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Deracinated, Dysphoric and Dialogised: the Wild and Beguiled.

Semiotics of Stravinsky’s Topical Signifiers

N. P. McKay, PhD
The University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

ABSTRACT

Stravinsky's 'transposition' and use of established musical topoi offer an intriguing

case study for the semiotician versed in Monelle's readings of musical topics and the
sense of music. Dialogised from the outset by the composer's anti-expressive,
formalist polemics, Stravinsky's use of extroversive semiosis brings to mind the lyrics
of an Ella Fitzgerald’s song: one is ‘bewitched, bothered and bewildered’ at the
simultaneously ‘wild’ and ‘beguiled’ play of his referential signs.

The convention-breeching and deceptive sense of Stravinsky's signifiers results

primarily from three stylistic and rhetorical strategies common to most of his topical
references. Stravinsky deploys topics: i) in deracinated contexts, displaced from their
natural stylistic, geographic and semiotic homes; ii) in dysphoric states, confronting
Monelle's assertion that topics are prototypically euphoric signifiers built on a
culturally mediated separation of signifier and signified; and iii) through dialogised
utterances akin to Hatten's notion of 'the troping of topics'.

Focussing on close readings of Stravinsky's music theatre and concert repertoire, this
paper builds on Monelle's discussion of 'apodeitic complicity' - evidenced here in the
relationship elicited between Stravinsky's referential signs and listener responses to
them - and highlights what (following Hatten) can be read as Stravinsky's 'stylistically
and strategically marked' deployment of genres as surrogate stylistic topics (e.g.
chorale, quartet, concerto etc.). This latter rhetorical conceit comprises a twentieth-
century analogue of the eighteenth-century use of dance forms (e.g. minuet, musette
etc.) both as self-contained genres ('forms') and as fleeting referential topics ('styles')
operating across a variety of genres; a distinction noted by Ratner and Agawu. In this
respect, Stravinsky's music both presents and problematises 'new', emergent musical
topics in the Western European repertoire of the last two centuries. A Monellean
semiotic reading of Stravinsky’s musical topics thus offers vital hermeneutic and
historicist keys to understanding their wild and beguiled natures, leaving us
bewitched, bothered and bewildered no more.

1. TOPICS AND CONVENTION

1.1. Topics as familiar, intertextual, commonplaces of style

Ratner described musical topics as ‘commonplaces of style’.[1] Allenbrook referred to
the inbuilt ‘intertextuality of the classical style’.[2] As such descriptions attest, ‘referential
signs’[3] are prototypically grounded on conventional signifiers. They have an inbuilt
tendency to behave themselves. Their musical life blood courses only when they evoke in
collective listeners a sense of interconnected similarity: of hearing again in a musical moment
an instance of something stylistically familiar enough to activate a ready-made, learned
cultural response. The referential signs of musical topics thus present a kind of semi-
automatic hermeneutic tool for comprehending what Monelle calls 'the sense of music'.[4]

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Hearing the difference or uniqueness of any particular topical reference, though vital, is
necessarily a secondary interpretative process, possible only when one's perceptual frame of
reference has first been securely cued by the familiar gestures and syntactic parameters of the
recognizable, governing topic. In this respect all topic readings participate to a degree in
what Monelle terms acts of apodeitic complicity:[5] the drawing of a generalised inference (a
topic or 'type') from a particular instance (a 'token') that displays the recognisable syntactic
hallmarks of a stylistic-semantic idea we accept at face value. Topical references may
subsequently be prototypical, stereotypical or even atypical[6] to varying degrees but it is rare
for topical references to challenge the topos they invoke through defamiliarisation devices
that bring into question the very commonalities and intertexts on which they are built.

1.2. Stravinsky’s aesthetic defamiliarisation

Defamiliarisation (also known as alienation), however, is the default rhetorical gambit of
Stravinsky's musical language.[7] Across his Russian, neoclassical and serial works, he has
made a well-documented career calling card of aesthetic distancing devices in most of his
musical output. Commentators have tended to focus largely on ('pure') signs of
defamiliarisation manifest in Stravinsky's musical syntax, highlighting moments of
'ungrammatically' evident in techniques such as polyrhythm,[8] polychordality and 'wrong-
note' neoclassic harmony;[9] even dialogised genres (e.g. the use of symphony and sonata
forms that question the formal conventions they simultaneously evoke).[10] Less well-
documented, however, are discussions of the composer's ('referential') signs of stylistic
ungrammatically: the simultaneous evocation of, and distancing from, topical references.[11]
This is perhaps to be expected given the composer's equally well-documented anti-
expressive aesthetic ideology.[12] Why look for referential signs (behaving or misbehaving)
in music constructed by one who advocated that music was 'essentially powerless to express
anything at all'?[13] Yet Stravinsky's music participates in rhetorical strategies of stylistic
defamiliarisation just as much as it does syntactic. To allude to the lyrics of a famous 1940s
Rodgers and Hart song, one can talk of the simultaneously 'wild' (critiquing) and 'beguiling'
(evoking) nature of his topical references. Expressively evocative and enigmatic in equal
measure, they 'bewitch, bother and bewilder' when subjected to music semiotic readings.
Building on Monelle's insights into musical topoi, this paper thus considers three common
rhetorical strategies through which Stravinsky's topical references characteristically encode
elements of stylistic ungrammatically. With a shamelessly contrived alliterative allusion to
that same Rodgers and Hart song, these three strategies can be summarised as the
'deracinated, dysphoric and dialogised' play of Stravinsky's wild and beguiling referential
signs.

2. STRAVINSKY’S DERACINATED, DYSPHORIC AND DIALOGISED TOPICS

2.1. Deracinated topics

The deracinated topic, as the term suggests, is one that is somehow uprooted or displaced
from its natural locale or geography. Here one recalls Ratner's historicising trichotomy of
musical topoi as signifiers of different levels of nobility (from high to low style), specificity
(from Turkish march to generic march style) and locale (from the battlefield to the
ballroom).[14] One also recalls Monelle's important de-historicising caveat (pace Ratner) of
the separation of signifiers from signifieds: the pastoral musette of art music is an ideological
evocation of an imagined bucolic repose bearing little or no resemblance to any practical
sonic tools of shepherding ever heard in the countryside (just as the hunting and military
musical topoi bare scant resemblance to anything ever sounded on horseback chase or in

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battlefield combat).[15] While Ratner is right to suggest that many topics correlate to
specific locales or geographies, Monelle's important historical work (aptly described by
Spitzer as 'out-historicising the historians'[16]) shows that all musical topoi are to a degree
deracinated from the locales or geographies they evoke. Yet, while such is to be expected of
any representation (be it in visual, literary or musical art) that is at heart a stylised ideological
conceit, Stravinsky has a tendency to willfully deracinate his musical topics a degree further
still.

2.1.1. Pastoralism in Oedipus Rex

Take for example his two relatively large scale operas, Oedipus Rex and The Rake's
Progress. Master-classes both in syntactic and stylistic distancing devices, they are replete in
examples of what we might term the 'stylistic', ‘temporal’ and 'geographic' deracination of
topics. Staying with the example of the pastoral topic, the Shepherd's aria in Act 2 of
Oedipus Rex presents a simple example of a geographically and temporally deracinated
topic.[17] Among its other pastoral signifiers (the pseudo-Siciliano compound time signature
and dotted-rhythm lilt) is heard a prototypical ostinato drone bass, not of anything endemic to
Greece (Ancient or modern), befitting the narrative of Sophocles's tragedy, but of a ranz des
vaches:[18] an Alpine horn drone characteristic of Swiss Herdsmen–doubtless something
Stravinsky heard while exiled in Switzerland between 1914 and 1920; a few years before
completing his opera-oratorio in 1926. Here, then, Stravinsky employs an off-the-peg
musical topic willfully deracinated by time and place from contemporary Alpine Switzerland
to Ancient Greece.
The ranz des vaches is not so deracinated by instrument, however. It is rendered by two
bassoons acting as ‘surrogate stimuli’[19] for the more penetrative sound of the double-reed
instrument (the aulόs of ancient Greece) likely to have been used in shepherding. In this
respect, Stravinsky’s use of the pastoral topic is not only temporally and geographically
deracinated (while preserving a stylistic association with shepherding), but curiously
breeches Monelle’s caveat on the separation of signifiers and signifieds. Resisting the
historically inaccurate (but more evocative of pastoral Arcadia) pan-pipe/syrinx-inspired ‘soft
and caressing’ flutes (that Monelle reminds us Debussy and Mallarmé imagined in L’Après-
midi d’un Faune),[20] Stravinsky opts instead for the more authentic double-reed sound;
albeit one playing a drone from an altogether other time and place.

2.1.2. Pastoralism in The Rake’s Progress

Stylistic deracination by time and place forms the very fabric–perhaps even the
underlying metaphor–of Stravinsky’s other major opera, The Rake’s Progress. Its principle
concern too is with the pastoral,[21] less as an isolated, stylistic, referential topic in itself (the
opening ‘The woods are green’ duet and trio being the obvious exception), more as an
allegory of ‘a lost pastoral’, indicative of the ‘impossibility of return’ to a state of bliss: be it
the idyllic countryside after the shallow machinations of London city (as suggested in the
diegesis of the opera) or, as Wiebe argues, to the very (meta-narrative) conventions of opera
itself.[22] By the 1950s those conventions and that genre were ‘adjudged by all respected
circles to be long since dead’, leaving Stravinsky and Auden (themselves both deracinated
from their cultural homelands in Los Angeles in the 1940s) to effectively (re)construct a set-
piece opera, picking over the ‘detritus of some other time and place’ to which no genuine
return could be made.
The result is an entire opera teeming with allusive (topical/genre) and explicit (quotations)
referential signs deracinated from their natural time and place; synthetic by their very nature.

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Stravinsky seems to employ explicit quotation from this operatic ‘detritus’ to draw dramatic
parallels more than rely on general, allusive topical references. Tom and Anne’s Act II,
scene 2 ‘discovery duet’ (‘Anne! Here!’), for example, is voiced through a comparable
‘discovery duet’ between Gilda and Rigoletto in Act II of Verdi’s Rigoletto (‘Signori in essa
è tutta la mia famiglia’). Here Rigoletto discovers that Gilda was seduced by the Duke, while
Anne discovers that Tom has been seduced by the attractions of London.[23] Continuing the
theme, Tom’s Act I, scene 2, ‘Love, too frequently betrayed’ cavatina, complete with
answering Prostitutes’ chorus, is modeled closely on the Act I, scene 5 (quasi-pastoral)
quintet, ‘Di scrivermi ogni giorno’ of Mozart’s Così fan tutte. Here both numbers are
concerned with the topic of love’s potential betrayal and, as Wiebe observes, both resonate a
‘duplicity’ which is not reflected in the beauty of the music.[24]

2.1.3. Personified quotation and characteristic topic of lament in Oedipus Rex

This use of explicit quotation (what we might term tropes of prosopopoeia for their
personification of another voice) over more characteristic, allusive musical topoi (what we
might term tropes of ethopoeia for their more general evocation of stylistic traits)[25] is itself
a hallmark of Stravinsky’s aesthetic defamiliarisation. A more sharply attuned referential
sign, quotation exhibits more stylistic precision than that typically found in conventional
musical topoi; a precision that Stravinsky uses as much to dialogise his music as to draw
dramatic parallels. Returning momentarily to Oedipus Rex, consider the example of the Act I
aria, ‘Invidia fortunam odit’, in which Oedipus boastfully accuses Creon and Tiresias of envy
and conspiracy explicitly set to the pianto-(topic of lament)-ridden music[26] of the ‘Qui
Mariam absolvisti’ from the Ingemisco of the Dies Iræ of Verdi’s Messa da Requiem: a
stylistic and semantic cross-matching of Verdi’s penitential guilt with Oedipus’s egotistical,
boastful, accusative reassertion of innocence.[27] Here, in contrast to the personified tropes
of The Rake’s Progress, Stravinsky appears to call on (the prosopopoeia of) explicit
quotation–here infused with (the ethopoeia of) the pianto topic of lament)–more to invoke a
‘dissonant’, dialogised referential sign than a resonant dramatic parallel. (As such, it
constitutes an example of Stravinsky’s third type of stylistic ungrammatically discussed
below.) Regardless of their relative degrees of stylistic/semantic-dramatic resonance or
dialogism, these ‘operatic’ referential signs, however, remain deracinated in time and place.
They are resonances or traces of what Stravinsky termed ‘disjecta membra’;[28] in this case
from an ‘Italian’ operatic tradition long since wrecked.

2.2. Dysphoric topics

If Stravinsky’s use of deracinated topics and quotations generates wild and beguiling
musical signs primarily from a temporal, geographic and sometimes stylistic displacement of
referential signs, his second strategy, the use of referential signs in dysphoric states, comes
more from the simple act of breaching the convention for topics to sound prototypically in
euphoric states. Monelle states this convention clearly with examples from the noble horse
topic (the euphoric male knight astride a galloping destrier vs. the dysphoric witch upon her
goat or broomstick)[29] and the hunt (the euphoric heroic parforce hunt of the Middle Ages
vs. the dysphoric chasse aux toiles with its ignoble, squalid encircled herding of a collective
group hunted en masse)–even going so far as to assert that ‘the dysphoric aspects of the
chasse aux toiles are nowhere present in the musical topic’.[30] I have elsewhere essayed
how Stravinsky’s Jeu du Rapt section of The Rite of Spring appears to contravene Monelle’s
assertion, paradoxically celebrating the dysphoric horn calls of the cornet de chasse (simple
rhythmic horn calls spanning a fourth in imitation of the primarily rhythmic early hunting
horns) depicting in both choreography and music the ritual abduction of multiple female

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quarry taken from a collective pool by encircling male hunters–whose threatening, thrusting,
stamping gestures synchronise to the rhythm of the calls.[31] Neither in music nor balletic
action does Stravinsky’s hunt in any way resemble the imagined noble ideals of the parforce
hunt with its evocative melodic horn calls. The dysphoria here is again in part, the result of
Stravinsky’s failure to follow the classical topic convention of separating signifiers from
signifieds (recoursing to stark rhythmic calls resembling those practical enough to have
sounded during a hunt in place of the more imagined ideal of melodic calls possible only on
instruments impractical for horseback hunting). Ultimately, however, it is the musico-
choreographic celebration of the terror of the chasse aux toiles over the nobility of the heroic
parforce hunt of a single quarry; a terror gendered here as threatening collective male power
exerted on encircled, herded females as perhaps befits Stravinsky, Roerich and Nijinsky’s
portrayal of this ritualised pagan-time Khorovod game of abduction facilitating cross-tribal
breeding.[32]

2.3. Dialogised topics

The third common strategy of Stravinsky’s use of referential signs, their dialogised
deployment, has already been previewed above in the stylistic-semantic cross-matching of
Oedipus’s assertive ‘Invidia fortunam odit’ aria with the pianto-lament of Verdi’s ‘Qui
Mariam absolvisti’. Here Stravinsky presents a classic example of what, in literary theory,
Bakhtin terms ‘double-voicing’:[33] the simultaneous bifurcation of two opposed voices (e.g.
Stravinsky-Verdi; neoclassic-melodramatic; modernist-Romantic; assertive-supplicating;
egotistic-lamentation) in a single musical utterance. The concept is not at all dissimilar to
Hatten’s notion of the ‘troping of topics’[34] where two or more active topoi suffuse in a
given musical moment. While Oedipus’s aria draws on both prosopopoeitic (quotation) and
ethopoeitic (topoi) for its referential signs, Hatten’s concept is geared more towards the
ethopoeitic double-voicing of musical topics.
For an example of this, one has only to return to the Shepherd’s aria of that same opera-
oratorio (discussed above as an example of a deracinated topic). As I have elsewhere noted,
the pastoralism of that ranz des vaches bass drone and lilting Siciliano melody is in fact
‘suffused (troped) with the lament of the weeping pianto, amplified by its “infinity of
laments” figure, the passus duriusculus (descending minor seconds over a fourth)’ all
rendered in a relatively unambiguous Bb minor.[35] The Shepherd’s aria is therefore not just
deracinated but also dialogised as a pastoral-lament with referential signs pulling in both
topical directions. In this regard the aria can also be seen as dysphoric, certainly in relation to
the more euphoric pastoralism depicted in Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony or indeed the
opening pastoral duet and trio of The Rake’s Progress discussed above. This simple aria thus
reveals on closer hermeneutic probing all three of Stravinsky’s strategies of stylistic
‘ungrammatically’ at play. It presents a simultaneously deracinated, dysphoric and
dialogised topical reference par excellence precisely because these ‘wild’ elements of stylistic
deviance that contravene the prototypical conventions of topical discourse remain so
beguiling: they ‘amuse, charm and delight’ as much as they ‘deceive, distract and divert’.

3. INSTRUMENTAL GENRES AS TOPICS

By way of conclusion, I present one brief and final extension to this discussion of
Stravinsky’s tripartite strategies for deploying referential signs marked by their
ungrammatically. In addition to the ethopoeitic evocation of general, stylistic topics and the
prosopopoeitic personification of particular musical quotation, Stravinsky has one further
prominent tool of extroversive semiosis: the tendency to employ genres as language styles

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within a given work; language styles which–as with his topical and quotational signs–carry
with them associative expressive meanings and ideologies. The technique is by no means
unique to Stravinsky. Agawu clearly articulates that many classical topoi exist both as
language styles and as independent genres (Baroque and Classical dance forms such as the
sarabande, gavotte, minuet etc. immediately spring to mind).[36] Chorales are another
Baroque genre that has migrated to the status of musical topoi–one replete with associations
of religiosity and congregational univocality. They figure prominently in Stravinsky’s music
both as discrete genres (the Symphonies of Wind Instruments’ isolated chorale in memoriam
for Debussy, the final piece of the Three Pieces for String Quartet etc.) and as passing
stylistic topics (the curtain rise of Petrushka [Figures 7-11] etc.); both prone to elements of
syntactic and stylistic ungrammatically (e.g. parallel/conjunct motion, wide chordal spacing
etc. in addition to the trademark deracinated, dysphoric and dialogised deployment).
The most common strategy employed by Stravinsky, however, is to dialogise one genre
against its typical language style. While Cone, Straus and Cross have all commented on
Stravinsky’s dialogised use of sonata form genres, their observations are confined largely to
matters of syntax (e.g. the tendency of a leading-note to act as a surrogate/synthetic tonic or
the superimposition of an arch form over a sonata form).[37] Stravinsky’s dialogised use of
genre as a language style in the Bakhtinian sense, however, is arguably more prominent as a
rhetorical trope. This can occur in one of two prominent ways. As I have argued elsewhere,
the middle piece of Stravinsky’s Three Pieces for String Quartet relies on the use of absent or
negated referential signifiers of prototypical string quartet textures, phrasing and gestures to
such an over-coded degree that the work can be read as an allotropic quartet: existing
simultaneously as both a quartet and anti-quartet (the lyrical, legato, teleologically-phrased
quartet transformed into a repetitive, percussive machine of seemingly haphazard gestures
expunging all traces of theme from the scene).[38]
While this Turanian period[39] use of genre codes as a referential sign relies largely on
absent or negated signifiers, Stravinsky’s hallmark neoclassic genre relies more heavily on
dialogising present signifiers of two or more conflated (‘troped’) genres. The opening of the
Symphony of Psalms is an excellent example of this rhetorical gambit.[40] Obliterating the
penitential, supplicating language style one might expect to accompany Psalm 38, v. 13-14,
the orchestra fires off with a virtuosic language style more befitting a piano etude replete with
rapid passage work, fistfuls of chords and extreme registers. When the anticipated subdued
lyrical language style finally appears, it is presented in a sequence of ‘compound utterances
of dual styles’ troped or double-voiced ‘in self-contradictory opposition with one another
(medieval plainchant penitence vs. eighteenth/nineteenth-century piano etude virtuosity)’.

Whether by topical reference, explicit quotation or genre styles, Stravinsky’s use of

referential signifiers thus bewitch, bother and bewilder in equal measure. They display a
tendency to subvert or play with the conventional rules of topics and musical signification as
outlined by Monelle’s compelling semiotic work. By deploying these referential signs in
deracinated, dysphoric and dialogised forms, Stravinsky compounds not only the syntax, but
also the sense of music.

References

[1] Ratner, L. G. 1980. Classic music: expression, form and style, New York, Schirmer
books.

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[2] Allanbrook, W. J. 1996. 'To serve the private pleasure': expression and form in the
string quartets. Wolfgang Amadè Mozart: Essays on His Life and His Music. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, p.134.

[3] The distinction between the extroversive semiosis of ‘referential signs’ and their
introversive ‘pure sign’ counterpart is drawn in Agawu, V. K. 1991. Playing with signs: a
semiotic interpretation of classical music, Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press.
For a further discussion of this distinction see McKay, N. P. 2007a. On topics today.
Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie, 4, pp. 159-183.

[4] Monelle, R. 2000. The sense of music: semiotic essays, Princeton, New Jersey,
Princeton University Press.

[5] Ibid, p.134.

[6] For a discussion of these different types of ‘typicality’, see Lakoff, G. 1990. Women,
fire, and dangerous things: what categories reveal about the mind, Chicago and London, The
University of Chicago Press.

[7] See for example Adorno, T. 1973. Philosophy of modern music, London, Sheed &
Ward; Albright, D. 1989. Stravinsky: the music box and the nightingale, New York, Gordon
and Breach; Bernstein, L. 1976. The unanswered question: six talks at Harvard, Cambridge,
Massachusetts and London, England, Harvard University Press; Walsh, S. 1993. Stravinsky:
Oedipus Rex, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press; Watkins, G. 1994. Pyramids at the
Louvre: music, culture, and collage from Stravinsky to the postmodernists, Harvard, The
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

[8] Bernstein, L. 1976; Boulez, P. 1991. Stocktakings from an apprenticeship, Oxford,

Clarendon.

[9] Andriessen, L. & Schönberger, E. 1989. The apollonian clockwork on Stravinsky,

Oxford, Oxford University Press; Bernstein, L. 1976.

[10] Cross, J. 1998. The Stravinsky legacy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press;
Kielian-Gilbert, M. 1991. Stravinsky's contrasts: contradiction and discontinuity in his
neoclassical music. Journal of musicology, IX, 448-480; Straus, J. N. 1990. Remaking the
past: musical modernism and the influence of the tonal tradition, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard
University Press; Straus, J. N. 1987. Sonata form in Stravinsky, in Haimo, E. & Johnson, P.
(eds.) Stravinsky retrospectives. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press; Hyde,
M. 2003. Stravinsky's neoclassicism, in Cross, J. (ed.) The Cambridge companion to
Stravinsky. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[11] While Straus has articulated a theory of what he terms musical topics operating in
Stravinsky’s music (see Straus, J. N. 2001. Stravinsky's late music, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, pp.183-248), I have elsewhere critiqued this application of so-called topic
theory for confusing what might be termed a private idiolect of secret (largely syntactic)
codes with the broader commonalities (and cross-composer intertextuality) of style required
of conventional referential topics. See McKay, N. P. 2009. Ethnic cleansing, anxious
influence and secret codes: a semiotician's guide to Stravinsky's musicological afterlife and

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its archaeological contra-factum, in Tarasti, E. (ed.) Before and after music: acta semiotica
Fennica. Helsinki: The international semiotics institute.

[12] Stravinsky, I. 1990. An autobiography (1903-1934), London, Marion Boyars

Publishers Ltd, p.53; Stravinsky, I. 1994. Poetics of music in the form of six lessons, Harvard,
Harvard University Press, pp.80-81; Stravinsky, I. 1924. Some ideas about my Octuor. The
Arts. Brooklyn, pp.4-6.

[13] Stravinsky, I. 1990, p.53.

[14] Ratner, L. G. 1991. Topical content in Mozart's keyboard sonatas. Early music, 19,
pp. 615-619.

[15] Monelle, R. 2006. The musical topic: hunt, military and pastoral, Bloomington,
Indiana University Press, pp.35, 207-208,

[16] Spitzer, M. 2002. Review: The sense of music: semiotic essays by Raymond
Monelle. Music & Letters, 83, 506-9.

[17] For a fuller discussion of this example, see McKay, N. 2012. Dysphoric states:
Stravinsky's topics - huntsmen, soldiers and shepherds, in Sheinberg, E. (ed.) Music
semiotics: a network of significations in honour and memory of Raymond Monelle. Farnham:
Ashgate.

[18] Walsh, S. 1993, pp.52-53.

[19] Eco, U. 2000. Kant and the platypus, London, Vintage, p.356.

[20] Monelle, R. 2006, pp.207-208.

[21] See for example Chew, G. 1993. Pastoral and neoclassicism: a reinterpretation of
Auden's and Stravinsky's Rake's Progress. Cambridge opera journal, 5, pp.239-263; Straus,
J. N. 1991. The progress of a motive in Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress. The journal of
musicology, 9, pp.165-185.

[22] Wiebe, H. 2009. The Rake's Progress as Opera Museum. Opera Quarterly, 25, pp.6-
27.
[23] For a discussion of this intertextual reference see Cantoni, A. 1994. Verdi e
Stravinskij. Studi Verdiani, 10, 127-54; McKay, N. 2001. Oedipus's Requiem: Verdi's 'voice'
in Stravinsky, in Seat, F. D., Marvin, R. M. & Marcia, M. (eds.) Verdi 2001, Firenze: L. S.
Olschki, pp.411-441.

[24] Wiebe, H. 2009, p.18.

[25] For definitions of prosopopoeia and ethopoeia, see Lanham, R. A. 1991. A handlist
of rhetorical terms, Berkeley, University of California Press.

[26] For a discussion of the pianto topic of lament, see Monelle, R. 2000, pp.66-76.

[27] For a detailed discussion of this dialogised reference to Verdi see McKay, N. 2001.

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[28] Stravinsky, I. & Craft, R. 1968. Dialogues and a diary, London, Faber, p.129.

[29] Monelle, R. 2000, pp.62-63.

[30] Monelle, R. 2006, p.95.

[31] McKay, N. 2012.

[32] Taruskin, R. 1996. Stravinsky and the Russian traditions: a biography of the works
through "Mavra", Oxford, Oxford University Press, p.873

[33] See Korsyn, K. 1999. Beyond privileged contexts: intertextuality, influence and
dialogue, in Cook, N. & Everist, M. (eds.) Rethinking Music. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, pp.55-72; McKay, N. P. 2007b. "One for all and all for one": voicing in Stravinsky's
music theatre. The Journal of Music and Meaning [Online], 5.

[34] Hatten, R. S. 2004. Interpreting musical gestures, topics, and tropes: Mozart,
Beethoven, Schubert, Bloomington, Ind., Indiana University Press, pp.68-89.

[35] McKay, N. 2012. For a discussion of the pianto and passus duriussculus topoi see
Monelle, R. 2000, pp.66-76.

[36] Agawu, V. K. 1991, p.32.

[37] Cone, E. T. 1963. The uses of convention: Stravinsky and his models, in Lang, P. H.
(ed.) Stravinsky: a new appraisal of his work. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc,
Cross, J. 1998; Straus, J. N. 1987.

[38] McKay, N. P. 2003. Igor's eccentric gestures: a semiotic decoding of Stravinsky's

syntax with markedness theory, in Tarasti, E. (ed.) Musical semiotics revisited: Acta
semiotica Fennica. Helsinki: The international semiotics institute.

[39] Taruskin, R. 1996, p.1167.

[40] For a detailed discussion of this example see McKay, N. P. 2007b.

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON M USIC S EMIOTICS IN M EMORY OF RAYMOND M ONELLE

THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH, 2012