The music philosophy that links Jack White with Igor Stravinsky
If you ask Jack White about his biggest musical influences, you’re likely going to get names like Son House, Charley Patton, Jimmy Page, and Captain Beefheart. But where’s the love for dead Russian classical composers?
In terms of Googleable evidence, at least, the former White Stripes frontman has never discussed his opinion of the ‘Firebird Suite’ or any other notable works from the catalogue of the great Igor Stravinsky, but whether he knows it or not, Jack and Igor have a lot in common.
Admittedly, Stravinsky, who was born in St Petersburg in 1882 and died in 1971, four years before White was born, probably wouldn’t have had much to say to the long-haired lad from Detroit if they crossed paths in another dimension. The composer was known to be a tad surly toward other musicians even in his own time, calling Vivaldi “greatly overrated” and dismissing Heitor Villa-Lobos with this killer takedown: “Why is it that whenever I hear a piece of music I don’t like, it’s always by Villa-Lobos?”
To be fair, Jack White has been known to drop similar smack about the Black Keys or the Von Bondies; self-confident songwriters aren’t gonna pull punches. Still, if Jack and Igor ever did get to talking about their actual approaches to music, setting aside the different genres, influences, and instruments involved, they might come to a pretty quick understanding.
Dating all the way back to a 2005 interview with Rolling Stone, Jack White has routinely talked about intentionally putting obstacles in front of himself as part of his unique methodology. “The whole point of The White Stripes is the liberation of limiting yourself,” White said at the time, responding to the common question of why he’d kept the band a two-piece. “A duo can only make so much music without tapes and samples… In my opinion, too much opportunity kills creativity.”
White dug more into this idea in a 2012 chat with Arte Interview, noting that “if you don’t have a problem, there is no story… I make struggles for myself. I purposely play guitars that are out of tune; things are too far away from me on stage that I can’t reach. I do that all the time because I want to create struggle.”
Stravinsky, who was something of a rock star in his own time, a rebel against the conservative conservatory culture, said remarkably similar things throughout his life, including a passage from his 1935 autobiography, written when he was about the age White is now.
“All music is nothing more than a succession of impulses that converge toward a definite point of repose,“ Stravinsky believed. “My freedom thus consists in my moving about within the narrow frame that I have assigned myself for each of my undertakings. I shall go even further: my freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles… The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self of the chains that shackle the spirit.”
Can’t you just see Jack and Igor high-fiving each other at some bar in Detroit as they realise they’ve landed on the same page from remarkably different starting points? Just so long as Stravinsky doesn’t mention his much weirder belief that “music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all,” we should be good!
