In his anti-Romantic polemics from his Autobiography (1936), Igor Stravinsky asserts his

infamous argument that music is inherently not able to express anything at all. He adds that what

most of us understand as expression is something that people attribute to the music, informed by

their listening experience. To Stravinsky, this impulse is “an aspect we have come to confuse,

unconsciously or by force of habit, with its essential being.” (pg. 461) He defends his argument

using the basis that music in and of itself is a complete construction that is realized through time.

Therefore, Stravinsky adds, "nothing more needs to be added” to the musical work, and any

attempts to search for anything beyond what is within the score is futile (pg. 461). Stravinsky

also questions the impulse to find the music’s external expression and meaning with regard to the

ontology of the music. He critiques that because of our tendency to orient ourselves with our

emotive responses to the music, we ignore the autonomy of the music and the entity it takes on.

In Stravinsky’s mind, music seems to mostly interests us “in so far as it touches on elements

outside it while evoking sensations with which they are familiar.” (pg. 461) Returning to his

central thesis, Stravinsky’s reasoning for the inherent inexpressiveness of music is that its form

and content are so ensconced in the score, that they warrant neither intervention by nor should

intervene in external interpretations and discourses, and they should not rely on external support

from programmatic explanations or descriptions. To put it another way, music is enough as it is,

and we should appreciate it as it ought to be.

Stravinsky’s rather cold and distanced perspective on the status of music find root in his

conception of earlier Neoclassical works, such as the ballet Pulcinella and Octet for Wind

Instruments. In his preface to the Octet, Stravinsky talks about his composition as an object in

both a material and a stylistic sense. Materially speaking, he characterizes the work as an object

that has a from that is “influenced by the musical matter with which it is composed.” (pg. 1) That
form, as Stravinsky later elaborates, is generated through counterpoint which he presents as an

architectural and constructive solution to his musical inquiries (pg. 2). In addition, Stravinsky

approaches the material of his Octet in terms of weight and space, both quantitative and

qualitative terms that would lose some of it through the erosion of time and, perhaps

controversially to us in the present, performance. Referring to the earlier summary on his

Autobiography, Stravinsky wishes for the work’s material autonomy to include the clause that

the author is the work’s only interpreter, and that anyone who claims to interpret it is merely an

executant of the author’s will (pg. 2). This is also reflected in his conceptualization of dynamics,

where forte and piano, the only two dynamics Stravinsky used in the score, merely indicates

volume and not the character of performance (pg. 1). Not only does Stravinsky excuse any

rhetoric on music from intervening in the musical work, but also performative interventions as

well. To that, he claims that the objective elements of a musical composition are already

“sufficient in themselves.” (pg. 1)

In terms of style, Stravinsky sets up a binary between the objective and the emotive. He makes

that clear right away when he states that the Octet is “not an ‘emotive’ work” but rather an

objective one based on the self-sufficient elements contained in the work itself. (pg. 1) What

Stravinsky seems to consider as “emotive” includes things like dynamic nuances and other

aspects that can be heavily influenced by the performer. Emotive works that are oriented towards

such nuances would, in the mind of Stravinsky, be deformed and made amorphous by their

presentation. This further illustrates Stravinsky’s formalist ideals for creating a completely self-

sufficient and autonomous work that is “interpretation-proof.” To reiterate Stravinsky’s

argument, music is inherently unable to express anything not because it does not communicate

any kind of information, but because it has expressed everything it has had to say and needs to be
said, and his concept of “expression” simply refers to external meanings and interpretations

which, again, is unnecessary for him. For a composition to be ontologically self-sufficient, any

emotive traces must be done away with once and for all.

I disagree with Stravinsky’s anti-Romantic polemics because it is not entirely possible to

practically compose a work that does not “express” something or is “perfectly impersonal.” It is

difficult for most musical works to be completely dissociated from external thoughts that are

contributed by the composer, performer, or listener. Even in works like Octet, which foreground

objective expression and construction, some of Stravinsky’s Neoclassical compositions,

especially his operas and ballets, contradict those ideals of the “perfectly impersonal” through

how he conceives of a personal approach to language, storytelling, and declamation, which to me

aligns closer with the emotive aspects of composition and expression. In addition, Stravinsky

seems to attempt to displace a powerful and historically-ingrained human impulse to associate

structural and emotive ideas so intrinsically with each other, so much so that it is difficult to

understand and discuss music with only one part of that binary. The ideals of “perfectly

impersonal” are set up for failure, for any musical presentation can’t really escape the mode of

personal expression even if it seeks to work against it in music composed by humans and

performed by humans.

My first point focuses on the works Stravinsky completed in his Neoclassical phase. The list of

genres Stravinsky worked with throughout his Neoclassical period reflects a turn towards

absolute and late eighteenth-century genres, such as symphonies, concertos, and sonatas. Indeed,

they bear a lot of references and homages to past styles and conventions, which foreground

objective and elegant expression. However, Stravinsky continued to work with a lot of staged

genres such as operas and ballets. Operas like Renard, Oedipus Rex, and The Rake’s Progress
and ballets such as Apollon musagate, Orpheus, and Persephone (the last of which being a

melodrama) combine music and drama beautifully and masterfully, in which the music conveys

and heightens the drama on stage and likewise the drama propels the music forward and provides

it a unique and immersive dimension. Focusing on the operas and Persephone in particular,

Stravinsky closely engaged with language and declamation as well as the expressive semantics

that come from them both to present compelling stories on stage.

The emotive effects of language and declamation pose as an opponent Stravinsky the

Neoclassicist seems to work against, yet in those works, he embraced and advanced such

emotive expressions that are human to the core, even in a stylized manner. All this evidence

points to a strong contradiction of Stravinsky’s anti-Romantic polemics. As he is pushing for

music that is “perfectly impersonal” in his compositions, the output that came about this

Neoclassical phase seems to suggest a glaring inconsistency.

Secondly, Stravinsky seems to not only set up a binary opposition between structures and

affects, but also asserting that one can exist without the other. While this aspiration does seem to

be utopic, it unfortunately is impossible to separate those two binaries in practice. From an

esthesic standpoint, most human experiences of listening to music have the tendency to make

semiotic connections between a passage they heard and an external idea or concept. Perhaps

most ironically, this is a focus of many 18th century theories from Affektlehre to Topic Theory,

which are applied to and developed from the very music Stravinsky intended to emulate from. I

am, however, aware that the information and discourse on Affect and Topics may not be as

widely available to Stravinsky as it is to us today, but it is an irony that is still worth considering.

Even with that in mind, it goes to show that music, as it is conceptualized by humans,

intrinsically connects structures and emotions together. One could discuss a musical passage that
is as esoteric and sophisticated in design like a Bach Fugue or a Mozart Symphony (again, the

kinds of style Stravinsky is harkening back to), but leaving any mentions of emotive elements

out would be a glaring oversight on the part of the discourse. A similar case can be made vice

versa, like the music dramas of Wagner or the Expressionist works of Schoenberg (the music

Stravinsky critiques with his polemics), in which the subjective expressions in their works are

substantially supported by a logically convincing structure inherent to the composer’s creative

process. In other words, while Stravinsky’s Neoclassical aspirations are admirable, they

challenge a powerful human impulse in musical discourse to associate musical ideas and

structures with external inspirations and parallels like certain images and stories. This impulse is,

for better or worse, insurmountable to displace by Stravinsky’s anti-Romantic polemics.