Graham Griffiths, ed., Stravinsky in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), ISBN: 978-1-108-42219-2 (hb).

Abstract

The 6th of April 2021 marked the 50th anniversary of Igor Stravinsky’s death. The BBC planned a ‘Stravinsky Day’ on Radio 3 to mark the occasion, with over five hours of programming and features on the Saturday after the anniversary. In the event, the programming was delayed for two weeks as the news came in of the death of HRH The Duke of Edinburgh. All BBC schedules were turned over to playing solemn music and identical news reports, a move which attracted the largest number of complaints the BBC has ever received. There is some faint poetry to discern in the parallels between the death and funerals of the Duke of Edinburgh and the death of Stravinsky back in 1971. Both occasions elicited very public outpourings of grief and various commentators marking the ‘end of an era’; on Stravinsky’s death, musicians, composers, and even politicians made press releases to express their sympathies, including the White House. Both deaths invited reflections on the direction and very existence of their respective spheres: contemporary composition and the monarchy. With the Stravinsky quinquagenary falling this year, it is perhaps inevitable that we would see several new publications released to coincide. One of these, Stravinsky in Context, edited by GrahamGriffiths, is a remarkable taking of the pulse of Stravinsky Studies over the last few years. There has been no shortage of books on Stravinsky, of course: there is perhaps no other twentieth-century composer who has received more scholarly attention. Edited essay volumes have been plentiful in recent years, including Stravinsky and His World; the 2013 anniversary of The Rite of Spring brought about at least two essay collections dedicated to that infamous piece alone. Unlike most other edited collections, however, Stravinsky in Context contains many essays: thirty-five, to be exact. Such a quantity might instantly make one think of large tomes along the lines of Routledge Companions, but that is not the case here; indeed, Stravinsky in Context barely tips over 300 pages. Instead, each contribution is a micro-essay, barely numbering 10 pages or so. For some authors, this clearly provides remarkable freedom while for others it evidently means limitations.