Stravinsky, Modernism, and Mass Culture

Noting Stravinsky’s recent interest in African American music in the Manchester Guardian, Ernest Newman remarked that Ragtime might have been better received in a cinema or restaurant. As a tribute to vapid entertainment, he averred, the piece was ‘hardly worth the while of a man of original genius’; Stravinsky, Newman claimed, had exhausted his compositional resources and – ‘having nothing urgent or vital of his own to say now’ – was busy ‘larking about boyishly among the more stereotyped musical humours of the day’.2 As a caricature of popular culture, in other words, Ragtime was beneath Stravinsky and, by extension, inappropriate fare for the concert hall. How should we understand this strange act of aesthetic transgression? Isn’t modernism supposed to maintain distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’?