Igor Stravinsky’s Octet for Wind Instruments marks the beginning of his so-called neo-classical period. Not for the first or last time, it marks great discontinuity with what audiences expected of him.

Stravinsky’s earliest works show the influence of his teacher Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov and the Russian nationalistic school. The impresario Serge Diaghilev commissioned his breakout work, the ballet Firebird. Its premiere in Paris in 1910 made Stravinsky an international celebrity.

He followed that success with two more very Russian ballets, Petrushka (1911) and Rite of Spring (1913).  When the First World War broke out, Stravinsky was stranded in Switzerland and needed money. So he intended his small-scale drama The Soldier’s Tale to provide some, but a flu epidemic prevented its performance after the premiere. In this piece, Stravinsky deemphasized Russianness.

After its premiere in Lausanne (1918), no one heard it until its Paris premiere in 1924. The Octet received its premiere in 1923. Another deliberately un-Russian piece, it confused at least some of its audience.

Aaron Copland was in the audience and summed up what many others may have felt:

Here was Stravinsky…now suddenly, without any seeming explanation, making an about-face and presenting a piece to the public that bore no conceivable resemblance to the individual style with which he had hitherto been identified.”

In the meantime, Diaghilev had commissioned another ballet from Stravinsky, Pulcinella (1919). But this time, he only wanted orchestrations of music he supposed to have been composed by Giovanni Pergolesi. It was more of an arrangement than original composition, but it sowed the seeds of Stravinsky’s new style. He later wrote, “Pulcinella was my discovery of the past, the epiphany through which the whole of my late work became possible.”

The cultural context of the Octet

The Romantic movement in music began with mostly German responses to Beethoven. It continued to Wagner’s operas and Mahler’s symphonies. By and large, it emphasized the expression of intense emotion. It relied on larger and larger orchestras in order to increase expressive possibilities.

In addition, nineteenth-century musicians took music very seriously. It seems they never noticed the humor and playfulness in the classical masters.

Beethoven’s Eroica symphony, for example, has a funeral march in rondo form, a scherzo that never gets started until it changes key, and a theme and variations that mocks all the conventions of the form. When it was first played in London, the orchestra played only the first two movements. After all, a note said, the last two do not fit the avowed purpose of the work.

Postwar composers in France, on the other hand, composed with a wink and a smirk.

German musical culture had long dominated orchestral music. Wagner’s work attempted to wrest dominance of opera from Italy. Other countries resented this German domination and tried to assert their own nationalistic style. Indeed, Stravinsky grew up with Russian nationalism.

The French attempt to throw off German influence doesn’t count as nationalism. French style had too long a history for that. But after the German invasion in the First World War, the French developed a new hostility toward everything German.

Besides the traumatic experience of war, the early twentieth century saw many technological and cultural innovations. Phonograph records, movies, and radio forever changed how people experienced music. The influence of popular music exploded. Jazz, in particular, captured the imagination of French composers (and Stravinsky), albeit briefly. In Francis Poulenc’s words, “the music hall was invading Art with a capital A.”

Neo-Classical style in music.

French composers, led by Erik Satie and “the Six,” turned to a more light-hearted and less artistically pretentious style. Other composers joined them, including Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Bartok, and  Copland.

They deliberately turned back to older forms and styles. That doesn’t mean they sought to imitate older music, however. They added more dissonant harmonies, complex rhythms, and fresh instrumentation.

Their various styles have been called “neoclassical.” The term is notoriously imprecise, but it remains a handy label to describe the music of a number of composers between the two world wars. It refers not so much to embracing the techniques and forms of the “classical” period as an utter rejection of late romanticism.

While neoclassical music is often identified as being in a particular key, it does not rely on classical tonal relationships. Nor does much of it have much in common with classical approaches to rhythm and meter.

Much neoclassical music seems as much a distortion or parody of classical style as a return to its formal procedures.

Stravinsky as a “French” composer

As a student of one of the leading Russian nationalists, Stravinsky’s earliest works are very Russian. For one thing, they owe a heavy debt to Russian folk music and folk stories. Even during his student years, however, he fell under the influence of French music.

After he moved to France, critics in Paris appreciated The Rite of Spring both for its wildness and its clarity and precision. They liked the orchestration that emphasized woodwinds and brass over the strings.

Russian critics, on the other hand, rejected it. Thus, even before the disruption of the Russian revolution, Stravinsky had reason to stop thinking of himself as primarily a Russian composer.

Coupled with the death of Stravinsky’s brother, the revolution marked the end of the land of his childhood. When it made returning to Russia impossible, Stravinsky tried, with mixed success, to be accepted as a French composer.

The composition of the Octet

Stravinsky composed the Octet during the end of 1922 and the beginning of 1923.

Robert Craft wrote Stravinsky’s recollections in Dialogues and a Diary (1968). Stravinsky told him that the Octet started with a dream of eight wind instrumentalists playing “some very attractive music.” Although he didn’t remember the music when he woke up, he did remember the instruments: flute, clarinet, two bassoons, two trumpets, and two trombones. He began to compose for that group immediately.

He also told Craft that he had long wanted to follow The Soldier’s Tale with an ensemble sonata of similar size. Note that he wanted to compose a sonata. Most classical composers wrote extensively in sonata form.

Wagner abandoned it. Bruckner and Mahler inflated it beyond recognition. In their hands, the orchestra grew to gigantic proportions. Few late Romantic composers bothered with small ensembles. And so Stravinsky’s desire to compose a sonata for eight instruments shows his neoclassical intent.

The structure of the Octet

The first movement of the Octet, then, is a sonata form. Except that it lacks the classical polarity of tonic and dominant and other expected norms. If it’s not quite what Haydn or Beethoven would have written, it comes closer than anything by the late Romantics. Tchaikovsky had tried in vain to master it. His best work came after he learned more congenial procedures from Liszt.

The second movement turns to another classical mainstay, the theme and variations. But classical composers never did what Stravinsky did with the form.

He called the part labeled Variation A a “ribbon of scales.” A classical composer might have chosen such a spectacular movement as the final variation. To the best of my knowledge, none of them ever had a variation played more than once. Stravinsky’s variation A occurs three times, introducing variations B, C, and E.

Stravinsky may originally have thought to make his second movement a dance, like the classical minuet. He composed a waltz, which he later incorporated into the variations as Variation C.

Many classical pieces end with a rondo. So does the Octet. This rondo does not display the formal oddity of the other two movements.

On the other hand, the piece ends very strangely. Finishing on a C major chord seems natural enough. But it doesn’t result from a standard dominant to tonic cadence. And the lowest note is a G in the second bassoon. That means the chord is in second inversion, the least stable possible presentation. Classical composers treated it almost like a dissonance that demanded resolution.

For any classical composer, ending on such a chord would have signified his incompetence. By Stravinsky’s time, it was fresh, original, and suitably irreverent.

What Stravinsky wrote about the Octet

Stravinsky’s Octet has a very facetious mood. On the other hand, anyone who read his explanation of it would never anticipate any humor. This explanation, “Some Ideas about my Octuor,” appeared in the January 1924 issue of The Arts, a London magazine. Here are some paragraphs, numbered and with the English improved by Richard Taruskin:

1. My Octuor is not an “emotive” work but a musical composition based on objective elements which are sufficient in themselves.
2. I have excluded from this work all sorts of nuances, which I have replaced by the play of volumes.
3. I have excluded all nuances between the forte and the piano; I have left only the forte and the piano.
4. The play of these volumes is one of the two active elements on which I have based the action of my musical text, the other element being the tempos [Stravinsky has “movements”] in their reciprocal connection.
5. This play of tempos and volumes that puts into action the musical text constitutes the impelling force of the composition and determines its form.
6. I admit the commercial exploitation of a musical composition, but I do not admit its emotive exploitation. To the author belongs the emotive exploitation of his ideas, the result of which is the composition; to the executant belongs the presentation of that composition in the way designated to him by its own form.
7. Form, in my music, derives from counterpoint. I consider counterpoint as the only means through which the attention of the composer is concentrated on purely musical questions. Its elements also lend themselves perfectly to an architectural construction.
8. This sort of music has no other aim than to be sufficient in itself. In general, I consider that music is only able to solve musical problems; and nothing else, neither the literary nor the picturesque, can be in music of any real interest. The play of the musical elements is the thing.

It is often a mistake to take any of Stravinsky’s comments about his music at face value. They too often contradict the evidence of the music itself. But here is a decisive repudiation of the Romantic idea of the composer as a dreamer or philosopher who used music to express deep feelings or literary ideas.

Sources:

A historical and analytical examination of the Stravinsky Octet for Wind Instruments, with a guide to performance preparation of the two trumpet parts / James J. Wood. DMA essay: University of North Texas, May 2007
Music in the early twentieth century: plus some famous words about it / Richard Taruskin, Oxford History of Western Music. 2010
The New Grove dictionary of music and musicians / ed. Stanley Sadie (Macmillan, 1980) s.v. “Neo-classical” and “Stravinsky, Igor (Fyodorovich)”
The rest is noise / Alex Ross (Picador: 2007)

Photo credits:
Stravinsky portrait (photo). Public domain from
Mahler 8th symphony. Public domain from
Les Six. Public domain from
Stravinsky by Picasso. Public domain from Wikimedia Commons