time when frontiers were starting to become much more strictly policed . . . worked to naturalize the thesis of the non-natural status of language.”20 This recognition of the arbitrary status of language, in turn, encouraged a deeply experimental approach toward the inherited foundations of many expressive media. Williams elaborates at length on this relationship between formal innovations in the arts and experiences of cultural strangeness and border crossing:
The most important general element of the innovations in form is the fact of immigration to the metropolis, and it cannot too often be emphasized how many of the major innovators were, in this precise sense, immigrants. At the level of theme, this underlies, in an obvious way, the elements of strangeness and distances . . . which so regularly form part of the repertoire. But the decisive aesthetic effect is at a deeper level. Liberated or breaking from their national or provincial cultures, placed in quite new relations to those other native languages or native visual traditions, encountering meanwhile a novel and dynamic common environment from which many of the older forms were obviously distant, the artists and writers and thinkers of this phase found the only community available to them: a community of the medium; of their own practices. Thus language was perceived quite differently. It was no longer, in the old sense, customary and naturalized, but in many ways arbitrary and conventional. To the immigrants especially, with their new second common language, language was more evident as a medium—a medium that could be shaped and reshaped—than as a social custom.21
For the moment, I would bracket Williams’s claim about vanguardists “breaking from their national or provincial cultures,” which smooths over many vexed questions about national identity in one easy phrase. Instead, I want to focus on aesthetic estrangement and the idea that conventions can be endlessly shaped and reshaped through such effects. Williams refers in a cursory way to “elements of strangeness and distances” that characterized avant-garde practices. It is worth elaborating the ideas and practices encapsulated in these words, with special attention to their relevance to Stravinsky, before returning to the question of migration and nationality.
Estrangement remains a vital term in the aesthetic interpretation of many avant-garde movements from Symbolism, Expressionism, Cubism, and Russian Formalism to the later vanguards of Dada and agitprop theater. All of these movements brought the concept to bear in disparate ways, aligning it with a wide variety of aesthetic agendas and political programs. Yet, even across all of these varied movements and settings, estrangement nonetheless retains a distinct and identifiable set of connotations as a concept. First, it promises the rejuvenation of sensory experience and aesthetic expression in the wake of social or artistic conventions variously conceived as stale, decadent, academic, or commercialized. It does so not by making a complete break with the past but rather by engaging old conventions and objects in a three-fold process of estrangement, formalization, and renewal. In order to bring about a revitalization of aesthetic experience, familiar artifacts—for example, words, expressions, or visual objects—must be extracted from their usual deadening contexts. Once an element is isolated from its familiar setting, it can be seen in a new light, as arbitrary formal material. Finally, its juxtaposition with other contrasting elements brings it to life anew: it has entered and been reborn into a fluid, formal network of novel and unexpected associations.22 Many late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century avant-garde practices across different media follow this threefold process of estrangement, formalization, and renewal. One classic example can be found in Mallarmé’s use of language. The poet excelled in retrieving the most seemingly banal terms and images from their dull, everyday contexts and associations. He did so by inserting them within enigmatic assemblages of diction held together by ambiguous grammar, creating a shifting constellation of highly particularized, polysemous effects.23 Visual montages from the 1910s onward sever similarly estranged found objects from their familiar contexts and bring them to life afresh within visual constructions that depend upon the juxtaposition of incongruous elements—again creating new networks of association and value that help to redefine the elements on which the montage depends.24
In his account of Stravinsky’s St. Petersburg avant-gardes, Taruskin makes repeated reference to Russian Symbolism, itself no stranger to the aesthetics of estrangement. Indeed, Taruskin begins his chapter on Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring with a quotation from Alexander Blok in which the poet describes “folk magic and ritual” as a golden and glinting “ore” to be “painstakingly collected” and brought into communication with “the ‘paper’ poetry of books” for the revitalization of contemporary writing.25 This elaborate imagery evokes an estranging process of extraction and incongruous juxtaposition, which participates in an aesthetic project meant to transform a world of sensory perceptions.
Taruskin’s thorough and convincing description of Stravinsky’s use of folk material in The Rite of Spring reveals compositional techniques that follow a similar logic of estrangement, formalization, and renewal, which ultimately mesh well with Raymond Williams’s account of turn-of-the-century avant-garde preoccupations. Closely interpreting Stravinsky’s sketchbooks, which include simple notated folk melodies, Taruskin shows how Stravinsky was “on the lookout for ethnographically appropriate source melodies—for natural artifacts, one might say—as a means to give his music authenticity.”26 These bits of musical material work as found objects, or the Blokian “ore” that helps to revitalize the contemporary aesthetic practice. As Taruskin shows, Stravinsky treated these tunes as formal material to be reshaped, submitting them to internal transformations and extraordinary reshufflings within new musical contexts. At the same time, elements within the tunes also provide the inspiration or motivation for larger-scale recurrent harmonies. Stravinsky’s use of a seasonal round-dance melody from Rimsky-Korsakov’s 1877 folk music collection stands out as a primary example of this practice. The song serves as the basis for at least one opening tune of “Spring Rounds,” as well as the main melody of the movement. The tune’s intervals “are not only abstracted as a melodic find, but generate the quartal second harmony [of the movement] as well.”27 Yet, as Taruskin observes, the tune becomes so thoroughly transformed in its new contexts that it becomes virtually unrecognizable.28 Another prominent example of such musical estrangement involves Stravinsky’s transmutation of a traditional wedding song in “Mystic Circles of the Young Girls.” As Taruskin points out, “It is apparent that Stravinsky created the final version . . . in ‘mosaic’ fashion: individual melodic turns . . . are treated as tesserae, subject to the most varied juxtaposition, internal repetition, and . . . independent transposition.”29 Taruskin’s use of visual metaphors here (“mosaic,” “tesserae,” “juxtaposition”) is both telling and compelling. The “magnificent extension” embodied by The Rite depended upon a musical reinterpretation of avant-garde techniques and concepts that traveled (and were transformed) across disparate media and geographies.
Stravinsky’s compositional techniques can productively be interpreted in terms of the aesthetic estrangement that Williams identifies as crucial to many geographically mobile European avant-gardes at the turn of the century. Yet, in keeping with the spirit of Taruskin’s arguments, it would be difficult to associate this aesthetic of estrangement with a clean break from “national or provincial cultures” that Williams associates with the life of émigrés and travelers in the modern metropolis. Rather, aesthetic estrangement techniques handle and rework all manner of pregiven signs and materials, including nationally loaded signifiers like folk tunes. One might speculatively interpret such acts as articulating a complicated renegotiation of a national cultural heritage. In Stravinsky’s case, this renegotiation took place precisely at a time when the “imagined community” of the Russian nation—conceived as a natural, broad, and horizontal identification—remained in severe political crisis, during a period when the composer himself attenuated his ties to that nation through his pursuit of professional opportunities elsewhere in Europe. In other words, even before the Revolution and Stravinsky’s exile, Russian national identity could no longer easily be taken for granted as something familiar and given, precisely at the time when the Ballets Russes relied upon Russianness as its exotic and arguably estranged trademark. In this context, a second claim made by Williams gains new meaning: “The artists and writers and thinkers of this [early modernist] phase found the only community available to them: a community of the medium; of their own practices.”30 These words suggest that a world of aesthetic practice—carried out in the lives of contentious and fragile avant-garde communities—ultimately helped to compensate for a larger national community that could not be taken as given.
Williams’s words link up with a whole body of migration studies that show how a plurality of small-scale communities sometimes works as a lifeline for displaced individuals when national belonging is made tenuous. To be sure, innumerable questions arise from this perspective. How does one gauge an individual’s sense of national belonging, nonbelonging, or ambivalence? To what extent can the “imagined community of the nation” ever be taken for granted on the part of the displaced, the exiled, or the fragmented cosmopolitan classes of an empire like Russia or elsewhere? How can we more thoroughly explore an otherwise speculative correlation between aesthetic estrangement effects and experiences of national estrangement? How can artistic worlds of communication and collaboration provide any means of compensation for a national community that becomes lost, distant, or untenable? None of these questions anticipates an easy answer. I would suggest, however, that a focus on individuals within displaced communities and their innovative use of media, in Williams’s terms, does bring new meaning to one of Taruskin’s most interesting insights, the idea that technical developments in The Rite of Spring would help to sustain Stravinsky after his exile. Moreover, if cultivating a fine-tuned understanding of the choices and constraints of the uprooted remains our goal as historians, then a wealth of scholarship, following in Taruskin’s wake, indicates that Stravinsky and his creative networks offer rich pathways of study.31
1. Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 1:847–48.
2. Clifford, Routes, 42.
3. Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 1:870n54.
4. Ibid., 1:18.
5. Ibid., 2:1675.
6. Ibid., 1:18.
7. Ibid., 1:848.
8. Cohen, Stefan Wolpe, 12–15.
9. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 4.
10. Ibid., 7.
11. Applegate and Potter, Music and German National Identity; Madrid, “American Music in Times of Postnationality.”
12. Gelbart, The Invention of “Folk Music” and “Art Music,” 236, italics in the original.
13. Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, 37.
14. Brinkmann, “Reading a Letter”; Jay, “The German Migration”; Scheding, “‘The Splinter in Your Eye.’”
15. See, for example, Sara Ahmed’s critical survey of migration and diaspora scholarship in her Strange Encounters, 77–94.
16. Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Said, Reflections on Exile, 174.
17. Williams, Politics of Modernism, 33.
18. Ibid.
19. Perhaps the most flamboyant and vivid documentary portrayal of these internal battles and intrigues at the Ballets Russes is found in Volta, Satie Seen through His Letters, 101–29.
20. Williams, Politics of Modernism, 34.
21. Ibid., 45–46.
22. Cohen, Stefan Wolpe, 88–103.
23. For more on Mallarmé’s techniques of estrangement, see Smith, Mallarmé’s Children; Johnson, The Critical Difference, 52–66; and Johnson, A World of Difference, 57–67.
24. Poggi, In Defiance of Painting.
25. Alexander Blok, as cited in Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 1:849.
26. Ibid., 1:911.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid., 1:914.
30. Williams, Politics of Modernism, 45.
31. See especially Levitz, Modernist Mysteries.