Tracing the social-psychological causality relationships in Stravinski and Shostakovich through the violin chamber music

Abstract

The biography of a work of art is always strogly connected to the biography of its creator. This statement is already well-known and it doesn’t need further explanation. In the musical analysis tradition, we are more inclined to treat the matter of a work by beginning with the context in which it was created by the composer, but we sometimes tend to neglect the fact that the given work has a biography of its own which, from a counter perspective, speaks of the creator’s social and psycholoigal context by itself. In the following article we selected two chamber music pieces by each composer in order to trace through them the causality realtionships that connect the works to the creators and their (inner and outer) world and see how the musical material of The Soldier’s Tale and the Piano Trio in E minor, respectively, can birng us to a better understanding of the immanent meanings which they posess.