He
has written some of the freshest, most rippling, delicate music.
Scarcely a living man has written more freshly or humorously. April, the
flowering branches, the snowing petals, the clouds high in the blue, are
really in the shrilling little orchestra of the Japanese lyrics, in the
green, gurgling flutes and watery violins. None of the innumerable
Spring Symphonies, Spring Overtures, Spring Songs, are really more
vernal, more soaked in the gentle sunshine of spring, are more really
the seed-time, than the six naive piping measures of melody that
introduce the figure of the "Sacre" entitled "Rondes printanieres." No
doubt, in venturing to write music so bold and original in esthetic,
Strawinsky was encouraged by the example of another musician, another
Russian composer. Moussorgsky, before him, had trusted in his own
innocence instead of in the wisdom of the fathers of the musical church,
had dared obey the promptings of his own blood and set down chords,
melodies, rhythms, just as they sang in his skull, though all the world
rise up to damn him. But the penning of music as jagged, cubical,
barbarous as the prelude to the third act of Strawinsky's little opera,
"The Nightingale," or as naked, uncouth, rectangular, rocklike,
polyharmonic, headlong, as some of that of "Le Sacre du printemps"
required no less perfect a conviction, no less great a self-reliance.
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