Talk:Igor Stravinsky/Archive 3

Archive 1

Archive 2

Archive 3

Two Honours sections

Please merge the two Honours sections together. Aminabzz (talk) 00:29, 28 March 2020 (UTC)

Hello, I merged it into a 'legacy' section. Let me know if there are still issues you see. ‡ Єl Cid of Valencia ^talk 16:35, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

I like the two subsections for "Awards" and "Honours". However Debussy's 1915 dedication of a score to Stravinsky seems odd under the heading "Legacy".—Jerome Kohl (talk) 01:06, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

I agree with Jerome Kohl on the Debussy point. Interesting information, but if it's to go in the article, I think there's likely another, better location. Noahfgodard (talk) 02:00, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

I am at a loss to suggest a better location. In the meantime, I have added another score dedicated to Stravinsky.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 05:59, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

• I have changed the main Heading to "Honours" and changed the sub-heading to "Orders." Upon re-reading the above concerns, I realize that I had misread them earlier - I thought the concern was in regard to the 'legacy' title. In any case, hopefully my change was an improvement, and if not, feel free to change. Best! ‡ Єl Cid of Valencia ^talk 18:33, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

Orchestration shorthand?

In the Innovation and influence section of the article, the instrumentations of the Firebird, Petrushka, and the Rite of Spring are written out. I fully support their being there, as I think the section is an interesting and valuable look into Stravinsky's orchestration. That being said, they're a bit unwieldy in paragraph form. Should we use standard shorthand instead, or is it worth it to write the instrumentations out fully in words, so that people who aren't familiar with orchestration shorthand can understand it more easily? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Noahfgodard (talk • contribs) 00:18, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

It seems to me that any of the shorthand notation methods is going to make it more difficult for the general reader. What we are looking at, of course, is Stravinsky's scoring. His orchestration is a far more interesting subject, but too complex to go into here.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 01:32, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

Ah, thank you for the correction, Jerome Kohl - my mistake. And yes, I think you're right. Noahfgodard (talk) 18:33, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

Russian-French-American

I understand the reason for referring to stravinsky as a Russian-French-American composer, but I don't think it reads particularly well. Would it be better to refer to him simply as a Russian composer and then note that he later lived in both France and the United States? Noahfgodard (talk) 20:52, 19 May 2020 (UTC)

I thought there had been a discussion of this in the past, with that solution being agreed on, but I have searched this Talk page and its archive and found nothing.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 21:13, 19 May 2020 (UTC)

He was a Russian composer - who cares where he lived at various times or what citizenship(s) he held in this respect! 50.111.34.214 (talk) 06:19, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Pianist/Conductor

Would it not be useful to have separate sub-headings to document his achievements as a pianist and conductor? He is, obviously, identified as a composer but both these aspects of his life are important. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A00:23C7:5B95:FA01:D4D7:1208:5984:4E8D (talk) 14:30, 27 February 2022 (UTC)

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Early life/Interest in ballets

In the section on early life, there is a peculiar sentence: "At around eight years old, he attended a performance of Tchaikovsky's ballet The Sleeping Beauty at the Mariinsky Theatre, which began a lifelong interest in ballets and the composer himself." To me, it would seem that the sentence should end with "interest in ballets". What is meant by "and the composer himself"? Does it mean that his interest in composition also started on this occasion? It would be good if an expert on the topic could clarify this sentence. KaldeFakta68 (talk) 22:04, 1 July 2022 (UTC)

GAN

Hey everyone, I've gone through the article and fixed it for a GAN. If there's anything that you think should be fixed, I'm here to do anything I can. Thanks! MyCatIsAChonk (talk) 02:23, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

The current music section should be immensely larger than it currently is (at least 2–3 times), particularly given the enormous literature written on Stravinsky. The lead is also hugely unsatisfactory, including practically no biographical information. I recommend you take a look at FA/GA composer articles (Gustav Mahler's article is a great example). Still quite a bit of work needed, I'm afraid. Aza24 (talk) 02:39, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

GA Review

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

This review is transcluded from Talk:Igor Stravinsky/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Chiswick Chap (talk · contribs) 15:50, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

Well, this is a detailed, informative, well-structured and well-cited article so I only have a few comments, bordering on suggestions at times. Chiswick Chap (talk) 15:50, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

Comments

• I'm not generally too keen on infoboxes but given the length of this article, an {{infobox artist}} would seem sensible.
  • Added
• In "Innovation and influence", you begin 'Stravinsky has been called "one of music's truly epochal innovators"'. If quoting directly, probably best to attribute to the author if they're actually notable; if it's just the day's editor at AllMusic then why are we quoting them at all? In fact, why are we citing AllMusic at all, given the number of books about S.?
  • Replaced with quotes from better sources.
• I note that File:The Rite of Spring manuscript.jpg is PD in the USA, so we can freely use it here. Maybe a short excerpt of the sheet music for the extremely distinctive The Rite of Spring would be in order in this article, as it is what made him lastingly famous. The obvious passage would be the Jeu de Rapt: a small bit of the relevant sheet of music illustrating the driving rhythm would I think look very striking. I expect you could include a small embedded playable file of the music, too, if you wanted.
  • Looking at the article for The Rite and in the commons, it seems that there's no recordings. There are some of the sheet music (like this one) but I'm having trouble finding a good place to put it considering I added the photo from the production as well. Thoughts?

You could use your small line of sheet music beside the text or centered Or use all or part of the manuscript file. On space, it's clearly relevant and justified. You could use a gallery for the photo and the sheet music nanuscript, suitably enlarged to be readable; or just |center|upright=2,5 the sheet music MS by itself, why not. You could also link to an external playable recording of a riff or two; if these are in copyright then the link has to be in a cited footnote, still useful.

• Thanks, I added a multiple image with the photo of the production and one of that bit from the score, as well as an EFN linking to a recording.

• That works well.

• Commons has good photographs of performances of Rite of Spring; for instance, File:Spring16 17 (26856034545).jpg or File:Spring16 11 (26822095346).jpg. You might consider including one, given how revolutionary the piece was back in 1913.
  • Added the second image you suggested
• In "Last major works", I don't see why the 1948 and 1962 images should be paired; the result is that the 1962 image is way too big, for a start.
  • Cut the image of Stravinsky in 1962 and replaced with a smaller image of the TIME cover
• The image in "Religion" is far too big also. The plain "|upright" parameter is all that's needed for sizing.
  • Fixed
• Ditto for the first image in "Reception".
  • Fixed
• "Final years and death": There is a lot of detail about being frail and sick, and a lot of detail about his death; I'm not sure this is really encyclopedic. Why do readers need to know that "In August 1967, Stravinsky was hospitalised in Hollywood for bleeding stomach ulcers and thrombosis which required a blood transfusion"? And so on. "He was hospitalised in April 1970 following a bout of pneumonia, which he successfully recovered from. Two months later, he travelled to Évian-les-Bains by Lake Geneva where he reunited with his eldest son Theodore and niece Xenia.[132]" seems like too much detail as well: why do readers need to know this? Maybe cut the last days down to a sentence or two. In fact, why not revise the whole section in this light. He was a composer, not a saint, and this is an encyclopedia, not a hagiography.
  • I do see your point, and I did remove some details from this section, but other FA's about composers like Claude Debussy, Hector Berlioz, Maurice Ravel, and Frédéric Chopin have quite a bit of detail (Chopin even gets an article about his health). If you still feel there is unnecessary detail when comparing to these articles, what do you think should be cut?
    • Not sure that WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS is much of an argument, but if you're happy with it now, that's fine.
      • Resolved
• Not sure why his grave should be illustrated, either.
  • Refer to above FA's, which all have photos of the composer's graves. Again, if you still feel it's unnecessary, it can be cut.
    • Yes.
      • Resolved
• The "Honours" section has a chunk of text not in a subsection, followed by the unbalanced subsection "Grammy Awards". It'd work better if you had something like "Distinctions", "Works dedicated to Stravinsky", and then the "Grammy Awards" as subsections.
  • Added headings and reordered

References

• Vlad 1978 has no Source.
  • Fixed
• Taruskin 1998 has no Source.
  • Fixed
• Stravinsky Craft 1963 has no Source.
  • Fixed
• Whiting 1943 has no Source.
  • Fixed
• Source Griffiths, Stravinsky, Craft, and Josipovici 1982 is not used.
  • Fixed
• Source Palmer 1982 is not used.
  • Fixed
• The Further Reading list is long: what are all these sources for if you're not using them? Some of them (like Cross 1999) are at least books by major publishers; but there are journal articles (Slim 2006); online journals that aren't online any more (?! --- Robinson 2004); 15-year-old articles in periodicals (Walsh 2007); half-published thingies on Academia.com (Floirat 2019); even ordinary newspaper and Time articles (Anonymous 1..4). Are these bits and bobs really justified?
  • I've cut a good bit of material from here and also reformatted them into their respective templates for consistency.

Chiswick Chap I think I've addressed everything here. If there are any other concerns, I'm happy to address them. Thanks for your review! MyCatIsAChonk (talk) 23:23, 9 March 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Shrinking reflist

Hi @Michael Bednarek, I see that you've reverted my edit where I replaced the {{refbegin}} and {{refend}} tags to shrink the references section, as well as converted the McFarland source to {{cite journal}}. I have changed the McFarland source back to {{wikicite}} as to match with all the other sources. Secondly, what was your reason for removing the tags that shrank the sources list? In my opinion, it makes it easier to read, and see it used on other articles (like Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel). Thanks for your concern about this article. MyCatIsAChonk (talk) 01:47, 24 March 2023 (UTC)

Refend and refbegin are standard for the vast majority of Wikipedia articles, so I don't know why Michael gone about reverting it. Aza24 (talk) 02:37, 24 March 2023 (UTC)

The font size of {{refbegin}} has been discussed previously. Editors who disagreed with the reduced font size, which once could be overridden, were told just not to use it. A reduced font size for short citations is much different from that for a bibliography, which requires more focussed reading. I can't see how a reduced font size makes for "easy readability"; quite the opposite I think.

The McFarland citation was deficient. Its title was slightly wrong, and it lacked a JSTOR identifier. As I was not sure how to add a JSTOR number into a free-fromat citation (before of after the ISBN?), I opted to use the appropriate template {{cite journal}}. On the wider question of {{wikicite}} vs media-specific templates: I think that {{wikicite}} is a crutch. I burdens the editor with formatting a citation by hand, and thus leads to inconsistencies. Each invocation also uses a few more nested templates which increases the article's load time and post-expand include size, which has led to problems for some articles (although that's unlikely to happen here). In short, I don't think that the use the generic template {{wikicite}} constitutes a specific citation style. Replacing it with media-specific citation templates will eliminate inconsistencies and create proper meta data. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 02:48, 24 March 2023 (UTC)

I can't really be bothered to argue about the refbegin matter any further, 99% of readers will ignore the references to begin with.

The archaic wikicites are definitely a net negative inclusion. I would agree with converting all the references and am happy to lend a hand (or perhaps split the tedious labor with someone) – Aza24 (talk) 02:53, 24 March 2023 (UTC)

@Aza24 and @Michael Bednarek: I'll let the (future) FAC decide upon the reflist matter. As for the use of Wikicite, I do agree that it's a rather inconsistent format; when I converted all the citations into sfns, all the sources already used Wikicite, and I wasn't sure if a consensus had been reached on using that template, so I just used it as well. Right now, I'm working on expanding "Music", but I would greatly appreciated it if you took on the task of converting the citations. MyCatIsAChonk (talk) 14:04, 24 March 2023 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: 20th-21st Century Art, Performance and Media

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 14 March 2023 and 28 April 2023. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): AllieMacHoffman (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by Ceiap (talk) 20:38, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

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• The Rite of Spring 1.jpg

Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. —Community Tech bot (talk) 15:53, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

De Bosset?

I had a question: is there any reason why Vera Stravinsky is referred to as "De Bosset" throughout the article, even in sections covering periods well into her marriage with IS? Walsh refers to her first as "Vera Sudeykina" then later simply as "Vera". Sitting next to my desk is a book entitled The Salon Album of Vera Sudeikin-Stravinsky; its book information page says that its subject is "Stravinsky, Vera". Maybe things have changed in the last few years, but I seem to recall she is generally referred to as "Vera Stravinsky", "Vera Sudeikina", or "Vera Sudeikin". According to WP:COMMONNAME, if any of those names are more often used to "De Bosset", then the article ought to be amended to reflect that. —CurryTime7-24 (talk) 01:42, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

Kiev and Ukrainian Ancestry

I see there have been multiple reverted edits regarding the spelling of Kiev/Kyiv. Firstly, the capital city of Ukraine is to be spelled Kiev in this article, as WP:KIEV states that for "unambiguously historical topics (e.g. Principality of Kiev)" the spelling should remain Kiev. The country of Saint Petersburg does not need to be clarified in the prose. Also, the location of Ustilug should be written as "modern-day Ukraine", since it was part of Russia during Stravinsky's youth. Last, there is no evidence that suggests he was of Ukrainian ancestry- please support it with citations if you wish to add this. MyCatIsAChonk (talk) (not me) (also not me) (still no) 14:48, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

You are correct - we shouldn't be using the spelling "Kyiv" until events after 1991, or even 1995. Regarding Stravinsky's Ukrainian ancestry, I'm not sure myself but you are right again - we need citations to reliable sources (and not partisan ones influenced by current geopolitical events). Antandrus (talk) 15:11, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

According to both Craft and Walsh, the origin of the Stravinsky family was Russian and Polish. The latter stresses that claims of his Ukrainian Cossack origins are "recent" (he also implies that they are nationalist in nature), but are disproven by the genealogical records kept by a member of the Strawinski family in Gdansk. See Walsh 1999, p. 6 and p. 552, n. 17.

The confusion about his ancestry may have to do with his first wife, Yekaterina, who was also his cousin. She was paternally descended from Ukrainian Cossacks. However, Stravinsky was related to her matrilineally, via the Kholodovsky family, which did not have ethnic Ukrainian ancestry, although some of its members had been appointed to official posts in the Ukraine by the Tsar. —CurryTime7-24 (talk) 19:26, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

Russia Empire

I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding something, but a number of users have attempted to change his place of birth in the infobox to "Russian Empire" rather than just "Russia". I believe it is correct to use Russia, as the Russian Empire is a political entity, while Russia is the place itself. Besides, I can't find many sources that state his place of birth as "Russian Empire". MyCatIsAChonk (talk) (not me) (also not me) (still no) 14:17, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

Craft, Walsh, Taruskin, White, Slim, Joseph, Théodore Strawinsky, and Stravinsky himself refer to Russia, not the Russian Empire. —CurryTime7-24 (talk) 16:54, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

Personality and political stances

I recalled reading a few years ago on Wikipedia that Stravinsky had fascist sympathies. I returned today to reacquaint myself with that situation, only to find that the article no longer had any mention of it. It looks like most of the "Personality" section is gone, including the entire "Political stances" subsection. Why were these removed? I think knowing these things about a composer like Stravinsky humanizes him and puts him in historical context. I generally like to know what 20th-century public figures were doing and saying about the state of the world around World War Two. I might restore it if nobody objects. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 12.34.198.160 (talk) 21:20, 13 July 2024 (UTC)

You have quite a remarkable memory, as this section was apparently removed in 2011. I would object to its reinstatement, as the sourcing is comparatively poor in quality, and I don't think it's really borne out enough in the literature to be given this much representation in the present article. Remsense诉 21:26, 13 July 2024 (UTC)

It was removed in 2023. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 12.34.198.160 (talk) 21:45, 13 July 2024 (UTC)

Apologies for my late response as I was offline for the month of July - that section was cut per comments from the failed FAC in 2023. Reviewers felt that the political ideologies of the man were irrelevant to his more notable qualities (e.g., his faith, which is discussed in the present Life section). Even so, the article is already very long, and more details about his life seems like overkill to me. There's plenty of other, more in-depth sources than Wikipedia to find out more about Stravinsky's life. MyCatIsAChonk (talk) (not me) (also not me) (still no) 13:46, 7 August 2024 (UTC)

Stravinskaya

@Agentdeer, I see you've removed the efn explaining the name "Stravinskaya", and provided a brief explanation. I'm not sure I understand - could you explain how I misinterpreted the source? Just wanting to make sure everything is accurate- thank you! MyCatIsAChonk (talk) (not me) (also not me) (still no) 22:53, 12 September 2024 (UTC)

Zappa

Frank Zappa cites Stravinsky as a huge influence on his own works. This should be mentioned. 146.200.132.123 (talk) 09:42, 28 September 2024 (UTC)

That would be better places (with a citation) at Zappa's own article. Nikkimaria (talk) 14:46, 28 September 2024 (UTC)

Dispute over "near-riot"

Earlier today there was a bit of a back-and-forth over the addition of an "accuracy" template. Another editor argued that it was needed because the description of the world premiere of The Rite of Spring as a "near-riot" was a "canard". What has been debunked is the police being called upon to quell the disturbance; this never happened. What is not in doubt, however, is that a disturbance did occur.

According to Stephen Walsh, reports were already circulating ahead of the premiere that the new Stravinsky work was "difficult, violent, incomprehensible", which motivated many to attend the performance for the sake of jeering at it. Supporters of Stravinsky and Diaghilev were moved to vociferously express their support, which in turn led to increased jeering. By the end of part 1, the audience degenerated into screaming matches and even violence between opposing factions. Gaston de Pawlowski's review of the performance stated that "it was only by straining our ears amid an indescribable racket that we could, painfully, get some rough idea of the new work, prevented from hearing it as much by its defenders as by its attackers". Walsh adds, "If the music was heard at all, it can only have been as a component of the uproar, to which it must appreciably have contributed".

Multiple reports attest that matters only got worse once part 2 was belatedly played. "Even when the curtain came down", Walsh reports, "the battle continued". (All of this can be found in Walsh 1999, pp. 203–205.)

The description of the performance as a "near-riot" is accurate; the addition of an "accuracy" template is unnecessary and would itself be misleading. —CurryTime7-24 (talk) 18:49, 28 September 2024 (UTC)