Noting Stravinsky’s recent interest in African American music in the Manchester Guardian, Ernest Newman remarked that Ragtime might have been better received in a cinema or restaurant. As a tribute to vapid entertainment, he averred, the piece was ‘hardly worth the while of a man of original genius’; Stravinsky, Newman claimed, had exhausted his compositional resources and – ‘having nothing urgent or vital of his own to say now’ – was busy ‘larking about boyishly among the more stereotyped musical humours of the day’.2 As a caricature of popular culture, in other words, Ragtime was beneath Stravinsky and, by extension, inappropriate fare for the concert hall. How should we understand this strange act of aesthetic transgression? Isn’t modernism supposed to maintain distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’?

Schoenberg and Stravinsky: compare and contrast. Setting aside the surfeit of binary logic which might threaten to engulf the proposition, geographical point/counterpoint in this instance began in two locations – Leopoldstadt, Vienna and Oranienbaum (now Lomonosov), St Petersburg – separated by almost 1,900 kilometres. By 1941, when Stravinsky took up residence in Los Angeles at 1260 North Wetherley Drive, West Hollywood, nine miles east of Schoenberg’s home at 116 North Rockingham Avenue, Brentwood, physical proximity would do little to alter the prevailing impression of their remaining not just words but also culturally segregated worlds apart. Schoenberg and Stravinsky went on to spend the remainder of their lives domiciled in the United States, and as naturalised American citizens. Moreover, creative priorities eventually turned out to dictate an altogether extraordinary point of convergence when in the early 1950s, but following Schoenberg’s death, Stravinsky began to compose using serial principles.