Stravinsky composed Agon in 1957 for the choreographer George Balanchine and the New York City Ballet.  Balanchine and Stravinsky had collaborated on and off since they created Apollo in 1928 for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.  In all Balanchine choreographed 29 scores by Stravinsky – some of them were original collaborations (The Card Game, 1937; Orpheus, 1948); some were pieces that Stravinsky had originally composed for some other purpose (Renard, 1947; Movements for Piano and Orchestra, 1963).  With Agon the two men worked together closely from the original conception to the premier of the ballet.  Music and dance are more closely linked here than in any of their other collaborations.

            “Agon”  is an ancient Greek word meaning “contest” or “competition.”  Here it seems to refer to competition among and between twelve dancers, four men and eight women, in a series of dances of different characters and with different participants.  The names and to some extent the character of most of the dances are taken from the Apologie de la danse, a 17th-century French dance manual. There are 12 dances in all, laid out as follows:

Pas de quatre                                    four male dancers

Double pas de quatre                       eight female dancers

Triple pas de quatre                         all 12 dancers

   Prelude                                               instrumental

Sarabande                                         one male

Galliard                                               two females

Coda                                                  one male, two females

   Interlude                                              instrumental

Bransle simple                                  two males

Bransle gay                                        one female

Bransle de Poitou                             two males, one female

   Interlude                                               instrumental

Pas de deux                                      one male, one female

Four duos                                           four males, four females

Four trios                                            four males, eight females

The excerpt on the recording and the score go from the beginning of the piece through the coda to the Galliard.

            In the early 1950s Stravinsky, who for many years had been critical of Schoenberg, began experimenting with 12-tone procedures.  Agon is 12-tone music, but in a selective way.  At the beginning of the ballet, where the full company dances, Stravinsky sets a fanfare motif with diatonic and octatonic harmonies.  As the ballet goes on with smaller groups, it gets less and less tonal.  A 12-tone row is introduced in the coda to the galliard, accompanied however by diatonic and octatonic harmonies.  In the three bransles the harmonies disappear, and the music is entirely serial   The Pas de deux is the most serially complex of the entire piece, with several transformations of the row used simultaneously.  In the duos and trios the row is heard in rather straightforward canons.  Then toward the end of the trios, as all 12 dancers come back on the stage, the original fanfare and the original harmonies come back.  Thus the overall structure of the dance and the music are closely intertwined.  The fact that there are 12 dancers, 12 dances and 12 tones is probably not a coincidence.