David Hughes discusses – Music and the Rediscovery of the Real. This talk by David Hughes considers Stravinsky’s compositional activity just prior to and just after World I, and examines two things in particular: one, how Stravinsky came to be the most prominent exponent of neoclassical composition in the 1920s and 30s, when he was just a few years beforehand something of a revolutionary enfant terrible (esp. with 1913’s Le Sacre); and two, to answer why, unlike many other neoclassical periods in music (e.g., that of circa 1730 to 1820), this one of the 1920s didn’t last longer as a movement. It looks particularly at his ballet Pulcinella (1920) and his opera Oedipus Rex (1927). The central question is: does the neoclassicist composition of the interwar period contain in itself the seeds of its own destruction? It’s not a foregone conclusion that it does, but this lecture explores the problem in detail.