Further Thoughts on Schnittke

Extract

If Schnittke's plundering of past styles brings to mind Stravinsky, important distinctions must be made. Schnittke does not quarry the past with Stravinskian detachment; his stylistic amalgams can be a deal more riotous (as for example in the First Symphony) than anything Stravinsky would have countenanced. It is in fact Shostakovich rather than Stravinsky who comes to mind as the more apparent influence, with his striking juxtapositions of the sublime and the banal, the diatonic and the chromatic. Schnittke's music can occasionally sound like listening to Shostakovich through an accumulated wealth of musical debris from the Western tradition. Another obstacle to any assessment of Schnittke's work lies in the apparent naivety of so much of his technique. Structures are often the most basic of designs, thematic techniques appear unsophisticated (transformations, canons, simple heterophonic devices). Climaxes are achieved by extravagant instrumental gestures, long pedal points are used to unify paragraphs (or whole movements, as in the opening movement of the Requiem of 1974–5), and serial devices amount to the simplest chromatic formulations. The Quasi una Sonata (1968) for violin and piano, for example, demonstrates that ten years before the Concerto Grosso No. 1 Schnittke was exploring the use of chromatic tetrachords in quasi-serial formulations.