Stravinsky's "Special Sense": The Rhetorical Use of Tonality in "The Rake's Progress"

Abstract

To understand more fully what Donald Mitchell calls Stravinsky's “special sense of the past,” this article analyzes four relatively short passages from The Rake's Progress, paying particular attention to foreground chord succession and voice leading. Conventional voice-leading analysis, pc-set theory, motivic analysis, and recent post-tonal approaches to voice leading are used—and ultimately incorporated—to assess the role(s) that tonal conventions play within the broader scope of Stravinsky's post-tonal harmonic language. Viewed broadly, this pluralistic approach offers multiple perspectives from which to measure seemingly irreconcilable differences and to identify cross references—thereby revealing features that mediate between divergent styles. More importantly, this approach acknowledges the stylistic conflict, tension, and interplay so typical of the music of Stravinsky (and so many other twentieth-century composers) without regarding these features as ancillary or exceptional.

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