Chernomor to Kashchei: Harmonic Sorcery; Or, Stravinsky's "Angle"

Abstract

STRAVINSKYIS "ANGLE " 73 first to have availed himself of this particular mode, Messiaen confided that "one already finds traces of it in Sadko by Rimsky-Korsakov; Scriabin uses it in a more conscious fashion; Ravel and Stravinsky have used it transiently."Except for Sadko (the tone poem or the opera?),Messiaen mentioned no specific works; he went on, moreover, to dismiss his predecessors' dabbling with the mode as having been a mere "timid sketch, the modal effect being more or less absorbed by classified sonorities," meaning that their use of the mode was impure and intermixed with diatonic elements.2Accurate or not, this remark stood isolated in the Stravinsky literature for over a decade, until Roman Vlad published his biography of the composer in 1958.Vlad, who had already written on the use of Messiaen's "mode no.2" in the works of Goffredo Petrassi and some others,3 now reported its presence in the Scherzo fantastique and Petrushka.In the third edition, Vlad was to note it again at the other end of Stravinsky's career: in the tone row for The Owl and the Pussy-Cat.4Although these observations were valid and valuable, they remained vague.Moreover, citing a mere trio of works that encompassed a time span of over a half century certainly seemed to confirm Messiaen's characterization of Stravinsky's involvement with the mode as "transient."It was a 1963 article by Arthur Berger that securely established the scale as a topic of prime importance for the study of Stravinsky's music.5In this seminal piece, enigmatic passages in works ranging from Petrushka through The Rite of Spring, Les Noces, Symphonies of Wind Instruments, Octuour, Symphony of Psalms, Symphony in Three Movements, all the way to The Rake's Progress were, in a manner of speaking, solved for the first time by invoking what Berger was the first to call "the octatonic scale.'"6Stravinsky's involvement with it, Berger now revealed, had been anything but transient or sporadic.Moreover, by the use of this new conceptualization of Stravinsky's pitch organization, an ordering that-and this was particularly impressive-Berger 2 Olivier Messiaen, The Technique of My Musical Language, trans.John Satterfield, I (Paris, 1957), 59-3 See his Modernitd e tradizione nella musica contemporanea (Turin, 1955), Chap.17. 4 Stravinsky, 3rd ed., trans.Frederick Fuller (London, 1978), PP. 7-8, 17, 258-59.

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