Uploaded June 2017 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago

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-Composer: Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (17 June 1882 – 6 April 1971)
-Performers: European Soloists Ensemble, Vladimir Ashkenazy (piano)

Septet for Clarinet, Bassoon, Horn, Piano, Violin, Viola and Cello, written in 1953

00:00 - I. ♩ = 88
02:52 - II. Passacaglia, Circa ♩ = 60
07:43 - III. Gigue, dotted ♪ = 112-116

For much of their two respective careers Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg were seen by the musical establishment as representing two opposite ideals of twentieth-century music -- two mutually exclusive stylistic and technical mentalities that, in the end, couldn't possibly be reconciled to one another. Certainly the two composers, by virtually ignoring each other during their lengthy period as neighbors in Hollywood during the 1940s, did little to discourage the animosity that frequently flared up between their respective followers. We now know, however, how wrong that idea was, for almost immediately after Schoenberg's death in 1951 Stravinsky began to explore -- tentatively at first, then with more surety of purpose -- the possibilities that the Second Viennese School's developments might offer him. It is as if composing The Rake's Progress in the late 1940s had finally purged Stravinsky of most of his so-called Neo-Classical urges and left him in a position to begin investigating other vehicles of musical thought. One of the earliest works in which we can really begin to see the incorporation of serial techniques (note that this does not by any means mean twelve-tone techniques -- at least not yet) into Stravinsky's own personal idiom is the remarkable Septet for clarinet, bassoon, horn, piano, violin, viola, and cello, composed during 1952 and 1953 and first performed at Dumbarton Oaks in early 1954.
To be fair, even as early as the 1920s Stravinsky had used recurrent pitch organizations in a way very similar in detail -- if not sound -- to the fundamentals of Second Viennese School's thinking. In the Septet, however, the manner of working such basic intervallic units out on a structural level can rightly be heard as something new in the composer's music.
At the beginning of the first of the work's three movements we find the clarinet singing out the seven note figure -- A-E-D-C-B-A-C sharp -- from which almost all of the thematic and accompanimental material of the entire work is derived. The seventh pitch is certainly of great significance over the course of the work: the conflict of C natural and C sharp within an A tonal context shows, as does the basic superficial style and rhythmic layout of this first movement, a strong connection to the Neo-Classical phase the composer was just beginning to depart from; perhaps even more significantly, that same chromatic alteration is made into the basis of all the chromatic meanderings of the theme used in the second movement.
The second movement, Passacaglia, is built on repeated statements of a sixteen-note subject that begins with the first five pitches (transposed up a fifth) of our intervallic unit. Throughout the seven variations (and one final statement) that make up the movement, all of the basic serial operations are made -- inversion, retrograde, and the various combinations of the two.
The same intervallic material is used as the basis for four fugal episodes -- the first and third featuring the strings, the second and fourth the piano and winds -- in the final, quick-paced Gigue. Throughout the second and third fugues, the piano echoes the music of the string fugues while the woodwinds go off on their own, justifying the idea -- hinted at all along (including in the title) -- that the piano is really a kind of mediator between the two disparate instrumental trios.
[allmusic.com]