By: Joseph Straus , CUNY Graduate Center
Abstract of Video:
In the 1950s and 1960s, in the final years of his life, Stravinsky abandoned the musical neoclassicism of his earlier years and refashioned himself as a serial and twelve-tone composer. In the early phase of this transition, Stravinsky practiced a form of “diatonic serialism,” in which a series is fashioned from a diatonic collection. “Full fadom five,” the second of the Three Shakespeare Songs, is an exemplar of diatonic serialism. Stravinsky constructs a seven-note series from the notes of an E<flat>-minor scale and derives from it what was to become his standard quartet of series forms: P and I with a shared first note; R and IR with a (different) shared first note. The series forms are highly redundant in content: P, R, and IR have the same seven notes; I differs only by a single note. The result is a densely contrapuntal texture, rich in canonic imitation, but with the overall effect of gentle, beautiful diatonic wash. For further information, see my book, Stravinsky’s Late Music (Cambridge UP, 2001).