14 - Stravinsky and us

Summary

When, at the dawn of the third millennium, we use the word ‘Stravinsky’, we no longer merely name a person. We mean a collection of ideas – ideas embodied in, or rather construed out of, a certain body of highly valued musical and literary texts that acquired enormous authority in twentieth-century musical culture. That authority and its consequences are what have been preoccupying my thoughts about Stravinsky since completing Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, which, though published in 1996, was not as recent a study as it seemed. It had spent almost seven years in press, during which time my thinking about the bundle of notions called ‘Stravinsky’ underwent considerable change.

In keeping with the scholarly tradition in which I was trained, my book was almost wholly concerned with the production of those texts, and with determining their place within the historical context contemporaneous with them. My thinking since has been more concerned with the relationship between those texts, and the ideas construed from them, and the contexts in which they have existed since the time of their production, up to their present contexts, including this book. Just as in Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions I considered the reciprocal manner in which Stravinsky received influences from his surroundings and influenced those surroundings in turn, so I continue to be interested in that reciprocity of influence in the period since his death.