INFERNAL TANGO: RETHINKING THE GENRE IN I. F. STRAVINSKY'S THE STORY OF A SOLDIER
UDC index:
782.9
DOI: 10.31773/2078-1768-2024-67-182-189
Article ID in the RSCI:
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Information about authors: Sushliakova Asia Aleksandrovna Postgraduate, Department of Music History, Glinka Novosibirsk State Conservatoire (Novosibirsk, Russian Federation). E-mail: sumb7673@gmail.com
Annotation: The earliest experience of transforming the tango into an academic composer's work, its insightful reinterpretation and destabilisation of the genre's canon features was tried by I. F. Stravinsky in 1918 in a work with an unconventional genre definition – a read, played and danced fairy tale performance. This process is characterised by the idea of the destruction of humanistic values, which is expressed in the confrontation betweenserious and light music, where everyday genres are interpreted as opposition to the established system of spiritual supports of life. The inversive approach with the deliberate destruction and exaggeration of the marked tango signs in the nodal scene of the fairy tale story was the origin of the evil grotesque. Presented by the author as an outwardly mechanical and toy dance of fairy-tale characters, the tango demonstrates an example of not only stylistic but also conceptual mutation of the genre. The distortion in The Soldier's Story of the semantic codes of the dance of love passion endowed the genre with unexpected anti-value features. Showing the incompatibility of the represented and the implied, the tango becomes the embodiment (which is further indicative of the twentieth century) of the image of the fatal-rock, infernal danse macabre. The denunciatory approach, contrary to the developed attitude of accepting the established perceptions of the genre, provides an opportunity to experience a kind of culture shock due to the acute feeling of not recognising its stable features. This experience of deformation of the usual perceptions of tango opens up bold horizons of experimentation with the conceptual interpretation of the genre through the prism of the idea of the collapse of high cultural traditions.
Keywords: tango, I.F. Stravinsky, The Story of a Soldier, denunciation, generalisation through genre, Danse macabre, infernality, neoclassicism.
DOI: 10.31773/2078-1768-2024-67-182-189
Article ID in the RSCI:
Article file: Download
Information about authors: Sushliakova Asia Aleksandrovna Postgraduate, Department of Music History, Glinka Novosibirsk State Conservatoire (Novosibirsk, Russian Federation). E-mail: sumb7673@gmail.com
Annotation: The earliest experience of transforming the tango into an academic composer's work, its insightful reinterpretation and destabilisation of the genre's canon features was tried by I. F. Stravinsky in 1918 in a work with an unconventional genre definition – a read, played and danced fairy tale performance. This process is characterised by the idea of the destruction of humanistic values, which is expressed in the confrontation betweenserious and light music, where everyday genres are interpreted as opposition to the established system of spiritual supports of life. The inversive approach with the deliberate destruction and exaggeration of the marked tango signs in the nodal scene of the fairy tale story was the origin of the evil grotesque. Presented by the author as an outwardly mechanical and toy dance of fairy-tale characters, the tango demonstrates an example of not only stylistic but also conceptual mutation of the genre. The distortion in The Soldier's Story of the semantic codes of the dance of love passion endowed the genre with unexpected anti-value features. Showing the incompatibility of the represented and the implied, the tango becomes the embodiment (which is further indicative of the twentieth century) of the image of the fatal-rock, infernal danse macabre. The denunciatory approach, contrary to the developed attitude of accepting the established perceptions of the genre, provides an opportunity to experience a kind of culture shock due to the acute feeling of not recognising its stable features. This experience of deformation of the usual perceptions of tango opens up bold horizons of experimentation with the conceptual interpretation of the genre through the prism of the idea of the collapse of high cultural traditions.
Keywords: tango, I.F. Stravinsky, The Story of a Soldier, denunciation, generalisation through genre, Danse macabre, infernality, neoclassicism.
