JOLLY DAYS

The Geometrical and the Vitalistic

From a 1989 NYRB article about Mozart by Joseph Kerman — speaking about the early music movement, but also, about a lot more:

It is certainly true that both historical performance and “traditional” performance tended toward the impersonal, the objective, and what T.E. Hulme called the “geometrical,” as opposed to the “vitalistic” in nineteenth-century art. Indeed the original impetus behind the early music movement was the revulsion against romantic emotionality endemic to early-twentieth-century modernism…Hulme (… admired “the dry hardness which you get in the classics”). .. Stravinsky is a key figure, with his astringent music of the neoclassical period, his influential polemics against musical expression in the Harvard lectures…the ideal was to find poetry in geometry…

Stravinsky's suspicion of freedom of expression derives from the idea that depersonalization is an antidote to the horrors caused by two world wars — Stravinsky wanted feeling to “submit” to intellect:

What is important for the lucid ordering of the work - for its crystallization - is that all Dionysian elements which set the imagination of the artist in motion and make the lifespan ripe must be properly subjugated before they intoxicate us, and must finally be made to submit to the laws: Apollo demands it.