Stravinsky à Delage: Pentatonic Scales as Japonisme in Three Japanese LyricsStravinsky’s
illustrious collaborations with Ballets Russes in the 1910s have for long overshadowed
his association with Les Apaches, a group of Parisian avant-gardists preoccupied with Japanese aesthetics.
Stravinsky scholarship has in recent decades revisited Three Japanese Lyrics
(1912–13) in the light of Stravinsky’s friendship with Maurice Delage (1897–1961), who translated
the three Japanese waka from Russian into French, and travelled to Japan in
1912 (Pasler 1982; Funayama 1986). Nonetheless,
analytical readings remain entangled with Schoenbergian pierrotic gestures
(Boulez 1968; Taruskin 1996) and the octatonic-diatonic framework purportedly
shared by The Rite of Spring
(Kaminsky 1983). Stravinsky’s autobiographical account further hinders
scholarly venture beyond what Richard Taruskin refers to as a ‘Japanese
perspectiveless style’ (Taruskin 1987). The present study probes into the
Franco-Japanese musical exchanges in the early twentieth century and illuminates
the sound world of Stravinsky’s Three Japanese Lyrics in relation to
Delage’s Sept haïkaï (1923). Importantly, it unravels hitherto
unknown appropriation of the Japanese In
scale (hemitonic pentatonic) and Yō scale (anhemitonic pentatonic) in
the first Lyric 'Akahito' and the third Lyric 'Tsaraiuki' respectively. Terminologies used by Japanese theorists, Uehara (1895) and Fumio (1958),
will be adopted. The two Japanese pentatonic
materials, In-scale trichord [015] and Yō-scale tetrachord [0257] are
embedded and transformed at strategic points and
relate Stravinsky and Delage musically. The distinctive sound of these pentatonic materials, arguably received as a kind of Parisian Japonisme, can be traced back to the Paris Exposition of 1889 and 1900 and
informed Maurice Courant's study of Japanese music in Lagvinac's Encyclopédie de la musique et dictionnaire du
Conservatoire (1913). This study impacts on our
understanding of Stravinsky’s musical
language during his years with Ballets Russes, demonstrates
notable influence of Japanese music, and throws light on Stravinsky’s and
Delage’s shared Japonisme in their waka- and haiku-inspired music. | 