It is never quite easy for the publisher to write about ‘his’ composer because the composer is ‘his’ in a very special and complex way. Abraham Mendelssohn once said in a letter to his family that he was but a dash between his famous father, the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn who profoundly influenced liberal thinking in the second half of the 18th century, and his better known and equally famous son Felix. But Abraham Mendelssohn was the founder of the family fortune which enabled his son to devote himself entirely to his hobbies and to make his house the focal point of musical and artistic life in Berlin and Leipzig.

What can one say, with what words should one address Igor Feodorovich Stravinsky on his eighty-fifth birthday, a day for the greatest rejoicing both in his personal life and in his life as an artist? We must express infinite gratitude to him (but can it be expressed in words?), for it is essential that he should know that notwithstanding his world-wide recognition, he is, and always will be, both as a man and as a composer, one of the great mysteries of world culture, and in particular of Russian culture, a mystery that will live forever, that will always be subject to fresh interpretations and that will always be needed. His secret—which cannot really be explained—is first and foremost the secret of his genius, the mysterious unexpectedness and the marvel of his appearance in the music of Russia and the world. As Tolstoy said: “Genius is that which cannot be called anything else but genius!” Its basic characteristics, moreover, are unpredictability and self-evidence.

As its title implies, Stravinsky's latest work is by no means comprehensive in its choice of texts from the Mass for the Dead, and clearly shows an idiosyncratic and personal attitude. Of the seven main sections of the Mass as set by, say, Verdi, Stravinsky taps only three, the Introit, Dies Irae and Responsory (Libera Me), extracting from them six short vocal movements which are symmetrically framed and divided by three sections for the orchestra. Significantly, four of these settings use the Dies Irae text, a thirteenth-century Latin hymn whose persistently dramatic and memorable poetic imagery thus dominates the canticles and produces the groundplan: Prelude—Exaudi. Dies Irae. Tuba Mirum—Interlude—Rex Tremendae. Lacrimosa. Libera Me—Postlude. It will be seen that there is no use made of the Requiem Aeternam sections which colour most settings, and the impression is that the cautionary aspects of the Mass have cast their aura over the concept of the work as a whole. While providing suitable material for an essay in dramatic ritual, this choice also presents something of the composer's personal attitude to life and the hereafter.

What follows is a purely personal account of my speculations about composition today, in relation to a study of Stravinsky's work. Under three main headings I shall try to show the contemporary relevance of certain features of Stravinsky's musical style which have not been very frequently discussed.

Jazz was a product of the confrontation of two worlds. The African Negro, transported in slavery, took with him to his new land his native musical traditions, which were corporeally rhythmic and vocally modal; and these came into contact—and before long into conflict—with the harmonic conventions of the West (specifically those of the march and hymn). Out of this tension was generated the classic form of the blues, the traditional basis of jazz. During the first two decades of the twentieth century the black man in America created a music that expressed not only his powerful protest against dispossession, but also a nostalgia for ‘the beauty of his wild forebears’; and (which was more remarkable) the white man too came to recognize in the black man's music a vitality and spontaneity which he, in his modern self-consciousness, had lost.

I first heard some of Stravinsky's music as a schoolboy of eighteen, in the course of a concert at the old Colston Hall, Bristol on 15th February 1924. It was The Firebird suite conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham; and I remember sitting in the gallery, listening entranced, and then to my astonishment finding that part of the audience was upset and scandalised by what they had heard. The impression was so strong that thereafter I began to look out carefully for opportunities of hearing other works by him.

Not only the piano music, but also the relatively unusual fact that Stravinsky composes at the piano, should concern us. It is noteworthy too that although Stravinsky's piano output is not very large, many of his orchestral works contain important concertante piano parts. That Petrushka and the Symphony in Three Movements were originally conceived as compositions for piano and orchestra, and then altered to their present form, perhaps represents a realisation on his part, prophetic at the time when Petrushka was composed, that the role of the piano as a solo instrument with orchestra could not remain in the same relationship to the orchestra, as protagonist, as had been the case in the nineteenth century.

For well over fifty years Stravinsky has been a prolific choral composer, using the medium widely within the framework of larger works, as well as turning out a stream of works which are either exclusively choral or which depend sufficiently on chorus to be categorised alongside such pieces. Even so the flow has never been entirely regular. Of the 102 separate works listed in Eric Walter White's recent survey, 20 are in some sense choral (I include operas like The Nightingale or The Rake's Progress, both of which have appreciable parts for chorus, as well as one like Oedipus Rex, where the chorus is a central and substantial figure in both the music and the drama). But no less than seven post-date The Rake's Progress—a proportion of seven out of 19 works—and all but two of these are settings of religious texts. Out of twelve choral works composed before The Rake only six are religious, and of these half are short unaccompanied settings of liturgical texts.