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Rating: Talking about music is a very awful thing, first of all unfair to the person who wrote that music, because you pretend to shrink an infinite, you talk about nothing, you sully a white coat. Unfortunately, however, one must at least try to say something, encourage listening, they say, accept to compromise, the compromises of words, perhaps try to explain why a set of sounds is a masterpiece, or why it is not. Someone asks me what I think of Stravinsky's Pulcinella, and I have no fucking idea what to tell him.
I could tell him that it's the first work considered neoclassical by Stravinsky, marking the beginning of the second artistic period of the Russian genius. But then my mouth clogs up, as soon as I start to pronounce that sad blasphemy, "Neoclassical," damn it, what crap, you need guts to coin such horrible terms and associate them with masterpieces. Today it's the fair of these plaques, so a critic also saves ink: instead of trying to explain in two paragraphs what he is listening to (and not what he hears) he can manage with two or three magic words: psych-folk punk. Which means jack shit. But you look good. Even if you can't write.
But let's dissect the score of Pulcinella from a technical point of view, the harmonies, the polyphonies, the changes in rhythm, or even the orchestration. I already know that if I put it on this plane, after a while, the usual music moralist will come and tell me that technique is useless, that it goes against creativity, that what matters is the feeling or whatever the fuck it's called, the wild inspiration, away with the knowledge, a cancer. Anyway, I don't know anything about harmony, counterpoint, and all those diploma hassles, so I won't talk about them. The only thing I feel like saying is that in my opinion, technique is indeed useful, to forget it, to trample it. It might seem that the greatness of Stravinsky’s work lies in technique, in technical-compositional progress, but it’s not true at all. It's true that most of the time they are very complicated, but if they are intricate on paper, to the ear, they are so simple and basic as to be eternal, so much so that a child could understand them very well (I have the proof). It is more plausible to think of a Stravinsky who writes music for children rather than someone who writes for critics.
Then it's true, times change, the cultural context too, and it is also true that in classical music one is a composer after years and years of study and masters, refinements and seclusion, while in rock, the license to write is those 150 euros you spend to buy a Squier Stratocaster. Some believe that one way of making art excludes the other, I don’t believe that. Stravinsky born today would not be an academic, a professor, just as he was not then. Perhaps he wasn’t even a musician, he was simply an artist (to say the least), his ability to play or write in sheet music was just a means to best render his ideas, in a form, in the best one.
The idea of the Pulcinella Ballet was to recover a seemingly distant and incompatible past with expressionist ferment, a baroque past, bringing it into its own era and its own way of writing. The scores of a Neapolitan composer of the early '700s in particular, Pergolesi, struck the sensitivity of Stravinsky and Diaghilev (the historic "producer" of his ballets), who took full possession of it, denaturing them to such an extent as to make them totally alien to the cultural context from which they came, the Baroque. Little does it matter then the discussions on the true authorship of the scores (many of the chosen ones have turned out to be by minor composers and not by Pergolesi), remember the stupid rejection of many critics who considered it a disrespectful operation. What counts is that once again the Russian composer managed to accomplish something new and special. While the ballet initially written in 1919 required a small orchestra and solo voices, in 1949 Stravinsky made a transposition of the same work in an instrumental-only version, the "Pulcinella suite." I have listened to both, but for me, the second is the definitive one, I put it as my opinion, but I find it perfect. In eight movements, passing through serenades scheris and minuets of arcane memory, one witnesses a progressive disintegration of the original structure (it seems that a desecrating and ironic spirit hovers in the sounds), a kind of dialogue between past and present, where one loses the very cognition of what is past and what is present. Precisely the ironic atmosphere that pervades the work manages to be a perfect description of the literary subject of Pulcinella, so that Stravinsky once again achieves with impressive verism the lie of music as an expression of something that is not just itself.
But now I’m fucking done:
http://it.youtube.com/watch?v=X4KYuhfag5I
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