Seeking explanatory models beyond the merely descriptive, musicologists have dismissed the concept of bitonality as a description of Stravinsky’s harmonic language as at best an early attempt to understand musical language departing from traditional diatonic forms and surfaces, at worst a misleading dead-end.
Pieter Van der Toorn (1983) explicates the interaction of diatonic (major-minor scale) harmonies, gestures, cadences, and formal operations with octatonic scales and operations of more chromatic, modernist style as a frisson which activates and animates Stravinsky’s sound.
I would add that one of the identifying characteristics of Stravinsky’s sound, through his Russian, neo-classical and serial phases, is dividing the octatonic scale collections into recognizable bits of separate and contrasting diatonic harmonies, usually by register, instrumentation or ostinato pattern. The particular aural quality of keeping those divisions distinct, articulating major, minor, major seventh and “dominant seventh” or jazz seventh chords (major chords with an added seventh without dominant function) and not blending the scale into an octatonic unity within instruments is what gives his scores their unique harmonic flavor. So the early twentieth-century musicologists espousing bitonality – that is, two or more harmonies operating at once – may have been expressing a more accurate representation of Stravinsky’s sound than they are given credit for. In fact, the presence of these diatonic references both reassures the listener with familiar harmonic landmarks and tantalizes the ear as harmonic functions veer from the expected in both direction and function. Similarly, his static block form is seen as an antithesis to development, yet tension mounts and resolution is achieved.
Some examples:
In the opening measures of The Rite of Spring the bassoon melody stays clearly in A minor while the accompanying harmony, a C sharp to a D and back to a C sharp, clearly implies A major to D to A major (I – IV – I). But the harmony never sounds minor, and the melody never hits a major third, so each instrument stays within its particular diatonic, or modal, frame of reference. The octatonic harmony is only perceived as a function of the whole of the orchestration, the combination of the bassoon’s distinct A minor with the harmony’s distinct A major. Within instruments there is no octatonic scale reference.
In the first movement of Symphony in Three Movements, the piano alternates between E flat seventh and C seventh chords while the bass ostinato moves between A and C, implying A minor. There is definitely an octatonic flavor to the experience of the whole, but even the piano part divides the E flat and C chords rhythmically, like jazz blue-note minor to major third in C, but never combining them, while the bass insists on A as tonic center. The exotic sound is achieved using distinct bits of diatonic material as disjunct simultaneities, not synthesized or unified, and maintaining distinction between instruments.
Even in the serial Variations In Memoriam Aldous Huxley the pairs of static chords in Variation VI demonstrate this principle. Two chords of exact doublings in harp and strings are followed by similarly exact doublings in winds and piano, interrupted by a brief trombone chorale, two more chords with same orchestration, another trombone choir, and a final similarly orchestrated pair of chords. In each case, at least half of the chord represents a familiar diatonic chord, inflected in the upper or lower cleft of harp or piano.
The first chord in harp and strings is an A minor triad in the bass, and an A and C sharp in the treble implying A major, the same contrast between A major and minor as in the opening of The Rite of Spring. The second chord in piano and winds (down from the top) is C,E,B in the treble and G, B flat and G sharp in the bass. This seems a more blended chord to me, with the C, E, B and G articulating a C major seventh chord, and the bass a 0134 octatonic segment (G, G sharp, B, B flat), so that the G (top note in the bass) and the B (bottom note of the treble) both hold dual functions. Alternately, the entire chord could be a chromatically colored first inversion of E, the only pitch in the chord not boundaried by simultaneous semi-tones. This chord is certainly the weakest case for dual function in this sequence. Note, however, that the C,E,B configuration cannot be notes in any octatonic scale.
The third chord in harp and strings repeats the first (A major over A minor), an example of the Stravinsky “stutter” (Straus, 2001), repeating a phrase or motive and either extending it further each time or changing direction with each repetition. The fourth chord in piano and winds, bottom up, is E flat, A, F in the bass, C, F sharp, B in the treble. The bass chord is clearly an F seventh with the seventh in the bass. The treble continues the pattern of “C and a fourth” in the response chords that began with the second chord’s C, E and B. Likewise, this group of three notes cannot be part of any octatonic scale.
The fifth chord, bottom up, is E flat, G, E flat in the bass, and E, G, C in the treble. An echo of the harmonic pattern (minus jazz sevenths) in the piano part from Symphony in Three Movements discussed above, E flat in the bass and C major in the treble. The sixth chord, bottom up, is A, E, G sharp (A major seventh), and C, F, B flat, another “C and a fourth” that each of the response piano and wind chords treble cleft share, and like wise, not octatonic.
Note that the most consonant of the chords begins the sequence, as one might expect in traditional diatonic harmonic progression, but the series of chords does not lead to consonant repose: its increase and decrease of dissonance including both tonal and atonal references within the repeated rhythmic gestures does, however, articulate an expressive logic that is powerful and novel. Like so much of serial and even neo-classical Stravinsky, traditional diatonic functions of consonance and dissonance are not observed consistently, but it seems important as a stylistic continuity in his sound that even in his late compositions, the instrumentally and registerally distinct diatonic references recur. This contrasts, as does his stuttering rhythmic style, with the hyper-dense musical discourse and rapidly shifting surface colors that are familiar serial and post-serial musical contexts.
This view of bitonality as a recurring feature of the instrumental and registral articulation of his harmonic
palette supports the view of Stravinsky as precursor to postmodern musical language, which combines radically divergent musical sources and styles without regard to a singular narrative of musical history or as justification or context. Yet it speaks to his strong musical personality that such disparate approaches as primitivism, neoclassicism and serialism could all bear his stamp so recognizably without compromising their or his integrity.
References
Peter C. van der Toorn, The Music of Igor Stravinsky, Yale University Press, 1983.
Joseph N. Straus, Stravinsky’s Late Music, Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Copyright 2002 Charles Holton