Old Revolutionary

More active than ever at 75,-Composer Igor Feodorovich Stravinsky works in intermittent bursts of energy in a soundproofed studio built into his Hollywood house. A neat and meticulous man, Stravinsky until recently liked to stand on his head and do morning calisthenics to keep in trim. With the aid of his second wife Vera, he watches his health with hypochondriacal care. After a glass of French wine he is likely to call, "Quick, Verochka, the proteins." His wife responds by bringing him crackers and cheese. Although he is deeply religious, Stravinsky seldom goes to the Russian Orthodox Church, once became indignant when the priest hearing his confession asked for his autograph. For relaxation Stravinsky plays solitaire and endless games of Scrabble (he uses a special Scrabble dictionary, which is not considered cricket by most Scrabble fans).

This week the placidly simple routine is being shattered by the invasion of interviewers, TV cameramen and technicians, all bent on helping the world celebrate the 75th birthday of the 20th century's most influential composer. What the world salutes in Stravinsky, among other things, is a paradox: in his 50 years as a composer, he has been both a popular success and a daring musical explorer, both a commercial artist unafraid of writing for money on assignment (e.g., his Tango for piano solo, his elephants' polka for the Ringling Brothers Circus) and yet an uncompromising individualist. Says Impresario Lincoln Kirstein: "He heard first for us all. Sounds he has found or invented, however strange or forbidding at the outset, have become domesticated in our ears."

Wild Rhythms. In his early works, Firebird and Petrouchka, he galvanized and repelled his audiences with wild rhythms, brutal harmonies, and kaleidoscopic tone coloring of a kind they had never heard or imagined before. The Rite of Spring unleashed a cacophony of sound that set its first Paris audience to pummeling one another with fists and canes. But within a mere ten years all three works were becoming accepted in the contemporary musical language, and Stravinsky boldly moved on to a new, dry, precisely turned style--Pulcinella, Oedipus Rex, Apollon Musagetes--that had little relation to the earlier, gaudily splashed Russian effects.

Whatever he did, he always had an Olympian confidence in his own work. In 1934 he wrote: "I am on a perfectly sure road; there is nothing to discuss or to criticize. One does not criticize anyone that is functioning."

Way of the Future. In his present style (Canticum Sacrum, In Memoriam Dylan Thomas), Stravinsky is experimenting with the serial or tone row technique of Arnold Schoenberg (see below), whom he once regarded as the leader of an alien musical camp. Said protean Igor Stravinsky on his 75th birthday: "I simply cannot do without a tonal row, and have come more and more to feel that it is 'the way of the future.' "

Climax of the birthday celebration was a Los Angeles performance of his latest work, a ballet score titled Agon (to be given in New York next fall). Agon shows just how far he has gone with tonal-row composition. A 20-minute work, it is scored for "twelve dancers and twelve notes," calls for the largest orchestra since Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements (1945). The fast, heavily percussioned score is cast in patterns of enormous rhythmic complexity. In its sheer harmonic and rhythmic invention, its virility, its brilliance of orchestration, the work is among the most dazzling music Stravinsky has ever written. It has some of the down-to-earth excitement of The Rite of Spring, the buoyancy of The Wedding. It proves once again, in the words of Composer Aaron Copland, that "only Stravinsky [writes so] that no one can predict just where he will be taking us next."

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