Stravinsky focus of Composers Festival

This weekend, the school is devoting its fifth annual Composers Festival to all things Stravinsky, with the centerpiece being a performance of excerpts from the work.

"In the pop world, this still remains a touchstone. You talk to people in the alternative music scene, they will say, 'Yea, yea, 'The Rite of Spring'," said UA composition professor Daniel Asia, who curates the festival.

Asia calls "The Rite of Spring" and Stravinsky's two other landmark ballets "The Firebird" and "Petrushka" "seminal pieces. You're talking about Bach's 'Passion' and Wagner's 'The Ring.' These pieces are part of that category, where you look at it and go, 'How did this happen?' "

The festival started Wednesday with a discussion of Russia during Stravinsky's time that put the rest of the festival in context. The festival moves to Fox Tucson Theatre tonight for a screening of the 2009 French film "Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky," a fictionalized account of the composer's affair with the famous French fashion designer.

"Everybody was in Paris. It's not just Stravinsky, but it's (Sergei) Diaghilev and (Pablo) Picasso and (Jean) Cocteau and Coco Chanel," Asia said. "Everybody was there hanging out and doing their stuff, and fashion was right in the middle of all this."

But it was "The Rite of Spring" that came to define Stravinsky and cement his legacy as one of the top 10 composers of all time, Asia said.

Stravinsky wrote "The Rite of Spring" for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes company. The piece strayed from convention, which strove for music to flow with unity, developing organically from a simple idea that is carried throughout a composition, said UA music theory professor Don Traut.

Instead, Stravinsky composed the work as blocks of seemingly discontinuous material consisting of short motifs derived from Russian folk tunes. The piece flows like a mosaic of tiles pieced together, explained Traut, who has researched Stravinsky and is working on a book about Stravinsky's Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments. Stravinsky uses wind instruments at higher registers to create shrills and irregular rhythms throughout that added a sense of unpredictability.

Diaghilev's raw and suggestive choreography accompanied the piece and nearly led to a riot when the work premiered on May 29, 1913, in Paris.

"It definitely was a combination of things. The music for 1913 in Paris … was very aggressive and some people say primitive," Traut said. "He was representing pagan rituals. The whole thing really was kind of shocking for the ballet audience at that time. … I don't know if it would be so shocking today."

When Stravinsky took it out of the ballet and into the concert hall, "The Rite of Spring" became an enduring hit.

"Musicians love to play his music because they respect its ingenuity," Traut said.

Traut said the festival covers Stravinsky's extensive career from the music informed by his Russian heritage, to his neoclassical period that borrowed from the styles of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart, to his later period that employed Arnold Schönberg's 12-tone system.

"The festival will give people a chance to hear pieces from all three stylistic periods," he said.

Traut will lead a discussion on Saturday afternoon about Stravinsky's composing, drawing on his research of the composer's early sketch books from the 1920s and '30s, many of which are archived in Switzerland.

"It allows me to see behind the scenes how he developed a piece of music. We can look at the finished version and then the various compositional stages the piece went through. That's a pretty exciting thing to be able to do," said Traut, who recently co-authored a paper on the composer's "The Soldier's Tale."

"Oftentimes it appears that he would have a very specific and short idea that he knew he was going to use and would play around with that and manipulate it until it became a larger idea. Once he had three or four or five ideas developed he would then start deciding what order those ideas would occur in. I think of it as bottom up versus top down," Traut said.

Traut said Stravinsky also was known to compose a phrase of music that was meant to flow, then literally cut the page up with scissors and tape it back together with space in between where he would compose unrelated music to create dissonance. But beneath that dissonance was a thread of continuity.

"It almost seems silly or trivial, but the effect he was going after sometimes was to ensure that there was discontinuity in the music but still have ideas going through the piece," Traut said.

"The message I hope people walk away with (from the festival) is that Stravinsky was one of the most influential, if not the most influential, composer of art music in the 20th century," he added.

If you go

• What: Fifth Annual Composers Festival.

• When: Today, Saturday and Sunday.

• Where: At the University of Arizona School of Music, North Park Avenue and East Speedway, unless noted.

• Cost: Concerts are $10 and $5 through tickets.arizona.edu; $7 for tonight's film through www.foxtucsontheatre.org. Lectures are free.

• Schedule: Online at www.azstarnet.com/calientetunedin

Schedule

Today: Film "Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky," 7:30 p.m. at Fox Tucson Theatre, 17 W. Congress St.

Saturday: Symposium with Don Traut and Bruce Chamberlain, 1 p.m., in Room 146 in the UA School of Music; concert, 4 p.m. in Holsclaw Hall, featuring "Petrushka," "Three Japanese Lyrics" and Three Pieces for String Quartet with mezzo-soprano Sun Young-Lee; trumpet player Edward Reid; pianists Tannis Gibson and Rex Woods, and the Arizona Choir; evening concert at 7:30 p.m. in Crowder Hall, featuring Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments, "Symphony of Psalms," "Petrushka" and selections from "The Rite of Spring" with Gibson, Arizona Symphony Orchestra, UA Wind Ensemble and the Arizona Choir.

Sunday: "Stravinsky and the Dance" concert, 1:30 p.m. at Stevie Eller Dance Theatre, featuring "A Soldier's Tale," Serenade in A and Septet with narrators Kristin Dauphinais, Grayson Hirst and Charles Roe; musicians Jerry Kirkbride, Edward Reid, Norman Weinberg, Moisés Paiewonsky, Ellen Chamberlain, William Dietz, Jim Karrer and Tannis Gibson; and School of Dance students. Closing concert, 4 p.m. , at Crowder Hall, featuring "In Memoriam Dylan Thomas," Octet for Wind Instruments, and "The Owl and the Pussy Cat," with vocalists Dauphinais and Stephen Warner, and musicians Carrol McLaughlin, Brian Luce, Jerry Kirkbride, Reid, Dietz, and Paiewonsky.