The first City Ballet performance was on January 17, 1967, at New York State Theater, Lincoln Center. The premiere took place on July 15, 1966, at Philharmonic Hall, New York. Igor Stravinsky s orchestral score for The Rite of Spring has been interpolated on. Ragtime (II) is the third ballet made by New York City Ballet s co-founder and balletmaster George Balanchine to Igor Stravinsky s Ragtime for Eleven Instruments (1918). Stravinsky wrote the piece for Arthur Rubinstein, but it was instead premiered by José Iturbi, on Novemin Lausanne. A 100-year-old ballet, composed by a Russian for a French audience, has become something of a jazz standard. The irregular meters give the piece an improvisatory character. Ragtime, Piano-Rag-Music, and A Soldiers Tale all date from roughly the same time (1918-1919), and all prefigure Stravinskys interest in jazz. Ragtime: 1917 Flute, clarinet, horn, cornet, trombone, percussion, cimbalom, 2 violins, viola, contrabass Rags Arranged for piano in 1919, and. Stravinsky incorporates elements from his Russian period ( ostinati, shifting accents, bitonality) with rhythmic and harmonic fragments from ragtime. The table below gives the following information for works by Igor Stravinsky (where applicable): K. However, he had managed to hear live jazz bands by the time he finished Piano-Rag Music.Ĭompositionally, Stravinsky interprets the ragtime in a rather cubist way, instead of directly imitating the style. Stravinsky's knowledge of stylistic jazz properties was at first limited to scores brought to him from the United States by his colleague Ernest Ansermet. Stravinsky, who had, by that time, emigrated to France after his studies with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in Russia, was confronted with American jazz combos actively influential in Europe. Piano-Rag-Music is a composition for piano solo by Igor Stravinsky, written in 1919. For Peter Martins', see Piano-Rag-Music (Martins). Shop Igor Stravinsky: Symphonies of Wind Instruments 3 Pieces for String Quartet Ragtime 3 Japanese Lyrics CD at Best Buy. For Todd Bolender's ballet, see Piano-Rag-Music (Bolender). Republished with permission from Interlude, Hong Kong.This article is about Stravinsky's solo for piano. Stravinsky himself declared that his pieces were not true ragtime, saying in 1963 that ‘the Histoire ragtime is a concert portrait or snapshot of the genre in the sense that Chopin’s Valses are not dance waltzes but portraits of waltzes.’ In his creations, Stravinsky drove ragtime as a genre forward and into places its inventors could only have dreamed of.īy Maureen Buja. The many shifts of meter detracts from its success in the genre – but those shifts of meter are something we’re very familiar with in The Sacre du Printemps. Piano-Rag-Music doesn’t really work as a rag because there isn’t a heavy enough beat in the bass line. In fact, for the premiere of Histoire du soldat in Lausanne, Ansermet suggested that Stravinsky bring his own bass drum and cymbal because the instruments he found in Switzerland were inferior. The most important instruments, then in the Histoire ragtime and the Ragtime for 11 instruments were the solid percussion. A typical scheme would be to place a syncopated melody in the upper voices, but played over a steady beat, with accents on the first and third beats. What the three pieces have in common, however, is what Stravinsky took from every example of ragtime that he would have seen (or heard): the syncopation. The work is scored for a septet of violin, double bass, clarinet, bassoon, cornet, trombone, and percussion, and the premiere was conducted by Stravinsky’s friend, Ansermet. Stravinsky’s first ragtime appeared as the third dance in Histoire du soldat (1918). Player pianos also helped spread the sound as did those American tourists, who flocked to the continent in their thousands. One historian doubts this claim, showing that jazz sheet music, usually of the ‘cakewalk,’ were circulating in Europe already by 1895 and people were dancing to it in Paris and London. Before he wrote these pieces, and used their rhythmic style, Stravinsky claimed he’d never heard jazz before, only seen its written expression. We have to say versions because Stravinsky’s creations are as far away from Joplin’s creations as Paris was from Missouri. In 1918, on his way back from the US, where he’d been conductor for the Ballets Russes’ second American tour, Ernest Ansermet dropped off some music for Igor Stravinsky, a ‘bundle of ragtime music in the form of piano reductions and instrumental parts.’ Stravinsky copied out the parts into scores and used what he learned from them to create his own versions of ragtime. What we may not realize is how international this turn of the 20th century-style was and how influential it was. We associate ragtime music with performers and composers such as Scott Joplin, confined by their poverty and marginality to the US.
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