1985/01/01 by Richard Taruskin · 93 citations
Arts and Humanities · #Acoustics #Art #Harmonic #Physics #Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices
paper · pdf · doi:10.2307/831550
published in Journal of the American Musicological Society 38(1), 72-142 (University of California Press)
openalex publication_date 1985/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/04/13
STRAVINSKYIS "ANGLE " 73 first to have availed himself of this particular mode, Messiaen confided that "one already finds traces of it in Sadko by Rimsky-Korsakov; Scriabin uses it in a more conscious fashion; Ravel and Stravinsky have used it transiently."Except for Sadko (the tone poem or the opera?),Messiaen mentioned no specific works; he went on, moreover, to dismiss his predecessors' dabbling with the mode as having been a mere "timid sketch, the modal effect being more or less absorbed by classified sonorities," meaning that their use of the mode was impure and intermixed with diatonic elements.2Accurate or not, this remark stood isolated in the Stravinsky literature for over a decade, until Roman Vlad published his biography of the composer in 1958.Vlad, who had already written on the use of Messiaen's "mode no.2" in the works of Goffredo Petrassi and some others,3 now reported its presence in the Scherzo fantastique and Petrushka.In the third edition, Vlad was to note it again at the other end of Stravinsky's career: in the tone row for The Owl and the Pussy-Cat.4Although these observations were valid and valuable, they remained vague.Moreover, citing a mere trio of works that encompassed a time span of over a half century certainly seemed to confirm Messiaen's characterization of Stravinsky's involvement with the mode as "transient."It was a 1963 article by Arthur Berger that securely established the scale as a topic of prime importance for the study of Stravinsky's music.5In this seminal piece, enigmatic passages in works ranging from Petrushka through The Rite of Spring, Les Noces, Symphonies of Wind Instruments, Octuour, Symphony of Psalms, Symphony in Three Movements, all the way to The Rake's Progress were, in a manner of speaking, solved for the first time by invoking what Berger was the first to call "the octatonic scale.'"6Stravinsky's involvement with it, Berger now revealed, had been anything but transient or sporadic.Moreover, by the use of this new conceptualization of Stravinsky's pitch organization, an ordering that-and this was particularly impressive-Berger JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY The most vocal opponent of the octatonic view has been Joseph Straus, who has compared that approach with earlier attempts to rationalize Stravinsky's centric practices through appeals to traditional functional tonality, dismissing a wide and incompatible assortment of Stravinsky analysts (Boulez, Schenker, Berger, and van den Toorn) under a common rubric: "The Tonal and Octatonic Fallacies."'4"Ultimately," he writes, "the octatonic model as presented by Berger and elaborated by van den Toorn is no more or less useful for understanding Stravinsky's music than the Schenkerian tonal model," and this because "in using either model, the analyst will be confronted by numerous 'wrong notes' and large-scale events which neither model can adequately explain.""1In addition, the contention that the scale can be adduced to account for Stravinsky's peculiar sense of tonal polarity is rejected because "the four potential competing tonal centers" implied by the scale (to be defined in the discussion that follows) are, according to Straus, neither necessarily inherent in the scale nor necessarily all present in any given octatonically referable composition.But neither of these points is valid.Both Berger and, especially, van den Toorn set greatest store not by the octatonic collection (to use the word that van den Toorn properly prefers to scale) per se, but by specific Stravinskian octatonic usages and "octatonic-diatonic interactions," from which point of view those notes considered wrong by Straus are handily taken into account.'6And to complain that all potential tone centers implied by the scale are not actual in a given piece of music is simply to misunderstand the word potential.I7 let Berger's or van den Toorn's (or anyone's) generalizations impede his very methodically inductive investigation of The Rite; his study could be looked upon, in scientific terms, as an empirical test of the octatonic theory, among others, provided suitable caution is exercised with respect to certain methodological flaws discussed in the reviews to be cited below.