Stravinsky Inside Out (review)
Celso Loureiro Chaves · Notes · 2002
Reassessment, reevaluation, and revisitation are key words that identify many of the books that have augmented the Stravinsky bibliography since the publication of [End Page 340] Richard Taruskin's Stravinsky and the Russian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). These new studies revisit the contributions of the composer to the music, society, and culture of the twentieth century, and hover between a reevaluation of his music and a reassessment of his biography. Jonathan Cross's The Stravinsky Legacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Joseph N. Straus's Stravinsky's Late Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) delve into Stravinsky's music; its lesser known corners are brought to light and its reverberations into the future presupposed. Stephen Walsh's Stravinsky: A Creative Spring (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999) takes advantage of the opening to researchers in 1986 of the Stravinsky Archives, housed at the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel, and has biographical preoccupations as its main axis. None of these books, however, is built so glaringly around the absence of Stravinsky's music as Charles M. Joseph's Stravinsky Inside Out. While Stravinsky: A Creative Spring is exhaustive in its systematization of new biographical information, Stravinsky Inside Out (it too the result of investigative research conducted in Basel) is a collection of loosely connected essays whose main focus becomes clear only by the cumulativeness of their thematic diversity.