Igor Stravinsky: Octet

Stravinsky composed his Octet in 1922. It is scored for an ensemble of 8 wind instruments: flute, clarinet, 2 bassoons, 2 trumpets, and 2 trombones. He wrote for wind instruments, Stravinsky asserted in an essay he wrote to accompany the work’s premiere in 1923, because they seemed “apt to render a certain rigidity of the form I had in mind.” Indeed each of the Octet’s two movements is cast in a “rigid” form: the first movement is a “sinfonia” in sonata-allegro form, the second is a “tema con variazione” The Italian titles make it clear that Stravinsky intends to refer back to forms common in18^th-century instrumental music.

Stravinsky also refers persistently to 18^th-century harmonic practice, with clear cadences, a firm sense of key, and modulations between related keys. At the same time Stravinsky’s harmonies sound “modern” despite his 18^th-century music models, because they are often based on octatonic or chromatic scales and pitch collections, rather than diatonic. In the first four measures of the Sinfonia, for example, Stravinsky begins with a diatonic scale on Bb, but at the end of measure 2 he introduces a B-natural and shifts to an octatonic scale, only to resolve in m.5 back to a diatonic scale on Bb.

The Sinfonia has two parts: a introduction and an allegro. The slow introduction ends, like an introduction by Haydn or Mozart, with a dominant seventh chord, leading to the key of the allegro: Eb major. The allegro presents a first theme in Eb major (RN 6), a transition (RN 8), a second group in Bb (RN 14), a development (RN 16), and a recapitulation (RN 21). The manipulation of theme and key form are clearly audible, although the listener may not identify the movement as a sonata-allegro form. At the same time, because of the alternating scales and pitch collections, the peculiar cadences and the fluctuating meters, the Octet doesn’t sound anything like 18^th-century instrumental music. Stravinsky “engages with” the musical past; he doesn’t try to recreate it.