For a man whose life-span took in two wars, a revolution, and men on the moon, Stravinsky's biography is in want of some excitement. This is the first evidence of his image, carefully fostered in his time: the artist as solitary genius, above the petty events of the world. Of course, this is a firmly 19th century ideal. Mozart as Amadeus. Wagner as superman. The enduring picture of Stravinsky is as a 19th century gent, an anachronism to be worshipped like bygone monarchs. The comparison to, say, Bradman or Einstein is revealing, in that, despite the cinematographic age, we see these figures as posed sepia polaroids in the line of Dickens and Victoria herself. How a 19th century gent created a revolution in music is a moot question, since the short answer is he didn't; but i'm leaping ahead. Igor Fyrdorovich Stravinsky was born near St. Petersburg, that most European of Russia's citadels, in 1882. His family was of aristocratic Polish extraction: people of property and Francais propriety; the types Tolstoy would mock and Lenin eventually exterminate. Igor's father, Fyrdor Stravinsky, was a successful opera singer, but that didn't stop him having firm ideas about suitable professions for his sons. So, like many figures in the arts canon, Igor Fyrdorovich was soon packed off to become a lawyer. The legal profession, then as now, was the front-door key to the establishment, a civil service job; but Igor was less than arsed. He seems to have been a lazy and perniciously snotty young man. He preferred messing on a piano to legal studies. He treated servants and fellow students with a practised high-handed indifference. His politics were Tsarist and trenchantly anti-Semitic. His tastes Europhile and carefully bourgeois. While ostensibly a law student, Igor spent much of his copious income on the most expensive music teachers he could find. His early work, indeed almost everything he wrote prior to the 'Firebird', is lost (we have a short symphony, a scherzo and a revealing thing called 'Fireworks'). But his influences would not have been radical. Russian concert music at the time formed two broad camps. For decades Russian aesthetes had sought European parity, indeed in a place like St. Petersburg the higher arts, concerts and opera, were an intrinsic display of Europhile sensibilities. Along with the rest of the aristocracy, Stravinsky spoke French and holidayed in Paris or the Alps. And yet when Tchaikovsky (1840-93) squared the circle by writing several near-perfect ballets, a reaction set in demanding more Russian music, whatever that meant. Using folk tunes and mock-Gregorian harmonies the likes of Borodin (1833-87), Mussourgsky (1839-1881) and Balakirev (1837-1910) supplied this admirably. Along with occasional glimpses of Strauss and Mahler, and a steady diet of Mozart and Beethoven, the young Stravinsky would have heard little else. In later years, as biographers attest, he would like to pretend his early work came from nowhere; and the virtual lack of any 'minor' Russians in the concert repertoire only helps.

In 1902, Stravinsky met a fellow student Vladimir Rimsky-Korsakov, son of the most famous Russian composer alive. He stayed with the family next vacation and showed Rimsky senior some of his work. The composer was encouraging to the law student and suggested he continue music study, eventually supervising Stravinsky himself. Igor ingratiated himself admirably, and was soon seen as Rimsky-Korsakov's star pupil, much to his mother's disgust. St. Petersberg had two cultural centres Stravinsky was to gravitate to. Rimsky-Korsakov's own circle, with their Wednesday evening soirees, which listened, mostly , to renditions of Rimsky-Korsakov. Then there were the contemporary music concerts organised on a shoe-string by the composer Walter Nouvel and his friends Nurok and Diaghilev. Here Stravinsky would have heard the likes of Debussy and Hugo Wolf, played along with huge dollops by Russians who, to all but the most ardent lexicographer, are incidental. Stravinsky himself had hardly anything of his own performed, and seems to have been way down the substitutes list as a pianist. Aged 24, the original enfant terrible of the 20th century had done nothing, precisely nothing of note.

1905 kicked off to the rattle of history's drums, especially for the people of St. Petersburg. Long before Lenin's Bolsheviks knocked the Tsar off his perch, highly organised Communist workers started a wave of strikes in January, which culminated in Russia's own 'Bloody Sunday': more than a hundred unarmed protestors shot dead by the Tsar's troops. A Times reporter noted how the troops shot children down from the balconies who "were only there to watch the show, much in the same spirit as our urchins watch cricket at the Oval". Rimsky-Korsakov wrote a vitriolic letter in support of the workers and lost his job over it. Stravinsky meanwhile remained aloof from student activists, feigning indignance when the closure of the university prevented his sitting his law finals. Freed from any semblance of family responsibility he married his first wife, his cousin Yekaterina Nosenko, 'Katya', early in 1906. His musical career continued to flatline.

Though increasingly radical politically, Rimsky-Korsakov was fairly sure the most modernist stuff that should be out there should be his. He called one piece Stravinsky sent him "suspiciously Debussyian". We can only take his word for it. He called another "frenetic and harmonically senseless". We can only take his word for that, too, but both comments have the clear ring of perceptiveness. As models for a 'modern' composer, Stravinsky had only two: Debussy over in Paris; and Scriabin (perhaps the most underrated Russian composer, and they're an underrated bunch) over in Moscow. He learned what he could from the imagination of each and applied them to his own orchestrational skills, acquired by painstakingly following the peerless Rimsky and Tchaikovsky. Rimsky-Korsakov's comments could, on a dark night, be the most accurate description of Stravinksy's early work, including the 'great' ballets, we have. By way of further terseness, you could say Igor was certainly coming on as an orchestrator; although he never did seem to have that much to say.

Nicolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov died in June 1908. His satirical final opera, 'The Golden Cockrell' was officially banned. Stravinsky lost a mentor and a father-figure. We don't have the piece he wrote for a memorial service. With one artistic circle gone, Igor embraced the other, which by now centered on Sergei Diaghilev. Always dynamic as he was flamboyantly camp, Diaghilev's passion was his Ballet Russe, which did an annual season in Paris. Facing criticism that the expected 'Swan Lake' and 'Nutcracker' weren't 'Russian' enough, Diaghilev resolved to produce a 'Russian' ballet, and chose the most 'Russian' subject he could think of, the folk-tale of Zhar-ptitsa: 'The Firebird'. Stravinsky wrote the score over into 1910, and it was performed in Paris in June. It was an immediate hit, of the sort composers just don't get any more. Stravinsky was feted by the ballet freaks, embraced by Debussy and Ravel, introduced to Proust and Gide; he stayed in France, dining out on the glory for months. In the meantime he began sketches for two further ballet projects, 'Petrushka' and 'The Rite of Spring'.

To call 'The Firebird' a masterpiece which justly took its place in the canon is to miss the point utterly. For one thing, we don't perform it, we perform 'The Firebird Suite' which is something else entirely, or rather two something elses entirely, since there are differing versions. The suite shows the young dazzling orchestrator at his best: cor anglais made translucent by Rimsky tremolo strings; tropical clarinets dancing with Rimsky muted brass. A dollop of Moussorgsky's dancing fowl. Huge slices of folk-song and Borodin-esque octatonic scales. The final pentatonic crescendo beginning with its famous French horn solo, far from breaking new ground in Western art, would, stripped of its undoubtedly magical colour, sound trite and simpleminded: sub-Tchaikovsky, who would have slipped into a presto fifty bars back; sub-Mahler, who would have thrown in a few lip-trills and less banal timps. Stravinsky doesn't so much raise 'Russian' folk-song to the level of high art; but rather, he painterly renovates these harmonically primitive tunes, producing an effect in his own culture comparable to his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov's exotic experiments evoking Spain and, most famously, Arabia. 'The Firebird' does mark a retreat from Tchaikovsky's total Europeanisation, but it fails to replace it with a worked-out 'Russian' art. Upon examination of the cultural forces he was working with, he was only left with the choice between an imposed aesthetic of the West and an aesthetically undeveloped folk idiom: at this stage he chose the latter.

'Petrushka' came out in Paris the following year. In it Stravinsky gives us more of the same: a riot of colour, modernist rather than actually modern. A festival of Russianism if a little quirky. For all his powers with his pallette, he could arouse none of the wrenching intensity of, say, Schoenberg. And he lacked the transcendental pointillist imagination of, say, Debussy. Debussy, though, was full of admiration, and, with the Paris scene firmly in his pocket, Stravinsky could write his own cheque. If adulation gives an artist anything, it is confidence. And Stravinsky responded with this new confidence to create a work which seems to have astounded even himself. Conceived along with the painter Roerich, who was to supply the design, he spent the next year and a half on his greatest work.

Having established himself as Russia's premier composer, Stravinsky left St. Petersburg, for good, preferring Paris, southern France and Switzerland. He wasn't to visit Leningrad until 1962. His wife was already in failing health (although she battled on until 1937), and Igor had developed his own form of hypochondria; he was to retain a reputation as 'delicate'. He'd just finished writing 'The Rite of Spring' when he met Arnold Schoenberg, in Berlin, in December 1912, and heard 'Pierrot Lunaire'. Stravinsky realised he could only retain his status if he kept ahead of the game. In Paris, particularly, the highest fashion was a fickle thing. There's plenty of evidence in Stravinsky's smaller works from this period that he was already moving away from the primal ethnicity of the Rite before it was ever performed. This has only added over a century to the singularity of this ballet. It was the end of one path for Igor; and he'd already turned back.

So how does one going about writing a 'Rite of Spring'. Stravinsky wrote it as he wrote anything else. First, he'd cantankerously demand peace and quiet for thirty miles around. Then he'd scribble on manuscript, at his piano, looking for those totally 'new' chords everyone's looked for on those same black and white keys for two centuries. He built his work up from different points of departure: a lick of melody, a rhythmic figure. Finally, when the serious business of the score was concerned, he was meticulous, precise, and completely sure of himself, even when his destined players were to throw up their hands in panic.

That said, Stravinsky's latest opus was very nearly beyond his own grasp. Later, when concerned with the art of myth-making, he would tell people it appeared in a dream; or, it was written through him on some higher plane, or; it wrote itself. At the time, though, his difficulties were concrete enough. For one thing, his rhythms were so beyond regular metre that he wasn't quite sure how to write them down. This singular piece was to use irregular metres against assorted irregular accents, creating both a rugged polyrhythmic bounce as well as his intended 'tribal' flavour. Apparently unswerved by the requirements of your average ballet dancer, he experimented with time signatures and barlines, and there's some evidence that he never quite got to what he wanted. The score handed down to us is extreme even by Stravinsky's standards, with time signatures every other bar and barlines which hardly ever coincide with the accent of the music. What we get are what jazz journalists call 'sprung' rhythms: extreme syncopations against an asymmetric beat. When rehearsals began, so did the problems. Choreography was to be sorted out by the legendary dancer, Vaclav Nijinsky, young and inexperienced, hardly attuned to the composer's mind, already busy with important gigs by Debussy. My guess is that the first performance, and many performances since, of the Rite was something of a fudge. The rhythmic nuances and melodic material (the stuff you'd be expected to dance to) are barely apparent until you're thoroughly familiar with a score that clings to its secrets. Stravinsky himself could barely explain the subtleties. It took many years before he was up to conducting the piece, let alone teaching it to anyone.

And yet the 'riot' that erupted at the first performance had little to do with musical revolutions; indeed, there's been dispute as to whether there was a 'riot' at all. It was certainly a noisy bunch in the theatre that night, some with a beef over the manager for something or other, others eager to catcall Nijinsky, none, as far as we know, horrified by the music. Apparently, they started laughing as soon as the curtain went up; Stravinsky walked out; the music was lost in the din, and nothing more was thought of it. Stravinsky fell ill and immediately left town. Later he would blame Nijinsky personally for not having the cerebral where-with-all for what he was doing. Incidentally, the Rite ran for the rest of the week without much fuss at all.

The saving grace for the ballet dancer is that 'Le Sacre Du Printemps' as it was called, or 'Vesna Svyashchenaya' ('Sacred Spring') in Russian, has a pretty straightforward plot. In a Pagan pre-society there's a ritual: a virgin dances herself to death. There's no philosophical subtext unless you don't go out much and desperately want one. It's a tame scenario compared to Richard Strauss' more garish operas or Wagner's tales of incest and suicide. There was nothing particularly pointed, no barb to prick pre-war Parisians. Some later producers attempt to spice things up a little, having the virgin dance naked by way of art-gallery cheap thrill. Given that the average ballerina lives on celery-flavoured yoghurt and has specific exercises to maintain a chest like a planed floorboard, the thrill is often more gym-class pervy than any eye-wobbling pole-dance; is it art, or is it pointlessly demeaning? Imagine if other artists had to perform in the buff. Trooping the colour would get a bit parky. It would add a new angle to a Pink Floyd show, though Dave Gilmour might get it caught in his whammy-bar. And there'd never be another Pavarotti gig ever again.

Roerich's costumes didn't call for nude dancers. They wore long wigs, beards, beads and squiggly long-sleeved tops. In fact, these ancient Russian peasants looked much like Los Angeles hippies from about 1967. The dancing seems to have been brutishly simple. Unison stomp to the left. Unison stomp to the right. Feigning a dance to the death is obviously strenuous, but Maria Piltz in the main role seems to have dealt with it well enough, with much angular, contorting poses and a shamanic verve. But the Rite isn't an historic landmark in ballet, at least not one they like to repeat too often. It is the score: Stravinsky's breathtakingly confident leap into the unknown.

Contemporary music fans, me included, consider it one of the finest works ever written. Some go as far as to credit it uniquely as the harbinger of all the 'modern' music we've heard since. The Rite's status only increased as the century passed, like it was some musical Theory of Relativity. Stravinsky as the next great leap away from Newtonian chromaticism. And yet it probably deserves the plaudits as little as it deserves the trenchant critics of squeaky gates. The Rite extends its predecessors' folkophilia to create an original full-grown primitivism. In this sense it has aesthetic neighbours in art such as late Gaugin and early Picasso, similar strains as Debussy's fascination for Eastern gamelan, or the various 'colonial' exhibitions that toured Paris and London on a regular basis. In cultural historical context, it therefore has an ambiguous nature. This is a composer, using his own ethnicity as a primitivist Western construct, holding his own roots up, distended and twisted, as some sort of exhibit in a velvet-curtained cage. I'm not saying he intentionally left his Mother Russia with a raspberry: he was more dispassionately cerebral, with a carefully laid out aesthetic point. A collector pinning a poor butterfly. A biologist who's forgotten mammalian reproduction is maybe unfit dinner discussion. Stravinsky never thought he might be mocking Russia. He barely seems to have given Russia a second thought. And yet, while we blithely dissect the Rite as high art, we need to acknowledge as historians quite what Stravinsky was doing, intentionally or no. He was, himself, leaving behind the primitive land of dancing peasants and puppet fairy stories, and joining the Western elite: the token Russian in a high-brow clique, the Paris set, the Alpine retreat, no longer sullied by Russians or Russianism. And in a historical context this is revealing of a man who, like so many of our 'great' composers, was essentially self-serving and self-centred. Russia, in the 1920s and '30s, was to retain a distinct taint of barbarousness in the eyes of the oh-so-civilised West.

But for a few hopelessly optimistic left-wing intellectuals like Bernard Shaw, the Russians were seen as a Red horde. To the establishment right, especially in Germany, they were savages that threatened a civil way of life. Political semantics can lead to endless diversions with shifting paradigms, as the sociological goal-posts dart about in the hot air of rhetoric. Here is not the place. But you can garner the news-print and glower over righteous tomes and plainly argue that the 'Cold War' as characterised by post-war ideologues, was actually in full swing in 1918, and; Hitler, was not just a diversion from capitalism's war with Russia's attempted state collectivism, but; Hitler was a deliberate anti-Communist weapon that got out of control. The real war all along was between the perceived threat of the East and the perceived perfection of the West. Right up to the days of President Ronnie 'Can't Remember' Reagan, the 'evil empire' was supposed to keep us awake at night. Right from the killing of the Romanoffs, a war based on ideological lies on both sides began.

Stravinsky, you could argue, was lending Westernist cultural manners to Russian art. If so, based on what relative power relationship? Russian culture for centuries has been seen by us in terms of what sense they might be 'catching up' with our mock-Roman manners. Back before the Bolsheviks, in 1913, the Ballet Russe was the epitomy of 'cultured' Russia. In 'The Firebird' and 'Petrushka', the composer successfully stands behind the mirror and paints Russian exoticism from the perspective of Western art. In the Rite, Stravinsky, with all the dispassion of a lab technician, trashes both East and West, but with knowing nod to the West, at the Paris ballet, with the peasants of his Mother Russia playing the epileptic minstrel show. Of course he was leaving. Russia was a place you wanted to escape from, and Paris a place you wanted to escape to, long before Stalin's purges. When the Bolsheviks did take power, many of them had been living the emigre life in Paris, Vienna or London. The link, for a long time, between self-centred Western Europe and a largely oblivious giant was St. Petersburg, and for Stravinsky it was simply too small. He barely, for the rest of his life, did anything but denigrate Russia. In a sense, in 1917, the Russia he knew ceased to exist. Maybe the Rite was always going to be his final word on the matter. Maybe it was all the Russia he had left in him. You can certainly say that after the Rite, Igor Stravinsky ceased to be a Russian composer, became a composer of no fixed address, but plenty of furniture dotted all over the place.

You can argue that Stravinsky in 1913 knew no more about Lenin's forthcoming takeover, than Einstein scribbling his equations knew about Hiroshima. But the Ballet Russe in general and the Rite in particular did not look well to the guys who built the USSR. True, it was radical in some musicological senses. But it was also trenchantly bourgeois, in the mockish way it treated folk-culture. And in flowerly post-structuralist terms, it created a power-dynamic in performance which intrinsically affirms the Darwinist supremacy of the affluent Parisian onlooker; within a paradigm where 'civilised' and 'uncivilised', far from being held up for aesthetic speculation, are merely demarcated as a given polarity to the shrieks of clarinets.

The primitivism, the sheer brute force of the Rite is its distinctive quality, achieved with a brutal approach to Western music. The convoluted rhythms (i've often suggested that to dance it properly you probably need five legs) are not intended to be arbitrarily unbalanced, this is a long way from Schoenberg's deliberate aural mathematics. Stravinsky is trying to capture the primitive spontaneity of folk rhythms across the world. Regular solid beats are a classicist construct. Folk music uses a natural asymmetry, varied, organic, be it Magya fiddles or Spanish guitars or mariners' ballads or John Lee Hooker. Stravinsky's was an approximation, in rigid orchestral terms, of the casual lilt of artisan culture, the home-made-ness of art before classical homogeneity: music where the metronomes don't reach. Structurally, the Rite stands in two halves, each with a different driving musical idea that imbues the primal momentum of the whole. Following the woodwind prelude, incorporating lip-twisting bassoons, two contrabassoons (an imposing beast, I wouldn't advise dealing with one without it's handler) and two bass clarinets, all doing bird-impressions in a sort of hallucinogenic Palaeozoic dawn chorus, we get the basic formal idea. The music runs on a ticking, rising ostinato figure, which Stravinsky develops rhythmically, not tonally, by modifying accent, metres and stress. Harmonically, the brutal approach involves merely piling unrelated chords on top of each other, creating a polytonal (many keys) collage, rather than an atonal (no key) construction. The ticking ostinato heralds each snatch of melody, and the melody is primitivist as well. Licks from folk tunes, bits that resemble plain-song. Simple diatonic or octatonic riffs, knitted into the close-fitting rhythms. Eight horns in what sounds like A minor (you need at least ten if you want them all to still be alive at the end), superimposed on the five assorted flutes in diminution in two other keys. A sort of mock-polyphonic layering of the simplest tunes he had to hand, constantly inconstant, hurtling like a drunk train.

The second half starts with a languorous, carefully chromatic chant with a slow, syncopated bass-line, but this is just a glimpse of the prehistoric swamp; for we are soon back in the land of hysterical drumbeats. This time two new figures, musical seeds predominate. A terse, tense, limping string idea, supported by its own 'sprung' rhythm; and a short descending chromatic staccato, often in menacingly muted brass. You might say the music builds for the last full fifteen minutes, but this journey is only really a few short stops from grand thunderous and discordant to very grand thunderous and discordant; and in a sense, after the colossal build-up he has nowhere further to go. And yet this groaning under its own dynamic weight becomes a forgiven, even desired characteristic in context, reflecting the growing mortal fatigue of she who dies for the sun.

There's an argument that i'm missing the point. That the Rite does have a subtext, and Stravinsky as actively revolutionary as those fellow countrymen he so despised. There's a thesis, based on valid examination, but also based on wild excursions in applied hindsight, that Igor was heralding the brutalist age of world wars and mayhem. Certainly, his music is informed by mechanisation. He developed a later fascination for the pianola, the piano that plays itself. He was still fascinated when everyone else had given up on the pianola in favour of the new gramophone. He doesn't seem to have been Luddite, or particularly satirical, or ideologically informed; at least, not enough to forsee the industrialised catastrophe that was shortly to follow. Others argue the Rite as a feminist tract, a surreal polemic on the objectification of women. But Stravinsky was a domestic tyrant, certainly by modern standards, as we have argued, a 19th century personality, and totally bereft of the sensibilities you could equate with the Pankhursts and the like. There's an argument that the Rite is a mirror, that those Parisians were shocked at the sight of themselves stripped of their well-worn manners. This is to confuse Stravinsky this time not with Einstein but with Darwin, and no ballet could create such furore as that. At its inception the Rite was an exotic Russian spectacle, not some proto-Desmond Morris, or prequel to 'Lord of the Flies', or outburst of neo-Nietzchean angst.

And yet the fabulous frightening noise it makes still sparks wonder for anyone but the narrowest ear. The relentless nature which Stravinsky unfolds is filled with all Stravinsky learned about orchestral colour and texture, and for Wagner-haters like myself it hammers home once and for all the breadth of uncharted music open once you ditched the unwanted aesthetics of chromatic harmony. His contemporaries, Debussy, Satie, Schoenberg were playing a similar game, but the Rite is a brash show-stopper that leaves caution and measured psychology for the crows. The popular aesthetic is still yet to catch up with its stylistic implications: and it still outshines much of concert music since, not because Webern, Boulez, Berio weren't 'as good', but because Stravinsky's Rite got the 'modernist' tag first, and with careful cultivation of the legend, he clung to his seat in the hall of fame. In a major way, he was never going to be as 'modernist' again: all of his subsequent can be seen as one form of retreat or another. For the next six decades he cautiously tinkered with one musicological ideology or another. Braver artists have considerably smaller reputations, but maybe that is no surprise.

In assessing the place of the Rite, you first need to separate its intrinsic primitivism from its effective brutalism. Brutalism, in the 20th century, took off in directions that art could only report: Nazi movies, 'Guernica'. It's ever-present shadow, be it the trenches or Stalin or Pol Pot, made generations of artists cower ere too much realism left a taste in an audience's mouths. Certainly Stravinsky never went there again. Composers as diverse as Penderecki and Shostakovich made the journey, often despite themselves. But when there's so much brutishness in the world, who needs brutalist art. Primitivism, on the other hand, has become one of the driving forces of popular culture. Bela Bartok worked folk music into his complex creations, perhaps carrying one baton Stravinsky wouldn't run with. But it was the impact of Afro-American blues that shaped music beyond recognition: first as jazz, later as rock and roll, or Merseybeat, or psychedelia, or glam rock. And another dimension of primitivism is brought about whenever two or more record-players come together in those beloved mechanical dance beats. Maybe it is here the Rite has most echoes: the latter-day virgins and their ritualised MDMA, and their own dance to the sun-god with the smiley face.

Grove and several other sources cite Stravinsky's years succeeding the Rite as ones of unhappy exile and pecuniary disadvantage. That we should all suffer such poverty. He had admirers the breadth of Europe. He was becoming a bankable conductor, at least of his own work. He had a studio in Paris; digs in the Alps. Even the odd open-ended commission, that the genius could dazzle us some more.

In 1918, Lenin's new regime seized the Stravinsky family's remaining estates in the Ukraine and elsewhere, at least the bits victorious peasants hadn't seized for themselves. The biggest social experiment in world history was in full swing. As historians of most colours admit thesedays it was mostly a disaster, followed by a famine and then another disaster, provoked in part by the frightened powers of the West. Stravinksy had no truck with Marxism: those with paid nannies rarely side with proletarian wrath. He certainly detested Lenin and Trotsky, with their plan for equality through authoritarianism, and their blithe replacement of work for the profiteer with work for the state. Trotsky wrote at the time (once he'd mobilised the workers, sued for peace, built the Red Army and won a civil war with it; but then he knew how to fill a day)) that they weren't sure of a true role for the arts in their self-proclaimed 'workers' dictatorship'. British-style 'socialist' artisanship was anathema to the Russian power-smiths. While the suppression through history of cultural movements such as the First International and the Paris Commune had left intrinsically left-wing culture somewhat bereft. But for a few French songs and the liberal pretensions of cheerfully market-led writers from Dickens to H. G. Wells, the 'Red' radicals of 1917 were afflicted with what Marx might have called the failure to conceive what Communism would look like until you've created it. And they never were to create it. All they had was a certain moral unity from the workers' committees, the soviets, and a huge exploitable power-vacuum the size of a Saxe-Coburg kingdom. Like the religious zealots that settled that other radical experiment, the United States, the Bolsheviks had no time for art when there was firmly materialist work to do. As soviet iconography took shape, it created that now scorned blend of 'futurist' poster-art and the old Orthodox idol-worship. A contributory factor in the creation of the terrible idol Stalin in due course. Igor made no bones that he was 'White' Russian to the core. He saw soviet Russia from its inception much as Marie Antoinette saw Robespierre and his chums. Indeed his attitudes may have coloured those other European intellectuals in the Bolshevik leadership. While technological modernism was put firmly on the CP agenda, modernist art was scorned as bourgeois posturing. Later, once Trotsky's flair for agitation and aesthetic theory had been dispensed with, the USSR took on the populist demeanour of its firmly low-brow Comrade Stalin. His people coined a word for modernist complexity: they called it 'formalist'. It was a word Stravinsky held on to with pride.

And yet in a classic cultural irony, Stravinsky the composer was actively engaged at the time in musical experiments which would have pleased professed socialists from any era then or since. For one thing he was taking an interest in jazz, the new proletarian art-form; and while his Rimskyian sensibilities never fully allowed him to absorb such musically foreign concepts as 'swing' or improvisation, his various piano 'ragtime' pieces from this period show a characteristically cold and scientific levelling of the stylistic hierarchies of bourgeois art. He was trying to bring jazz into the concert hall while Benny Goodman was still a busker in short trousers. And this is Stravinsky, the great 'modernist', the man who threw the established rule-book away. Commentators with more access to manuscripts and sketch-books than me, point to Stravinsky at this time striving to stay ahead of the modernist game. Debussy was dying, never having quite taken the leap from tonality into the unknown; settling for the shimmering beauty of the middle-ground of whole-tones and oriental scales. Composers such as Satie and Dukas, always hesitant, often burning more music than they published, were now firmly 'old school', along with tedious Brits only the Brits liked, still living in their Constable skyline, and Sibelius, the establishment canon's token Fin, with his Christmas card skyline. There were rumblings over in America, but no-one was hearing them: Ives was barely performed at all until after his death in 1954; similarly, Varese wasn't known much until the '50s, but he at least lived to see it. If there was a game to be ahead of, it was Arnold Schoenberg in Vienna with his twelve-tone maths. And yet Schoenberg wasn't de rigeur, he wasn't fashion. Indeed Leopold Stokowski, as late as 1944, was sacked by NBC for playing Schoenberg's piano concerto. He was the mad scientist tinkering away, while Stravinsky wanted to be a leading man, a feted gent.

He worked for a long time on 'Svadebka' ('The Wedding'), on the face of it a follow-up to the Rite, with its setting of old Russian texts. But in fact it was several steps back from the Rite's revolutionary verve. He was leaving behind the thunderous dissonance. Instead was a lightened rhythmic vitality, and the unmistakable Stravinskian harmony: those wide-spaced angular chorales, part naive, part Cubist kaleidoscope, that were to linger in his music whatever stylistic hoops he was to leap. And then just when you'd think he'd be at his Whitest, he produces a folk drama for gypsy-band and two actors, 'The Soldier's Tale'. I had to study it at A-Level. True the story would hardly get past the Central Committee: the old Mephistopheles tale with a dash of Rip van Winkle, served on a bed of dressed Pushkin. But the concept: the cheap, small-scale yet high-art 'folk drama', is the Brechtian dream, the reply to Wagnerian decadence; as 'grass roots' as potato pie. The music mixes his latest kinky rhythms, rather genteel diabolical frenzy, and a few popular dances thrown in: a waltz, a rag and a tango, all presented with twisted vigour. It has been said he wrote it because he was skint, and seriously considered it a marketable travelling fair-type operation. True he was skint by his own opulent standards, having to support a growing extended family as the only famous composer in the clan. Around this time he put together the 'other' 'Firebird Suite' and sold it to Chester's in London with a profiteering panache old Beethoven would have admired. But in truth even a 'great' composer, especially one living in semi-isolation from a war-torn continent, can only write what gets put in his brain. Rubenstein wanted ragtime for the concert hall, so that's what he got. His friends in Switzerland wanted a little play, so that's what they got. If someone had suggested to Stravinsky at the time he write a concerto for heavy-metal guitar and backing vocalists, he'd have considered that, too. And if you'd offered him a grand or two, he'd have had it all scribbled down in no time.

I'm guessing it was with the same non-ideological pragmatism that drove him into the second big stylistic phase of his career, generally referred to as 'neo-classicism'. Around 1919, Diaghilev (still Stravinsky's only regular employer) asked him for a new ballet based on arrangments of Pergolesi. The result was 'Pulcinella': produced in Paris; sets by Picasso. It certainly paid the rent. For the next fifteen years, he evolved a style, the height of fashion, of no-style at all, of a retreat to homagesse. In works like 'Apollo', 'La Baiser de la Fee', 'Oedipus Rex', The 'Octet', 'Mavra', he hides in the skirts of others, content to leave his fundamental content to someone else: someone dead, someone still putting bums on seats. So he plunders Pergolesi. He plunders Haydn and Verdi. He revels in plundering Tchaikovsky; he rips off Handel and Gluck. In one sense, his neo-classicism is the final journey from the empire of the East. He can divest himself of all cultural ties or ethnocentric boundaries, and simply exist in the tranquillity of the Germanic tradition surrounded by busts of composers of yore. In another sense he was pointing to that End of Art always signified in modernism of any era: the post-modern melting-pot where anything goes, the great plastic plug-hole of the apocalypse; whether it be Zappa or Fat Boy Slim or Tarrantino or 'The Simpsons' or the latest funk DJ. But, to me, the key to Stravinsky's 'neo-classical' period is that it was markedly easier for him than having a post-classical period. Georg Frederic Handel was a dab hand at recycling his own stuff (you'd be amazed how a stale concerto can beef up a nice oratorio stew), but Stravinsky went several steps better; and for several years there he seemed to have relieved himself of ever having to actually write something new ever again. Plenty of authoritative long-hairs tell us 'Oedipus Rex' is a masterpiece: a sparse psychological drama; a follow-on from Debussy's 'Peleas et Melisande'; a complete history of opera and a 'pure' 'Greek' theatre at one and the same time. It is a masterpiece in the sense that Rory Bremner is a genius. It is an act of composing, musicianship in a mask; a cold, distanced, scientific distillation of the elements of warmed-over Handel, opera buffa consommé, dehydrated Mozart; with freeze-dried Haydn's 'Creation' thrown in to add some spiritual zest. In its static, careful poses it apes Greek drama. Maybe it was over-reverence: Stravinsky didn't want to handle Sophocles without Verdi's gloves on. Maybe he considered it the height of cleverness to be so referential, in the way Zappa did 'Stairway to Heaven'. Maybe he was saying, with superior conservatism, that 'modern' music could only move forwards when its resolved its relationship with the past. The last of these is the worthiest; but 'Oedipus Rex' doesn't improve our relationship with classicism. It leaves us asking: isn't there anything else?

While all the semantic convolutions in cultural philosophy have left the 20th century looking like Swiss cheese, we can at least prattle on with reasonable lucidity about what it was to be a 'neo-classicist' in the 1920s. Stravinsky had met Picasso. He had worked with Cocteau. He'd had dinner with the Italian 'futurists'. He'd almost certainly had sex with Coco Chanel. And yet for the foremost 'modern' composer of his generation, the dictated high fashion was to be conservative dilettantism, with extra Tchaikovsky and all the trimmings. It can only be seen as a great retreat into the 19th century, when, for the likes of Brahms, being neo-classical was as natural as breathing. The 19th century symphony can't help but be neo-classical by design. Heroic 'romanticism', we usually call it, but in structure, form and historical context it is neo-classicism with wild, alluring hair. Beethoven, in particular, was neo-classical, in just about every sense. What Beethoven, Berlioz, Schumann, Mendelssohn and even Brahms did, and Stravinsky for at least two decades failed to do, was take the classical tradition somewhere new, a furthering of known art. What Stravinsky did, arguably all Stravinsky did was serve up terse variations on a theme of someone else, with the trademark Stravinsky sheen to make it sellable. All this when as early as 1921, a thirty year old Prokofiev had written a delightful if sarcastic 'Classical' Symphony, which says all that needs saying about 20th century neo-classicism in about twenty minutes.

In 1931, Stravinsky struck up a performing duo with the violinist Samuel Dushkin, for whom he wrote a concerto and a few other things for them to play. Dushkin was Jewish, but the publisher was paying. As a pianist Stravinsky played only Stravinsky (he was competent, a little mechanical, and prone to nerves); and as a conductor Stravinsky conducted only Stravinsky (he painstakingly taught himself his own scores, and opinions varied from 'balletic' to 'not very accurate'). Nevertheless, these were his main sources of income during Depression and transformation in a Europe heading to war. Igor Stravinsky was immediately a big fan of Benito Mussolini. We don't know if this good-will was reciprocate. The arch conservative composer supported the necessary authoritarianism the popular dictator would bring. Whether Stravinsky ever fully embraced Facism, though, is an open question, which, in the end was answered for him. His political beliefs were, like his spiritual beliefs, rather aloof and non-committal. He acknowledged his Orthodox roots, but was to move artistically towards Catholicism since, for one thing, musical instruments were precluded from Orthodox worship, and, for another thing, Catholism (as Wagner and Mahler had sussed) was the only thing a composer could be. Similarly, while he saw the USSR as a jumped up regime that stole his birthrights, the European Fascists were ok so long as they were paying for the gig. If it was left to him, the Nazi Party would have been just as suitable an employer as anyone else. Like him, they were Jew-hating, Communist-hating, God-fearing Euro-supremacists. He played Munich in 1933, Baden-Baden in 1936, and undertook a recording session in Berlin in 1938. But he hadn't allowed for the way Nazism was to engulf the arts. For a start, Igor's beaky nose, pale complexion and big drooping ears helped to convince the Nazis he was Jewish. For another thing, his modernist standing and the percieived difficulties of his music was clearly at odds with their Wagnerian romanticism. So to his dismay, Stravinsky was included in dictats and exhibitions of the 'degenerate' arts: homosexual abstract painters, Jewish jazz musicians, Communist polemicists, and snotty Igor from St. Petersburg joining Brecht, Einstein and Charlie Chaplin- not welcome in the Reich. In 1935, Stravinsky's eldest daughter died from TB. In 1937, he lost both his wife, Katya, and his mother, Anna. He tested the water with a couple of US tours. In 1939, just as the war was getting into its swing, he joined all the Jews, Communists and undesirables, and left Europe to its own doom.

To some extent his fame preceeded him. His ‘Autobiography’, ghost-written by Walter Nouvel, was now in English translation. And a handsome commission (Stravinsky must have hoped for many more from those big-pocketed Yanks) led to the concerto, ‘Dumbarton Oakes’ in 1938. Writing strictly to order, ‘Dumbarton Oakes’ is lively, at times pleasantly diverting mish-mash of warmed-over Bach. Fun as it is, and Stravinsky’s music isn’t without humour, we’d be suffering a biased inconsistency if we didn’t see Stravinsky in a deep creative hole; and he seems to have stopped digging. In the year that Cage wrote his ‘Metamorphosis’; Bartok was on his 2nd violin concerto; Lutoslawski, Berio and Tippett already making their way, any furtherance of the art produced by a ‘new’ Brandenburg Concerto is obviously limited. You could come along with your fashionable market-led ethic and argue that Stravinsky alone was attempting to make his music popular and approachable; but then you have to stand back and see how stupid that sounds. With typical historical irony, it was actually the Russians, the Soviet composers like Shostakovich and Prokoffiev who were making the concert hall ‘accessible’; and they’ve been castigated for it ever since.

He took up lodgings in Hollywood. To pay the rent he did a course of lectures, in French, at Harvard. His writings, whether on music or himself, are remarkable less for their insights than for their obfuscations. He never produced a written work on his own steam, preferring, it would seem, to maintain the mystique, like the proverbial jazz trumpter who covers his fingers with a handkerchief. And yet he began some semblance of an educational career, holding seminars with a privileged few. Still, his main income in the US wasn’t to come from commissions, or teaching, but a fairly gruelling schedule of conducting, mostly of the ‘Rite of Spring’. In 1940, Hollywood’s own idea of high art for the masses appeared: Disney’s ‘Fantasia’. Essentially a schlock ballet for Walt’s undernourished army of animators, the movie used Mickey Mouse and the boys to trash the ‘popular classics’, and along with Johann Sebastian and the boys, it features a crude two-minute edit of the ‘Rite of Spring’. Stravinsky didn’t complain, though he may have cried all the way to the bank. He settled himself into a little Russian enclave, hired some Russian servants, and passed the time with fellow emigres; he’d been an emigre already 25 years. Friends included the ageing Rachmaninoff, himself effectively homeless since the Bolsheviks had condemned him in 1918: not for any Tsarist crimes but because his hyper-romantic unguent music was ‘bourgeois’.

Occasionally it was mooted that Stravinsky was to write some film music. As it turned out, he never did. Whether he considered himself aloof ultimately from motion pictures, or was merely unprepared for the compromise involved in producing a finished film score- possibly both were true. Perhaps in his own version of catering for the popular market, he wrote a tango, a polka for some circus elephants, and an arrangement of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. His ‘Ebony Concerto’ of 1946 shows some aspects of where he drew the line. It was written for Woody Herman’s big band, and is, says Stephen Walsh in Grove: “a stylised portrait of the balletic precision of big band playing”. From the perspective of 20th century ‘long-hair’ concert music it is a pastiche, in the most accurate sense of the word. He uglifies the roots, the essence of jazz playing, like a white guy painting minstrels or a prince in a hooded top; he presents, through stylised distortions which owe more to ‘20s Paul Whiteman than ‘40s Stan Kenton, a high-handed dissection of jazz elements. Antiphony, syncopation and blues harmony are given the cool Stravinsky treatment: all rhythm is subservient to his own eclecticism, while the instruments are shorn of jazz freedoms and regimented into concerto grosso-type sections; the harmony is that mixture of stodgy clusters and naive open space that is Stravinsky. From a jazz perspective, the chord voicings are obtuse and immature and it swings like a three-legged hippopotamus. Simplistic clarinet ‘riffs’ are imposed on dixie-staccato saxes and wah-wah trombones, and then you realise the wah-wahs are one of the bits that work. Clearly, Stravinsky’s now entrenched formalised sense of rhythm cannot coexist with the metric ambivalence of jazz, and so Stravinsky’s “stylised portrait” of a drum-break gets lost in translation, coming out as a square bongo-man with a limp. The most successful elements of the piece are those where rhythm means the least; and the central ostinato section, with its passable Artie Shaw chords works in so much as a Martian might learn to tap-dance. The shame about the ‘Ebony Concerto’ is it fails to be one: there’s no understanding of the clarinet (this from an unqualified master orchestrator) and as for any feel the old White Russian might have for jazz as it was evolving, we have to say though the words stick in our throats that even the likes of Copland and Milhaud had ‘crossed-over’ with greater success. Whether it sounded better at the time, I can only guess. If you played it now, without letting on the Stravinsky tag, your audience will hear a soundtrack for a bad kung fu movie, starring Lee Majors, which thankfully was never made.

Stravinsky’s fortunes changed somewhat in 1948, when he met the 25-year old New Yorker Robert Craft. Craft was a post-war modernist in ways that attracted the tired stylist, and an association began which was symbiotic to the core. While the formal teaching structures of even US universities were unaccommodating to the average European genius, Stravinsky felt very at ease with an old-fashioned acolyte; in a sense playing the young Igor to his ageing Rimsky. But musicology stinks with quite enough Freud. Stravinsky’s relationship with Craft, particularly as time wore on, might be compared with Delius and Fenby, but that leaves out the whole creative dimension. Delius strictly dictated to Fenby, who loyally wrote down every detail. Craft’s influence, on the other hand, was prodigious.

For one thing, the entire image we still have of Stravinsky the towering forefather was down to the activities of Craft. He ghost-wrote articles, put words to Igor’s ‘theories’, gradually took over the conducting duties, and acted as an increasingly dictatorial shield from critics and the less clued-up general press. He was criticised for usurping other artists, especially other Russians, from Igor’s time and affections, of cutting Stravinsky off from anyone else. But if you want the image of a towering genius, you need to be aloof, and it was a part Stravinsky was born to. Creatively, compositionally, Craft hardly cut him off. Indeed, it was Robert Craft who plugged the old guy back in.

In 1945, Arnold Schoenberg gave up his job at the University of California. He was 71, and he had two major pieces and a book to finish, so he hoped for a decent pension. They gave him less than ten dollars a week. So he took in private pupils, and never truly finished his life’s work. When he died in 1951, he left behind a coterie of high-art fans and a reputation in the popular mind as difficult, ‘tuneless’, cacophonous and unbearably cerebral. But here the rift that had beset contemporary music-making since the First War had finally polarised, and the two ideologies set up camp at Schoenberg’s grave. There was, and still is, the ‘classical’ music market, conservative and capitalist, attempting to dictate taste in terms of bottom denominators, and for whom the ‘Firebird’ is quite ‘contemporary’ enough. Then there was, and still is, the progeny of Schoenberg’s coterie, encompassing pretty much every notable Western composer since Webern, along with a stolid band of highly trained modernist performers, for whom Schoenberg was only the starting point for a series of aesthetic and conceptual leaps. For all the major and minor developments since, this is still the checkmated battle-ground a young composer surveys. There have been largely retrograde tonalist attempts, largely on the back of rock music, but Philip Glass and John Taverner, are, in their different ways arch-conservatives for all their fad. Schoenberg’s serialism must now be seen as the starting point for all the experimentalism and electonicalism that followed him, whether we like the resulting art or not.

Igor Stravinsky, as we have seen, was largely ambivalent to Schoenberg’s ‘revolution’. He used the palette for psychological effect as early as ‘Three Japanese Lyrics’ of 1914, but he firmly considered his culturally integral neo-classicism as a clear and superior path, or at least, the path the disciples of Stravinsky would take. Shortly after Schoenberg’s death, though, Stravinsky visited Europe and got a shock. Whether it was the final realisation that his genteel, conservative music wasn’t exactly de rigeur with an idealist cultural youth that included Pierre Boulez and Stockhausen. Whether his reluctant admiration for Schoenberg and what he’d left in his wake, or the deep influence of Webern he witnessed in Germany, that finally snapped him out of his own stylistic aloofness. Whatever it was, for the rest of his career he engaged a gear-shift, and took a markedly different route.

In 1952, Robert Craft supervised and conducted a retrospective series of Schoenberg concerts in Los Angeles. Stravinsky, now 70 years old, looked on with all the interest of a keen young student. He’d written nothing for much of a year, and when he did start work on a Septet, it was clear that Schoenberg’s sense of sonorities had already been isolated and absorbed. But the change was more than surface style. The Septet also contains early seeds of serial technique: the geometric transformation of groups of notes which Schoenberg and his pupils had adopted as an alternative development process to tonalism. Stravinsky was Schoenberging out. Craft did everything he could to help. In 1953, Igor met Dylan Thomas, and the two are said to have planned a work together. But the poet, more accustomed to a quiet pint than the drink and drugs of US ‘stardom’, never survived the tour. Stravinsky wrote an ‘In Memoriam’ which incorporated neo-classical brass with serial note rows and ‘Do not go gentle’ to a string quartet. By 1958, Stravinsky was a full-blown serialist, and he rammed home the fact with ‘Threni’ for singers and orchestra, setting the ‘Lamentations of Jeremiah’, which he conducted himself in Venice. While it uses all the serial atonalist devices of a 12-note row combined with the linear geometry of inversions and retrogrades and the rest; sparse, atmospheric orchestration, and non-melodic, deliberately awkward intervals, he yet stands back from the asymmetries of serialist ‘harmony’ by leaving in implied tonal harmony and clean a cappella space.

Along with serial method, in fact hand in hand on whatever level he functioned, was an increasing religiosity. i’m no expert on the gods of men; so I feel unqualified to dwell at length on the end of Stravinsky’s career. Old men are very often inclined towards a spiritual centre, and in artists this of course becomes apparent. Composers, in particular, often bow out in an attempt at over-worldly planes. Mozart, as it turned out, wrote his own requiem. Beethoven’s last quartets sought a spiritual purity, and, as friends related, the cantankerous old revolutionary seemed to be writing his own invitation card to the pearly gates. Verdi exclusively wrote stunningly humanist operas for the best part of sixty years and then spent his last two on Te Deums and Ave Marias. And Wagner, the same Wagner beloved of Nietzche, the same Wagner who preached sex and death and Valhalla, produced ‘Parsifal’ (he called it a ‘Buhnenweihfestspiel’ which in typical Meccano German translates as ‘Staged-Holy-Festival-Singing-thing’ and cultural sequels included the Nuremberg rallies), a sort of Catholic ritual with trombones in, a year before he died. In 1965, Stravinsky wrote two requiems: the ‘Canticles’ and a mass for T. S. Eliot. In his last years, in addition, he wrote ‘In Memoriams’ for Aldous Huxley and John Kennedy and several settings of ‘Genesis’, including ‘The Flood’, produced by Craft for CBS Television in 1962. Igor Stravinsky died, after several strokes, in 1971. His body was flown to Venice, for burial near Diaghilev.

The central point I seem to be making is one of measured perspective. We certainly shouldn’t fear Stravinsky like our fear of smart cards and mobile ‘phones. In many ways he was a conservative. We also shouldn’t revere him unconditionally, since, again, in many ways he was a conservative. After the quantum departure of the Rite he reined back, leaving others to lead the way. In the first phase of his career, he successfully adopted the foreign folk-culture of Russia and passed it off as originally his own. Once he had a foot in the door of the European intelligentsia he pushed hard, and ended up as the face of the 20th century composer, a modern icon. But such an icon is intrinsically reactionary: an evocation of heroic comparisons in a history where kings win wars and churches bring learning and composers are informed by the divine orchestrator in the sky. Stravinsky stood for imperial decadence, just as in his homeland it became a capital offence.

Whether you buy his neo-classical phase depends on whether you buy neo-classicism. Personally, viscerally, I don’t dig Stravinsky Lite. I think he misunderstood classicism, even in the broad sense he took it. If we were to witness Mozart, Pergolesi of even Handel as their contemporaries heard it; purely, in their age, without any memory of all the Beethoven and Tchaikovsky we’ve had in between: we wouldn’t hear it as elegant, airily distant, ‘pure’ music- we’d hear the sweat and the drama, the directness and the realism, that all artists strive for who are modern to their age. Stravinsky puts classicism in a specimen jar, and asks us to admire his hand-written label; applaud his handling of the formaldehyde, gasp, not at the classics, but at the classifier’s system of classification. To what extent Stravinsky alone is responsible for the difficulties concert music now has in ‘relating’ to anyone, or; to what extent to pushed against this trend in his occasional populism- there is simply too much social and cultural clutter to make so precise a measurement. He certainly cultivated the myth that things went on in his brain that were beyond mere mortals; but then so does Liam Gallagher.

In embracing serialism at the end of his career was he giving up, copping out, or merely catching up on his mail? Well, there’s at least three ways of looking at the question. Traditionally, we are taught that the genius Stravinsky had that extra stage within himself; that he had the courage and the sensibility to ‘keep up with the trend’. We are directed to the observation that he never gave over to serialism, but more he adapted it in his own eclectic genius way. There are lingering areas of tonality, traditionally arched melodies, and a trademark harmonic consonance in even his bleakest works. But did he do any more than ape serialism? When, as he did later, he bases his works on pre-arranged ‘rotation grids’, is he really just replacing a classicist formula for one of the new up-to-date models? To my mind, what became known as ‘integral serialism’ (which is a sort of Jesuit wing, proud of their decimal points) and the numerological practises of Cage and Maxwell Davies in their diverse ways (one to prove anything goes and the other to look smart once everything had went), amount to an acute case of ‘formalism’, in the sense that they look to prescribe a structure, rather than allowing one to grow. Music, especially high-art concert music, must be more than Lego bricks. Even in our brutally depersonalising age, where there’s no more heroes any more, we need to hear the spark of the artist, the gifted soul who enlightens through sheer force of habit. It’s all very well using a string of numbers to construct a piece of music, if you think the only alternative is a rehash already written by someone else. But simply writing out the equation without engaging any ‘creative’ faculties isn’t art: it’s join the dots. The fact is that by the time Craft pushed Stravinsky into serialism, it had already become the new orthodoxy, with its own set of rigid rules.

In a sense, the serialism of the late ‘50s was to attract Stravinsky for its very strictness. The complex system of note permutation and geometric translation was, for all its college bluster, a form of neo-classicism itself, or more accurately: neo-baroque. Much of the geometry was an adaptation of counterpoint construction, and would have been appreciated by Johann Fux himself. JS Bach, who studied Fux, as did Haydn and Beethoven, used the same devices: essentially you take a set of notes, write them backwards, or upside-down, or twice as fast, or all three at once for effect. But serial technique is a technique. It should solve problems, facilitate, like a technique should. Shrewd jazzers are suspicious of someone who’s ‘all technique’ and we should expect no less from our composers. Cage had a singular honesty: for him numbers were just one compositional device, just as valid as rolling dice or randomly quoting the ‘I Ching’. But the singular difference between Bach and the serialists, and I write this not as a reactionary tonalist but as someone who’d hoped for more, is that Bach, before he transformed his notes in all his clever ways, would first ensure that the ‘integral note sequence’ was unutterably beautiful; not just beautifully equal to 17 point 6. No construction technique should abrogate creative inspiration: the search for truth and beauty, or unbeauty, for that matter- one of the more popular works since the war was Penderecki’s ‘Threnody For The Victims Of Hiroshima’. While so much concert music is dismissed as from a bad horror movie, we are so often not listening to deliberate horror, or terror, or Jungian stress displacement: we are listening to the kind of car crash you get when there’s no driver.

Taken to extremes, any extensive technique eventually occludes the very creative spirit we expect from things we call art. In the current capitalist work-speak: it de-skills the creative process. We may accept that as simply another modernity, and look forward to the day when the machines do all the work, even composing, arranging and ‘performing’; but at a time when untold billions of people are educated, aware, and capable of being great at something, it seems odd to entrust the beauty of our music to a pre-arranged set of lottery numbers that didn’t even win. Peevishly, we can say Igor Stravinsky embraced serialism, because like neo-classicism, the system did all the work for him. We can hardly attach the label ‘greatest composer of the 20th century’ to a guy who, deep-down creatively, was hardly ever there. But maybe another impact of serialism, of the de-skilling, of the triumph of technique, is a levelling process, one which precludes ‘great composers’ or anything like. Because, the fact is, music can now be constructed without anything we might call ‘musicianship’. By that I mean such trifles as the ears of a bat, the rhythm of a humming-bird, or the harmonic alignment of the wind in the trees. Now, anyone with a calculator can write music, so why are we surprised there are no ‘great’ ones about?

There’s a story that Charlie Parker once went to Stravinsky’s house. The pivotal sax-player, wrecked by heroin and never sure whether next he’d be in the studio or in a hospital, had long admired ‘The Rite Of Spring’ and had often professed a desire to write orchestral music. For Charlie it was a pilgrimage to long-hairdom, and i’d be glad if I could report some seminal philosophical interaction. Unfortunately I can’t. Charlie got to the gate. The lights were on: he could tell the great Russian was at home. But he didn’t have the nerve even to knock on the door. Whether Igor would have had a clue who he was is doubtful: Woody Herman had been stretching it. Neither do we know whether Charlie could have found any words intelligible to the little old man, or whether he’d have just forgotten himself and pissed on the doorstep. That these two towering figures in contemporary music were so close to meeting is fascinating. Considering the criticism they both received in their time, and still do now from traditionalists of all colours, it is poignant that, on that hot Hollywood night, all that separated Igor and the Yardbird was one squeaky gate.