Strawinsky
The new steel organs of man have begotten their music in "Le Sacre du
printemps." For with Strawinsky, the rhythms of machinery enter musical
art. With this his magistral work a new chapter of music commences, the
spiritualization of the new body of man is manifest. Through Debussy,
music had liquified, become opalescent and impalpable and fluent. It had
become, because of his sense, his generation's sense, of the infirmity
of things, a sort of symbol of the eternal flux, the eternal
momentariness. It had come to body forth all that merges and changes and
disappears, to mirror the incessant departures and evanescences of life,
to shape itself upon the infinitely subtle play of light, the restless,
heaving, foaming surface of the sea, the impalpable racks of perfume,
upon gusts of wind and fading sounds, upon all the ephemeral wonder of
the world. But through Strawinsky, there has come to be a music
stylistically well-nigh the reverse of that of the impressionists.
Through him, music has become again cubical, lapidary, massive,
mechanistic. Scintillation is gone out of it. The delicate, sinuous
melodic line, the glamorous sheeny harmonies, are gone out of it. The
elegance of Debussy, the golden sensuality, the quiet, classic touch,
are flown.
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