Thoughts About Hershy Kay and Igor Stravinsky

Back in the days when the New York City Ballet was “all about George Balanchine,” it was hard to avoid going to a program that did not show at least a few signs of Hershy Kay. Kay was primarily an orchestrator and an arranger, providing Balanchine with music from sources that departed from the usual ballet scores. One of the most popular of those Balanchine ballets was “Stars and Stripes,” which was structured as five “campaigns,” each of which was named after a composition by John Philip Sousa.

Those familiar with Sousa marches know that they all followed a very rigid structure. It did not take Balanchine long to realize that those structures were too confining. Kay had previously prepared a score for “Western Symphony,” which took familiar tunes from cowboy songs and provided Balanchine with episodes that would lend themselves to choreography. Where “Stars and Stripes” was concerned, Kay knew that Sousa composed more than marches. Indeed, the “El Capitan” march was based on themes that were taken from an operetta that Sousa had composed with the same title. As a result, Kay could provide a score for “Stars and Stripes” that went beyond expectations for Sousa but without compromising an overall sense of familiarity.

Nevertheless, when he had the task of arranging the music of Louis Moreau Gottschalk for Ruthanna Boris’ ballet “Cakewalk,” there was an interesting blip in his efforts to throw new and original lights on Gottschalk’s piano music. One of the dance episodes in this ballet was called “Wallflower Waltz.” It did not take long for a listener familiar with ballet scores to recognize that this episode had less to do with Gottschalk and more to a composer who was not only alive but also working with Balanchine on a variety of projects. “Wallflower Waltz” comes across as an almost outrageous imitation of music that Stravinsky had composed for the ballet “Petrushka!” Was this an intentional prank on Kay’s part? Did Stravinsky ever attend a performance of “Cakewalk;” and, if so, did he recognize his own music lurking there?

I doubt that we shall ever have definitive answers to those questions; but it reminds us that “musical ideas” often slide from one composer to another, often without either of them realizing what had happened