# Stylistic strawmen in the history of music



## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

In some thread, someone mentioned an interesting point. It was mentioned there that the idea that pre-romantic composers were mainly concerned with form rather than emotion was mainly put forward by the romantics so that they could define themselves more clearly and as a reaction to a previous era. This was later reinforced in the 20th century since the modernists, wanting to define themselves as a reaction to the romantic era, identified with the pre-romantic era and exaggerated the claims of form and lack of emotion that were actually made by the romantics!

Of course, the different eras of music are much more complex than the often heard caricatures of them. What other strawmen of an era made by another era do you know? Or even done by an era to itself!


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## Enthusiast (Mar 5, 2016)

I don't really have any answers but these days, when there really is no single tradition, you only need to look at the battles that rage between various camps which exist (or existed) concurrently. Straw men aplenty and probably the odd straw woman, too.

One older battle that I am not sure I ever got was that many 20th century composers - Britten among them - particularly despised Brahms. But perhaps these criticisms were too specific to be straw? Other than that, I may be wrong but it seems to me that the Classical composers didn't rubbish the Baroque so much as revel in their own new highly fashionable music. And perhaps Baroque composers did the same in relation to those who came before _them_?


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## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

All era definitions are post facto. Society continually evloves in accordance with the zeitgheist, and people after the fact try to impose order on it, like historians, as if that will really tell you anything useful. In that sense, history in general is one big straw man.


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

I don't know much about strawmen in music.

But there is Richard Hayman: Richard (Warren Joseph) Hayman (1920-2014), an American conductor, harmonica player, arranger, and composer. He received training in composition from Alfred Newman and Max Steiner, and in conducting from Arthur Fiedler. In 1938, at the age of 18, Richard Hayman launched his career as a harmonica player.









From Wikipedia: Hayman is most famous for having been the principal arranger at the Boston Pops Orchestra for over 30 years where his award-winning arrangements are still used today. He occasionally guest-conducted there, and when Arthur Fiedler had a time conflict with his job as pops conductor for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, he recommended Hayman for the post. 
Hayman was also closely affiliated with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra for over 30 years. Known for his sequined jackets, harmonica solos, and corny jokes, he became its Principal Pops Conductor in 1976, leading both the Pops at Powell and Queeny Park concerts. Queeny Pops, with concertgoers seated at tables in the acoustically atrocious but centrally located (in the suburbs of west St. Louis County) Greensfelder Field House, was a hit for many years, and made it possible for the SLSO to offer its musicians a full 52-week annual contract.


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## Eschbeg (Jul 25, 2012)

One fascinating sort of triple straw man concerns Stravinsky's _Symphonies of Wind Instruments_. The music critic Boris de Schloezer wrote an early review of the work that praised Stravinsky for removing any trace of emotions, feelings, or moods from the music and instead focusing on pure sound. Schloezer was apparently underestimating how much the work was a heartfelt memorial to the recently deceased Debussy.

Second, the work's lack of an obvious program, coupled with the above mentioned "purity" of the music, sometimes causes listeners to view the work as the end of Stravinsky's Russian period, despite the fact that (as Stravinsky's writings reveal) the _Symphonies_ is modeled after a Russian Orthodox funeral mass (again appropriate given the work's memorial intent).

Third, going back to Schloezer, the work was the first of Stravinsky's to be described as "neoclassical," and while Schloezer used the term simply to mean abstract and pure, making no mention of references to the past, other critics quickly took the word literally and claimed Stravinsky was following the model of pre-Romantic composers.

What's astonishing is that even though very little of it was pertinent to what Stravinsky was trying to accomplish in the _Symphonies_, he found the reception so compelling, and the praise so irresistible, that bought into it and spent the next decade composing works that fulfilled all of these expectations. Hence those famous fighting words about music being powerless to express anything, and the sudden disappearance of conspicuously Russian themes in his works, and the sudden appearance of Classical themes.


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## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

SONNET CLV said:


> I don't know much about strawmen in music.
> 
> But there is Richard Hayman: Richard (Warren Joseph) Hayman (1920-2014), an American conductor, harmonica player, arranger, and composer. He received training in composition from Alfred Newman and Max Steiner, and in conducting from Arthur Fiedler. In 1938, at the age of 18, Richard Hayman launched his career as a harmonica player.
> 
> ...


As a Bostonian, I knew Richard Hayman as the Pops arranger, but absolutely none of the rest about him. Thanks!


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Eschbeg said:


> One fascinating sort of triple straw man concerns Stravinsky's _Symphonies of Wind Instruments_. The music critic Boris de Schloezer wrote an early review of the work that praised Stravinsky for removing any trace of emotions, feelings, or moods from the music and instead focusing on pure sound. *Schloezer was apparently underestimating how much the work was a heartfelt memorial to the recently deceased Debussy.*
> 
> Second, the work's lack of an obvious program, coupled with the above mentioned "purity" of the music, *sometimes causes listeners to view the work as the end of Stravinsky's Russian period, despite the fact that (as Stravinsky's writings reveal) the Symphonies is modeled after a Russian Orthodox funeral mass* (again appropriate given the work's memorial intent).
> 
> ...


This is a curious argument, leading to an extraordinary conclusion. I hardly think that Mr. Schloezer's failure to hear this music as a "heartfelt" memorial to a deceased friend shows any lack of perceptiveness. I've heard the work a few times, knowing nothing of its origins or of Stravinsky's intentions or remarks about it, and never suspecting anything like them. To me it sounds simply "Stravinskian" and, now that I think of it, perhaps transitional in his stylistic development, neither particularly Russian nor neoclassical. But how would its possibly being the end of Stravinsky's Russian period be incompatible with its being modeled after a Russian Orthodox mass? And anyway, who would suspect such a model from the sound of the music?

I think it far more likely that Stravinsky appreciated in Schloezer's remarks a perceptive divination of his aesthetic direction, than that he was so flattered by uncomprehending but fulsome praise that he proceeded to reshape his musical style and philosophy so as to live up to it.


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## Eschbeg (Jul 25, 2012)

Woodduck said:


> I hardly think that Mr. Schloezer's failure to hear this music as a "heartfelt" memorial to a deceased friend shows any lack of perceptiveness.


I wouldn't call Schloezer's observations unperceptive either. His observations about the _Symphonies_ are fascinatingly suggestive, particular regarding the contrast between Stravinsky and Schoenberg, which is the real thesis of Schloezer's review. It's just that Schloezer's observations weren't Stravinsky's until after the fact. Indeed, he found Schloezer's remarks about _Symphonies_ so compelling that he tried to read them into his earlier works as well. This is the phase in his career when Stravinsky was claiming that even the _Rite of Spring_ was just a "system of sounds" (Schloezer's words, adapted by Stravinsky) that were conceived independently of the scenario, which flatly contradicts the documented evidence, and that he borrowed only one or two preexisting Russian folk tunes and made up everything else himself, which is also demonstrably a lie.



Woodduck said:


> But how would its possibly being the end of Stravinsky's Russian period be incompatible with its being modeled after a Russian Orthodox mass?


You'd have to ask Stravinsky, since he's the one who was so eager to read the Russianness out of his Russian works. It seems not to be a coincidence that his drive to do so happened just as the Russia he knew got drowned in a wave of hammer and sickles, and also that advertising himself as a Russian to Western Europeans no longer had the cachet in the 1920s that it had in the 1910s, as evidenced not only by the remarks by Schloezer (another Russian émigré fleeing the Bolsheviks) but also by the failure of _Mavra_.



Woodduck said:


> I think it far more likely that Stravinsky appreciated in Schloezer's remarks a perceptive divination of his aesthetic direction, than that he was so flattered by uncomprehending but fulsome praise that he proceeded to reshape his musical style and philosophy so as to live up to it.


The evidence suggests otherwise. His career opportunism was the stuff of legend as early as the 1930s. Schoenberg, for one, saw through it all when he taunted the newly neoclassical Stravinsky for "merely trying to please the customers." Stravinsky himself claimed later that his heart was never fully into all those famous ghostwritten mantras and slogans of neoclassicism he allowed to be published or spoken under his name, such as the bit about music being powerless to express anything or the bit about music being pure form.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Eschbeg said:


> I wouldn't call Schloezer's observations unperceptive either. His observations about the _Symphonies_ are fascinatingly suggestive, particular regarding the contrast between Stravinsky and Schoenberg, which is the real thesis of Schloezer's review. It's just that Schloezer's observations weren't Stravinsky's until after the fact. Indeed, he found Schloezer's remarks about _Symphonies_ so compelling that he tried to read them into his earlier works as well. This is the phase in his career when Stravinsky was claiming that even the _Rite of Spring_ was just a "system of sounds" (Schloezer's words, adapted by Stravinsky) that were conceived independently of the scenario, which flatly contradicts the documented evidence, and that he borrowed only one or two preexisting Russian folk tunes and made up everything else himself, which is also demonstrably a lie.
> 
> You'd have to ask Stravinsky, since he's the one who was so eager to read the Russianness out of his Russian works. It seems not to be a coincidence that his drive to do so happened just as the Russia he knew got drowned in a wave of hammer and sickles, and also that advertising himself as a Russian to Western Europeans no longer had the cachet in the 1920s that it had in the 1910s, as evidenced not only by the remarks by Schloezer (another Russian émigré fleeing the Bolsheviks) but also by the failure of _Mavra_.
> 
> The evidence suggests otherwise. His career opportunism was the stuff of legend as early as the 1930s. Schoenberg, for one, saw through it all when he taunted Stravinsky for "merely trying to please the customers." Stravinsky himself claimed later that his heart was never fully into all those famous ghostwritten mantras and slogans of neoclassicism he allowed to be published or spoken under his name, such as the bit about music being powerless to express anything or the bit about music being pure form.


Perhaps you're right. I have to admit that I've always been a bit skeptical of Stravinsky as a "theorist." Whenever I read his aphoristic remarks about the nature of music and his tart comments on music he wants to distance himself from, I imagine his bony, expensively clad figure curled up in an overstuffed wing chair in Gertrude Stein's living room, dangling a cigarette holder between his slender fingers, one eyebrow raised above the frame of his wire spectacles and a hint of a smirk on his thin lips, dropping ashes on the carpet as he drops _bons mots_ in overemphatic Russian-accented French.

I wouldn't want to do him the injustice of overestimating his sincerity.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Woodduck said:


> I wouldn't want to do him the injustice of overestimating his sincerity.


I've tucked that one away for re-use. Fear not, I won't give credit!


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