Avant (Dec 2013)
Stravinsky and Others
Abstract
This paper revisits an old question that neither I nor anyone has been able to answer very well, namely, why is it that nineteenth century composers, who had fairly easy access to nonwestern musics in notation, rarely quoted them? But by the early twentieth century, such quotations became quite common. This article argues that the rise of finance capital, as theorized by Rudolf Hilferding in the early twentieth century, marked the ascendance of exchange value over use value. As a rise of the ideologies accompanying finance capital, composers, and everyone else, began to regard other musics, other sounds—other objects—as something that could be exchanged. This process is exceptionally clear in works by Igor Stravinsky such as Le Sacre du printemps, which, while drawing on nineteenth century nationalistic impulses, also shows a relationship to other musics, appropriated as raw material. The new ideology of exchangeability introduced by the rise of finance capital continued through musique concrète in the 1940s and into the rise of digital sampling in the 1980s and after.
