2013-02-27
4 分钟Howard Goodall and Suzy Klein discuss Stravinsky's Les Noces
The story of music in 50 pieces, with Howard Goodall and Susie Klein.
Howard, in telling the story of music in 50 pieces, you have selected two Stravinsky ballets.
We've already had the rite of spring.
Now we have le noss for different.
Reasons, I should say.
It's not because Stravinsky is a very important composer in the 20th century, which he is, and he's a very important figure in modernism, which he is.
It's because in two different pieces, he had an impact that led to different outcomes with the rite of spring.
And by the way, they're both works for ballet.
They're both dance pieces, and we keep talking about this, but the impact of dance on 20th century music is enormous.
And we see this time and time again it's not just to do with rhythm, it's to do with the purpose of the piece.
And it's almost as if having a story to tell with physical bodies on a stage distracted composers from worrying too much about the internal vocabulary of their music, that they could just write the story.
In 1922, Srinsky starts working on another ballet for the ballets Russes, and this time it's Les Nosses, which is about a wedding ceremony, again, in an old russian peasant community.
It's not as love to piece, it has to be said.
It's not one of the loved pieces of the 1920s, in a way that other works of that period are.
But Lenos tells us all sorts of other things, and it's one of those pieces in musical history that impacted on other composers.
For a start, there's a musical style here, a kind of declaiming, rhythmic speech, which, whilst it didn't lead to rap, it's kind of an early version of what we now think of as rap, which is a form of declamation.
It happens to be in Russian, but it's a rhythmic declamation in the voice, and he's using the voice like a percussion instrument.
Of.
The second thing is that Stravinsky reinvented what the orchestral ensemble sound should be.
It's one of the truisms of 20th century and 21st century music that if you didn't have the symphony orchestra hadn't been invented, there's almost no 20th century composer who would actually choose that particular constellation of instruments woodwind strings, lower brass, upper brass, etcetera.