Stravinsky and Balanchine by Charles M. Joseph

Author:Charles M. Joseph
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2002-11-03T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10 The Evolution of Agon’s Musical Structure

My past and present time worlds cannot be the same. I know that portions of Agon contain three times as much music for the same clock length as some other pieces of mine. . . . We are located in time constantly in a tonal-system work, whether Josquin’s Duke Hercules Mass or a serially composed non-tonal-system work.

—Igor Stravinsky

The Apologie de la danse (1623) by François de Lauze constitutes the most substantive dance treatise of the seventeenth century. When Kirstein mailed a copy to Stravinsky, he sent the 1952 British reprint of the book, which had been greatly supplemented by its editor, Joan Wildeblood. The manual addressed the instruction, history, and function of several period dances, at least “the most advantageous” ones, as de Lauze concludes. But most important, Wildeblood offered detailed explanations of several popular dance patterns.

Given Stravinsky’s immersion in the music of the Renaissance, Kirstein could not have sent the manual at a more propitious time. The composer’s curiosity about early music extended from the fourteenth-century composer Guillaume de Machaut through the fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century works of Josquin des Prez. It even included Claudio Monteverdi, whose seventeenth-century operas and ballets (including the important 1607 opera Orfeo, which Stravinsky studied while composing Orpheus) were contemporary with de Lauze’s manual. Still, even though the Apologie dates from the early 1620s, its spirit is more sixteenth than seventeenth century, just as Agon’s musical roots are directly traceable to the Renaissance rather than the baroque. Indeed, the whole of Agon’s music has a subtle but unmistakable Renaissance quality; in terms of dance, Robert Garis adds, “Agon is indeed a ballet in which Renaissance dance forms are brought up to the minute under great pressure.”1

De Lauze’s treatise was far more than a standard how-to dance manual: it was a lexicon of protocol, an attestation to the hallowed virtues of classicism that Balanchine, Kirstein, and Stravinsky revered. The composer surely endorsed the proprieties elucidated in Wildeblood’s editorial introduction: “In an age when the manner of the Court was becoming increasingly artificial, the observance of the correct mode of behavior became a matter of supreme importance, especially for those members of society who desired to appear to have advantage in courtly circles.” This call for order and deportment was terribly important to a composer whose personal code of conduct embraced carriage and deference. Equally important were the tenets of logic and reason synonymous with the courts of Louis XIII and Louis XIV (which led to the establishment of the Royal Academies of Dance, in 1661, and Music, in 1669)—tenets linked to “the artistic models of classical antiquity,” yet another fundamental Stravinskyan connection.2

Order and proportionality were part of the French Renaissance’s belle danse, just as they run to the core of Agon’s tightly conceived structure. As dance master Pierre Rameau advised in his 1725 Le Maître à Danser: “Especially in BallRoom dances . . . the steps should be executed with every regard for uniformity and proportion.” That proportion

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