DescriptionDoes an artist create in a vacuum or is there more at stake in a work’s
production than art for art’s sake? A great deal has been written about The Rite
of Spring by Igor Stravinsky and the atonal works of Arnold Schoenberg, much of
which has depicted their works as autonomous objects – objects that embodied
an inevitable step in a natural evolution of Western art music. This essay
reconsiders these works not as the product of Hegelian evolution, but as social
acts of symbolic violence against cultural establishments in Saint Petersburg and
Vienna by two remarkably similar personalities. Following an overview of their
social and professional development, this essay considers primary sources on
Stravinsky and Schoenberg in light of recent psychological research on identity.
The system of sign and myth outlined by semiologist Roland Barthes is then
brought to bear on Stravinsky’s Rite and Schoenberg’s Erwartung to further
analyze conservative versus radical reception of these works. The essay concludes with a discussion of the concepts of cultural capital, symbolic violence and collective misrecognition proposed by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu as they relate to theoretical and historical writing on Stravinsky and Schoenberg later in the twentieth-century.