By: Joseph Straus, CUNY Graduate Center
Abstract of Video:
The major works of Stravinsky's final years are based on serial charts known as "rotational arrays." This video describes the construction and features of these arrays and shows how they operate musically in a particularly beautiful and powerful piece of music: the Lacrimosa movement from his Requiem Canticles (1966).
Bibliography:
Joseph N. Straus, Stravinsky's Late Music (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Jeffrey Perry, "A 'Requiem for the Requiem': On Stravinsky's Requiem Canticles." College Music
Symposium 33-34 (1993): 237-256.
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).