Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Walsh’s biography sheds a rather interesting light on the fact that Stravinsky wasn’t this great powerful omniscient figure, but, wonderful composer that he was, he was subject to all the usual difficulties… It was an eye-opener because it’s a counterweight to the slight myth-making of Craft’s conversation books, which for Stravinsky were really a way of making some money.
And this is what the Stephen Walsh biography, Stravinsky: The Second Exile, deals with?
That’s what the biography sheds a rather interesting light on: that Stravinsky wasn’t this great powerful omniscient figure, but, wonderful composer that he was, he was subject to all the usual difficulties. Even more so because he’d lived through these two world wars and a revolution, and was actually in quite a shaky state when he arrived in America. He had to rebuild his career, really.
What does this book say about Stravinsky’s relationship with Craft?
It’s difficult because Robert Craft is still alive and he’s quite litigious, but it’s pretty blunt about him: he made himself very unpopular with the music profession, because he was seen to be exploiting Stravinsky and was also very rude to him in public, in rehearsals, when Stravinsky was very old and frail. It was also felt that he’d misled the public about the extent of how much of these ‘conversations’ were actually written by Craft, which they largely were, towards the end. For me Walsh’s biography was an eye-opener because it’s a counterweight to the slight myth-making of the conversation books, which for Stravinsky were really a way of making some money.
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Giles Swayne is a British composer, best known for his monumental choral pieces and his interest in African musical culture. He studied at the Royal Academy of Music under Harrison Birtwistle and at the Paris Conservatoire with Olivier Messiaen. In 1980 his choral work Cry, for 28 amplified voices, was premiered by the BBC Singers under John Poole. Hailed as a landmark, it has since been performed twice at the Proms and many times worldwide. In 1981, Swayne visited Senegal to record the music of the Jola people of Casamance. These recordings are now in the British Library. From 1990 to 1996 he lived in the Akuapem Hills in eastern Ghana. He now lives in London and is Composer-in-residence at Clare College, Cambridge. He is currently working on an open-ended series of bagatelles for piano, and a choral setting of a poem. ‘The thing about music, like the arts, is that there’s an extraordinary dichotomy between the art and the career,’ he says. ‘You can have people who are really extremely mediocre with huge careers, and you can have people who are wonderfully good, who explore their art in great depth, and actually don’t have wonderful careers. Bach was one of those.’
