Carl Van Vechten

“ In such an extraordinary work as The Nightingale we find him making little or no attempt at representation. The bird does not sing like the little brown warbler; instead Stravinsky has endeavored to write music which would give the feeling of the bird's song and the effect it made on the people in his lyric drama to the auditors in the stalls of the opera house. As for Strauss's use of orchestral color the German is the merest tyro when compared to the Russian. There is some use of the whole-tone scale in The Firebird, and elsewhere in Stravinsky, but it is not a predominant use of it. ”

“ Stravinsky is more of an expert than Moussorgsky; he handles his medium more freely (has anyone ever handled it better?) but he still preaches the older Russian's doctrine of truth of expression, a doctrine which implies the curt dismissal of all idea of padding.
But all these composers and their contemporaries, and the composers who came before them, have one quality in common; they all use the orchestra of their time, or a bigger one. ”

“ Ansermet there is required an orchestra of forty-five men, each a virtuoso, no two of whom play the same instrument (to be sure there are two violins but one invariably plays pizzicato, the other invariably bows) . There are novelties in the band but all the conventional instruments are there including, you may be sure, a piano and an infinite variety of woodwinds, which always play significant roles in Stravinsky's orchestration. And Mr. Ansermet says that in this work the composer has achieved effects such as have only been dreamed of by composers hitherto . ”

“ Strauss, to be sure, increases the number of instruments, but he still utilizes a vast number of violins and violas massed against the otfcer instruments, diminishing in number according to the volume of sound each makes. He divides his strings constantly, of course; they do not all play alike as the violins, say, in Il Barbiere di Siviglia, but they often all play at once.
Stravinsky experimented at first with the full orchestra and he even utilized it in such late works as Petrouchka and The Nightingale. ”