By: Joseph Straus, CUNY Graduate Center
Abstract of Video:
Stravinsky composed his Fanfare for a New Theatre in 1964 for the opening of what was then called The State Theatre in Lincoln Center. In its first performance, the two trumpet players were positioned on opposite sides of the hall. The twelve-tone series for the work is derived from the chromatic trichord (sc(012)). Stravinsky uses his usual quartet of series forms (P and I with the same first note; R and IR with the same first note), to which he adds a fifth (RI). This exuberant short piece is highly charged motivically.
Bibliography:
Joseph Straus, Stravinsky’s Late Music (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Joseph Straus, The Art of Post-Tonal Analysis: Thirty-Three Graphic Music Analyses (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).