Talk:Igor Stravinsky/GA1

GA Review

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Reviewer: Chiswick Chap (talk · contribs) 15:50, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

Well, this is a detailed, informative, well-structured and well-cited article so I only have a few comments, bordering on suggestions at times. Chiswick Chap (talk) 15:50, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

Comments

• I'm not generally too keen on infoboxes but given the length of this article, an {{infobox artist}} would seem sensible.
  • Added
• In "Innovation and influence", you begin 'Stravinsky has been called "one of music's truly epochal innovators"'. If quoting directly, probably best to attribute to the author if they're actually notable; if it's just the day's editor at AllMusic then why are we quoting them at all? In fact, why are we citing AllMusic at all, given the number of books about S.?
  • Replaced with quotes from better sources.
• I note that File:The Rite of Spring manuscript.jpg is PD in the USA, so we can freely use it here. Maybe a short excerpt of the sheet music for the extremely distinctive The Rite of Spring would be in order in this article, as it is what made him lastingly famous. The obvious passage would be the Jeu de Rapt: a small bit of the relevant sheet of music illustrating the driving rhythm would I think look very striking. I expect you could include a small embedded playable file of the music, too, if you wanted.
  • Looking at the article for The Rite and in the commons, it seems that there's no recordings. There are some of the sheet music (like this one) but I'm having trouble finding a good place to put it considering I added the photo from the production as well. Thoughts?

You could use your small line of sheet music beside the text or centered Or use all or part of the manuscript file. On space, it's clearly relevant and justified. You could use a gallery for the photo and the sheet music nanuscript, suitably enlarged to be readable; or just |center|upright=2,5 the sheet music MS by itself, why not. You could also link to an external playable recording of a riff or two; if these are in copyright then the link has to be in a cited footnote, still useful.

• Thanks, I added a multiple image with the photo of the production and one of that bit from the score, as well as an EFN linking to a recording.

• That works well.

• Commons has good photographs of performances of Rite of Spring; for instance, File:Spring16 17 (26856034545).jpg or File:Spring16 11 (26822095346).jpg. You might consider including one, given how revolutionary the piece was back in 1913.
  • Added the second image you suggested
• In "Last major works", I don't see why the 1948 and 1962 images should be paired; the result is that the 1962 image is way too big, for a start.
  • Cut the image of Stravinsky in 1962 and replaced with a smaller image of the TIME cover
• The image in "Religion" is far too big also. The plain "|upright" parameter is all that's needed for sizing.
  • Fixed
• Ditto for the first image in "Reception".
  • Fixed
• "Final years and death": There is a lot of detail about being frail and sick, and a lot of detail about his death; I'm not sure this is really encyclopedic. Why do readers need to know that "In August 1967, Stravinsky was hospitalised in Hollywood for bleeding stomach ulcers and thrombosis which required a blood transfusion"? And so on. "He was hospitalised in April 1970 following a bout of pneumonia, which he successfully recovered from. Two months later, he travelled to Évian-les-Bains by Lake Geneva where he reunited with his eldest son Theodore and niece Xenia.[132]" seems like too much detail as well: why do readers need to know this? Maybe cut the last days down to a sentence or two. In fact, why not revise the whole section in this light. He was a composer, not a saint, and this is an encyclopedia, not a hagiography.
  • I do see your point, and I did remove some details from this section, but other FA's about composers like Claude Debussy, Hector Berlioz, Maurice Ravel, and Frédéric Chopin have quite a bit of detail (Chopin even gets an article about his health). If you still feel there is unnecessary detail when comparing to these articles, what do you think should be cut?
    • Not sure that WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS is much of an argument, but if you're happy with it now, that's fine.
      • Resolved
• Not sure why his grave should be illustrated, either.
  • Refer to above FA's, which all have photos of the composer's graves. Again, if you still feel it's unnecessary, it can be cut.
    • Yes.
      • Resolved
• The "Honours" section has a chunk of text not in a subsection, followed by the unbalanced subsection "Grammy Awards". It'd work better if you had something like "Distinctions", "Works dedicated to Stravinsky", and then the "Grammy Awards" as subsections.
  • Added headings and reordered

References

• Vlad 1978 has no Source.
  • Fixed
• Taruskin 1998 has no Source.
  • Fixed
• Stravinsky Craft 1963 has no Source.
  • Fixed
• Whiting 1943 has no Source.
  • Fixed
• Source Griffiths, Stravinsky, Craft, and Josipovici 1982 is not used.
  • Fixed
• Source Palmer 1982 is not used.
  • Fixed
• The Further Reading list is long: what are all these sources for if you're not using them? Some of them (like Cross 1999) are at least books by major publishers; but there are journal articles (Slim 2006); online journals that aren't online any more (?! --- Robinson 2004); 15-year-old articles in periodicals (Walsh 2007); half-published thingies on Academia.com (Floirat 2019); even ordinary newspaper and Time articles (Anonymous 1..4). Are these bits and bobs really justified?
  • I've cut a good bit of material from here and also reformatted them into their respective templates for consistency.

Chiswick Chap I think I've addressed everything here. If there are any other concerns, I'm happy to address them. Thanks for your review! MyCatIsAChonk (talk) 23:23, 9 March 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.