My iTunes shuffle just brought up the “Pas d’action” (“Apollo and the Muses”) from Stravinsky’s Apollo, one of the most beautiful pieces of music I know. Given what I’ve just been writing, how does its beauty strike me? As deliberately clsasical beauty, an assumed serenity, serenity that implicitly honors all the 20th century reasons not to be serene. (Too bad for Theodor Adorno, who absolutely did not get that, and thought Stravinsky dishonestly tried to make the world go away.) Which makes the music all the more beautiful, and helps me understand why I respond to eagerly to Stravinsky, with no sense of puzzlement or uneasy nostalgia.
Greg Sandow on the future of classical music
