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).
Bibliography:
Joseph Straus, Stravinsky’s Late Music (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Joseph Straus, The Art of Post-Tonal Analysis (Oxford University Press, 2022).
About the Author:
Joseph Straus is Distinguished Professor of Music Theory at the CUNY Graduate Center. With a specialization in music since 1900, he has written numerous technical music-theoretical articles and scholarly monographs on a variety of topics in modernist music, including Remaking the Past: Musical Modernism and the Influence of the Tonal Tradition (Harvard University Press, 1990), The Music of Ruth Crawford Seeger (Cambridge University Press, 1995), Stravinsky's Late Music (Cambridge University Press, 2001), and Twelve-Tone Music in America (Cambridge University Press, 2009). He is also the author of Introduction to Post-Tonal Theory (4th ed., Norton, 2016).