Tom McGee's Blog

Red Black Win­dow offers up the author’s mem­ory of first being turned on to Stravinsky’s Petrouchka as a col­lege stu­dent, and how it changed his life. I cer­tainly remem­ber where I was when I first heard Le Sacre, and it sent me on a path totally dif­fer­ent from the one I would have taken.

Part of the arti­cle is a nice sound clip of an inter­view with Stravin­sky in the ‘60s, dis­cussing his Vari­a­tions, Aldous Hux­ley In Memo­riam. I sup­pose this is an advanced piece in the Stravin­sky cat­a­log, but by con­tem­po­rary stan­dards — sev­eral years after Penderecki’s Thren­ody, for exam­ple — rather but­toned up and orga­nized. Still, it is chal­leng­ing in its own right, with its dense yet trans­par­ent tex­tures and twelve-tone vocab­u­lary. Still it retains Stravinsky’s lively sense of rhyth­mic vital­ity throughout.

This page from the B&H score (these late Stravin­sky scores are works of type­set­ting art in them­selves) is a pas­sage from about three min­utes of the way through this brief piece [ 2:49 in this

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

]. The instru­men­ta­tion here is one clar­inet, eng­lish horn, one bas­soon, one horn and strings. Notice how he maps phras­ing from one instru­ment to the other using braces across staffs: in the first mea­sure, the horn plays two eighth notes, then passes it off to the clar­inet. In the sec­ond and third mea­sures, the eng­lish horn and vio­lins are linked. The “cut-outs” of staffs add to the read­abil­ity, as does the elim­i­na­tion or dot­ting of ver­ti­cal bar lines.

In the audio clip, Stravin­sky good-naturedly con­cedes that this piece may be for “con­nois­seurs,” slyly hint­ing that it’s not going to hurt you to give it a try. The first taste may be astrin­gent and unfa­mil­iar, but “Music is not always ‘to like’: music is also for some­thing much more impor­tant than ‘to like’.”