Septet

The piece unfolds in three movements played by seven players with no conductor, so listeners can watch the musicians trade lines directly.

I. The opening movement moves in a brisk, syncopated dance rhythm, with instruments passing short motifs back and forth like a conversation that keeps interrupting itself.

II. The middle movement slows down and turns inward, built as a passacaglia, a form where a short bass-line pattern repeats underneath while the other instruments spin ever-changing variations above it. Listen for the same low phrase returning again and again while its surroundings keep shifting.

III. The finale is a gigue, a lively old dance type, but here treated as a fugue, meaning one instrument states a tune and the others enter one by one, imitating it. The effect is part antique dance, part puzzle, as the players chase each other's phrases to the close.

Throughout, listen for Stravinsky's dry, precise instrumental colors, sudden changes in texture, and a sense of tightly controlled play, more athletic than emotional, as instruments toss ideas rapidly among themselves.

Stravinsky composed the Septet in the early 1950s, during the period when he was moving away from his earlier neoclassical style and beginning to absorb the twelve-tone methods associated with Schoenberg and his followers, partly under the influence of the young conductor and composer Robert Craft, who became a close associate. The work sits at that turning point, using old forms, a passacaglia and a fugal gigue, filtered through a more systematic, rigorously worked-out harmonic language. It had its premiere performance in Washington, D.C. in 1953, played by an ensemble drawn from wind and string players alongside piano. The Septet is heard less often than Stravinsky's ballets, but it occupies an important place in his output as a hinge between his neoclassical decades and his final, serial period.