The ‘Utopia of a Unified Style,’ or The Musical Narrativity of Alfred Schnittke’s Polystylism [ABSTRACT]

Before his death in 1998, Alfred Schnittke was one of the most performed, recorded and commissioned living composers. Unknown in the West until the late 1970s, the Russian-born composer developed a compositional technique called 'polystylism,' which is characterized by the use of two or more styles in a single composition.

Living under the Soviet regime and facing censorship, Schnittke had to compose film music for a livelihood. Polystylism derived from his work on such movies as Andrej Khrjanovsky's Glass Harmonica and Mihail Romm's, And Yet I Believe. The former 'quotes' famous paintings, from Brueghel to Magritte; the latter presents an eclectic and rather pessimistic account of the world by showing images of China's Cultural Revolution mixed with others of starvation in Africa among others dismal images. Schnittke used a similar referential technique in two of his most famous and 'polystylistic,' works: the Concerto Grosso No. 1 and the Symphony No. 1. For Schnittke, polystylism created “new possibilities for the musical dramatization of 'eternal' questions—of war and peace, life and death.”

In this paper, I will demonstrate how polystylism makes use of the process of 'defamiliarization' in order to create a musical narrative. The juxtaposition of foreign styles—tango and dodecaphonic clusters, for example—is impossible to justify as the consequence of purely musical developments. The rupture between these styles and the 'background' of the work brings them to the foreground. Such stylistic shifts result in the creation of spaces, musically unexplainable gaps between 'foregrounded' elements and the general background of the work.

The literary theorist Maurice Blanchot describes the possibilities created by such disjunctions. He explains how fragmentation proposes a new kind of arrangement “that accepts disjunction or divergence as the infinite center from out of which, through speech, relations are to be created.” As many authors have noted (Wolfgang Iser, Michel Foucault, Leonard Meyer, Kevin Korsyn), when confronted with gaps, readers and listeners experience the desire to resolve or to explain them. The natural impulse to resolve discontinuities allows narrativity to infiltrate the musical text.

The narrative implications of Schnittke's polystylism are realized in two stages: (1) the acknowledgment of extra-musical connotations for specific musical styles or borrowings (2) the ordering of those meaningful units into a narrative. The Concerto Grosso No. 1 constitutes the epistemic nexus of a complex web of extra-musical associations, which includes animation movies, Chamisso's Peter Schlehmil, Baroque paintings, a film on Rasputin, Jungian definitions of anima/animus and the collective subconscious. While the Symphony No. 1, in the shape of a musical chronicle, proclaims its own death... only to resurrect afterwards.

By discussing the origins and the connotations of various stylistic elements as they appear in Schnittke's Concerto Grosso No. 1 and in the Symphony No. 1, with reference to film excerpts and the examination of the composer's sketches, I will demonstrate how Schnittke’s music compels listeners to elaborate upon a narrative, not by providing a single definitive 'story' for the music, but by explaining the processes involved.