USA

In the earlier part of the 20th century the USA saw the emergence of a young generation of experimental composers with their own distinctive 'American' style. Battling against the largely conservative European-dominated repertoire of the concert hall, Charles Ives, Carl Ruggles and Henry Cowell produced avant-garde music (exploring tone clusters, bitonality, juxtaposed contrasting strands and new ways of playing instruments) without chasing commercial success. In 1927, financed by Ives's flourishing insurance business, Cowell started the periodical New Music in which he published scores by radical composers from the USA and beyond. At the same time, jazz now appeared regularly in 'art music' from George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue (1924) and other popular music reached wide audiences via the phonograph and radio, which replaced the sheet-music song-pluggers of Tin Pan Alley as conduits. The first feature-length movie with music (Al Jonson in The Jazz Singer) smashed box-office records in 1927, as did the earliest all-talking film (The Lights of New York) the following year. In 1928 Walt Disney's Steamboat Willie (featuring Mickey Mouse) led the way for animated cartoons with music, words and sound effects.

Despite America's struggle throughout the Depression years the country was still a promising proposition for composers displaced compulsorily or voluntarily by the rise of Nazism during the 1930s. The USA, which was beginning to emerge as a leading power, was a natural choice for Stravinsky in 1939; having just lost a daughter and then his wife from tuberculosis he was more than ready to make a fresh start with his long-term lover and soon-to-be second wife Vera, far away from political events in Europe that threatened millions and, perhaps more importantly for him, his composing routine. In the early 1940s, after failing to have his fears that America might dissolve into civil war assuaged, his instinctive response was 'But where will I go?'.

Having started to discover its own musical voice, the USA suddenly found itself custodian of Europe's leading composers. Along with Stravinsky in the broadly tonal (neo-classical/folk-inspired) group came Béla Bartók and Paul Hindemith, while Arnold Schoenberg, living not far from Stravinsky in California, continued his serialist path. Given the choice, post-war concert promoters veered towards the more approachable and tuneful music of Stravinsky and the like, with American composers such as Aaron Copland and Samuel Barber finding similar acceptance. More aggressively intellectual music rarely secured more than one or two performances and soon became relegated to academic institutions where unashamed esoterics such as composer and mathematician Milton Babbitt pushed the techniques of Schoenberg and the late Webern into 'total serialism'. Academia soon became a home for many composers (Schoenberg at UCLA, Hindemith at Yale). Stravinsky accepted Harvard University's offer of six lectures and some informal teaching as part of the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship but he failed to attract a regular post. Instead, moving in a world of émigrés he cultivated working relationships with other ex-patriot Russians (conductor Serge Koussevitsky and choreographer George Balanchine) until, with the help of right-hand man Robert Craft, he felt able to navigate the English-speaking world.

Stravinsky absorbed some of what America had to offer slowly and in his own limited way, borrowing from jazz in his Ebony Concerto (1945) and venturing into English for The Rake's Progress (1951). His many attempts to compose for films ended in failure (frustrating and humiliating for someone who spent nearly thirty years living in Hollywood), although Disney used an assemblage from The Rite of Spring in Fantasia (1940, with the ubiquitous Mickey Mouse again). The death of John F Kennedy, whose company Stravinsky much enjoyed at a White House dinner a year before the assassination, elicited from him a moving Elegy (1964).

In many ways Schoenberg's death in 1951 freed Stravinsky to experiment with serialism in a way that was never possible before, leading to the intense concentration and spareness of his later works (Agon and Threni, 1957-8). It also broadly coincided with the extreme distillation of John Cage's 'silent' 4'33" (1952), which in turn was influenced by the self-explanatory 'white paintings' of his friend and colleague Robert Rauschenberg, whose work elegantly traced the transition from 'abstract expressionism' to 'pop art' in America.

Although technology profoundly shaped music during the 20th century, Stravinsky, who experimented in so many disciplines, was not tempted by tape or electronic music. The USSR's launching of Sputnik during the Cold War in 1957 sparked a Russo-American 'space race' that spawned a rush of funding for technological projects, among then musical ones (Lejaren Hiller's computer-generated Illiac Suite for String Quartet was created that same year at the University of Illinois), but by then Stravinsky was obsessed with religion and with Venice, which became in death his final resting place.

© Madeleine Ladell/BBC

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