The 20th century brought a perceptual change in the components of music as a consequence of the composer's search for new means of expression. In the field of rhythm and meter, new compositional methods were used to explore the structural and perceptual possibilities that they entail. Igor Stravinsky is one of the main contributors to those innovative practices in rhythm and meter, and his music has been extensively studied regarding the formal and perceptual repercussions of his rhythmic-metric structures. However, the research on Stravinsky's rhythm was narrowly confined to the formal field, because of the predilection for structural analysis and its wide development in the second half of the century. Also, the deep influence of formalist aesthetics and the new theories of musical time and durational perception caused the expressive aspects of Stravinsky's music (especially in rhythm and meter) to be understudied, and not to be taken into consideration until the 21st century.

This investigation aims to provide another viewpoint on the study of Stravinsky's rhythm and metric compositional practices from the perspectives of expression and representation to determine how far they can be reevaluated from aesthetic approaches such as stylistic development, narrative discourse, portraying intentions, historic contextualization, among others. Also, it seeks to propose mixed analytical methods that can encompass both intrinsic (formal) and extrinsic (poetic) features of this music, and therefore to allow the construction of a correlation between musical structures, their perception, and possible interpretations from the extra-musical dimension. This, in the hope of contributing to the discussion about the expressive and representative possibilities of rhythm in 20th century music and beyond.

To do so, a corpus of six pieces was selected (“Le Baiser de la Fée”, “Agon”, “L'histoire du Soldat”, “The Rake's progress”, “Le Chant du Rossignol”, and “Pribaoutki”), all of which are framed on an expressive or representational level beyond purely musical parameters because they include dramaturgy, text, narrative, and stylistic reference. The works “The Rite of Spring” and “Les Noces” are included as well, as a comparative-reference group — because these are the pieces that have the most attempts at poetic or expressive analysis within the literature on Stravinsky. The methodology for analysis starts with a formal analysis where Stravinsky's rhythmic and metric innovations are identified and contextualized within the piece (this includes title, genre, dramatic scene, historical context, characterization, etc.). Later, other pieces with those characteristics are searched in Stravinsky's entire corpus and compared with one another, aiming to trace the effect of those elements in the general construction of the pieces.

This investigation is framed under the parameters of the Ph.D program of the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien (mdw) and is still ongoing. Nonetheless, preliminary results have shown that, based on Stravinsky's aesthetic discourse and, more importantly, in specific stylistic features — particularly rhythm and metric ones — the music exhibits intentional portrayals of musical genres, narratives, and concepts that shaped the composer's compositional process.