I’m excited because, one the one hand, I don’t have much exposure to Stravinsky so this will be a fantastic opportunity for me to delve more into who the man was and what made his music so individual.\u00a0 Stravinsky occupies a very interesting place in history, and I even acknowledged him already in my first paper, so there are multiple layers of intrigue here.\u00a0 When I was brainstorming ideas, I almost wanted to somehow incorporate the original essay I wrote, as if Stravinsky had some opinion on not being considered as French as French composers (but this would be poor form, because as you’ve pointed out, Stravinsky didn’t even consider himself a French composer).<\/p>\n
It’s also much easier to use websites such as retronews.fr because this actually occupied a real space in history, so it’s not particularly difficult to find primary source documents on it.\u00a0 Both in retronews, Google Scholar, and Catalyst, there’s plenty of information that can be synthesized into the final product.\u00a0 Above all else, though, this is probably the easiest to base in historical fiction because there are actual reviews from the time period, so if I’m a little lost I can just consult those.<\/p>\n
Where I’m struggling a little, however, is when it comes time to actually thinking about how I’m going to write this.\u00a0 I have no experience writing reviews from anything other than a technical standpoint.\u00a0 I can talk in casual settings about aesthetics that I like or don’t like, but having a strong opinion about music that actually counts for something has always been a struggle for me.\u00a0 It’s almost as if I feel the need to make it more mathematical, because it’s much easier to make a case for “clearly this disobeys the rules of counterpoint, and leads to a weak resolution that emphasizes the 5th of the chord more than the root” than it is to say “I rather enjoyed his presentation because of the way it is”.\u00a0 Even when it comes to debating things like opera, my dislike isn’t so much “I don’t like the way it sounds” but rather “we have microphones, why perpetuate a style of singing that’s unnecessary?” because, in my opinion, that’s empirical.<\/p>\n
It’s been getting easier as I read more reviews, however.\u00a0 What I’ve gathered from most reviews is that you have to place much higher emphasis on presentation and interpretation.\u00a0\u00a0Why<\/em> did he make this decision here?\u00a0 From a listening standpoint, did he repeat the original motif too many times, or was there just enough variety to keep it from getting boring (or, was the repetition intentional and we’re supposed to be shocked when he finally takes us somewhere else)?\u00a0 Were people enjoying the concert, or were their heads buried in their programs or any other distraction?\u00a0 Something tells me this might be the more difficult paper for me, but the challenge is actually fairly exciting.\u00a0 Having found a few sources, at this point, I just need to figure out what the core of my argument is, rather than little snippets of “I could say this, and this, and this…” etc.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m excited because, one the one hand, I don’t have much exposure to Stravinsky so this will be a fantastic opportunity for me to delve more into who the man was and what made his music so individual.\u00a0 Stravinsky occupies a very interesting place in history, and I even acknowledged him already in my first […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3595,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3595"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=796"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/796\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":799,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/796\/revisions\/799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}