vi, 116 leaves : ill., music ; 28 cm. Typescript (Photocopy) Bibliography: leaves 115-116.
In the summer of 1912, while completing the orchestration for The Rite of Spring, Stravinsky read an anthology of Japanese
poetry (translated into Russian by A. Brandta), about which he writes, "The impression which they made on me was exactly like that made by Japanese paintings and engravings. The graphic solution of problems of perspective and space shown by their art incited me to find something analogous in music." From the volume he selected three haiku, or short Japanese poems usually referring to one of the seasons of the year and containing a fixed number of syllables. The resulting musical
' settings were published as the Three Japanese Lyrics (1912-13), and the names of the three poets were used as the individual song titles: "Akahito", "Mazatsumi" and "Tsaraiuki". Each of the three songs was composed in two versions: "Akahito'' and "Mazatsumi" were first written for soprano and piano, then transcribed shortly thereafter for soprano and chamber orchestra (piano, string quartet, piccolo, flute, clarinet and bass clarinet): the piano and orchestral versions of the third song,"Tsaraiuki", are both dated January 9-22, 1913. The exact nature of this musical language is extremely difficult to define, as evidenced by the widely divergent theories on pitch organization in Stravinsky's music. And, while to my knowledge there has been no previous analytical work done on the Japanese songs, there exists a wealth of theoretical literature on The Rite of Spring and on Stravinsky's pre-serial works in general. In the following discussion, I will summarize the theoretical literature on Stravinsky's pre-serial compositions, focusing on those issues which relate directly to the analysis of the Japanese songs.
