Igor Stravinsky’s Espressivo Enigma

McKay, Nicholas

Igor Stravinsky’s Espressivo Enigma

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McKay, Nicholas ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5238-8225 (2025) Igor Stravinsky’s Espressivo Enigma. In: Musical Analysis. Historia - Theoria - Praxis. The Karol Lipinski Academy of Music, Wroclaw, Poland, pp. 55-72. (In Press)

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Abstract

The question of whether or how to analyse expressive gestures in Stravinsky’s music has been a well- documented problem. The composer’s provocative assertion that music was ‘essentially powerless to express anything at all’ [Stravinsky 1990] fuelled a neoclassical ideology that has both repelled and marginalised such approaches. Inconsistencies and contradictions in Stravinsky’s own performance interpretation, verbal pronouncements, and notation practice of, on and in his music, along with musicology’s drift from formalist analysis to contextual interpretation, however, have exposed the ideological flaws and turned the tide. Taruskin [1993, 1995] undermined the objectivity pretence of neoclassicism. CHARM Sonic Visualiser-inspired analyses of Stravinsky’s recordings dismissed the conceit of expressionless performance by mechanical execution [Cook 2003]. Straus [2001] sketched the beginnings of a universe of topical gestures for Stravinsky. More recently, Dahl [2022] unpicked the modes of communication at work in the music through data-driven observations on performance, notated expression signs, and ideological practices. Long before the tide turned, speaking in 1973, barely two years after the composer’s death, Bernstein [1976] captured the enigmatic paradox when he found the Symphony of Psalms’ instructions, dolce, tranquillo, espressivo, ‘right in the middle of a severe Bach-like fugue’, ‘enough to make you give up aesthetics for good – at least Stravinsky’s aesthetics’.
Parallel to these developments, topic theory approaches to music analysis, interpretation, and meaning evolved considerably as a means of decoding musical signs of expression. The earlier championing of Ratner [1980], Allanbrook [1983], and Agawu [1991, 2009] provided the intertextual analytical foundations on which Hatten [1994, 2004] and Monelle [1992, 2000, 2006] could build more hermeneutic approaches. Recent authors [Mirka (ed.) 2014] have sought more detailed historicist scrutiny of the contemporaneous recognition of topics in dialogues between iconic pictorialism and indexical genre/style conventions. Hatten’s [2014] call for ‘a higher degree of interpretive abduction through tropological mediation’ to analyse the migration, troping, and juxtaposition of topics continues to highlight the dialogical and dialogised [Bakhtin 1981] nature of these musical signs of expression.
It is at this intersection of dialogised topical references; genre conventions; ideology, performance and notation practice where an analytical understanding of Stravinsky’s espressivo can be mediated from the inherent, multi-layered contradictions – paradoxes even – upon which it is built. Here, linguistic expressive indications in the scores are not just signs of expression confronting ideologies of aesthetic objectivity or performance execution, but signposts of topical intertexts (along with metre, rhythm, harmony, texture, and other musical parameters) on which analytical approaches can be built and hermeneutic readings made. The article evidences this through analyses and interpretations of the encoded expression in Stravinsky’s music. Reappraising what detailed scrutiny of Stravinsky’s expressive signs can yield as a form of music analysis, it calls upon musicology to tropologically mediate, rather than ‘give up’, Stravinsky’s aesthetics for good.

Item Type:	Book Chapter or Section
Subjects:	Music
Date Deposited:	28 Oct 2025
URI:	https://repository.uwl.ac.uk/id/eprint/14202
Sustainable Development Goals:	Goal 4: Quality Education

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Igor Stravinsky’s Espressivo Enigma

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