Even after Stravinsky developed the trademark twelve-tone techniques that distinguish his last works, he continued to experiment. Many of these serial explorations seem more like compositional games – games of which, as Joseph Straus notes, Stravinsky was both inventor and player.
Presenting evidence from analyses of the composer’s sketches for The Flood, Abraham and Isaac, Requiem Canticles, and an unfinished, late work, I analyze instances of Stravinsky’s serial “games” that in their innovations go beyond his well-known hexachordal arrays and even further from the practices of classic serialism. These serial games appear to depend upon spontaneously invented sets of rules, from which the composer could derive in a systematic –if often circuitous– manner new pitch resources from those already established. Through these new resources, he could create the sounds presumably desired for composition but unavailable within existing pitch structures.
Uncovering some of Stravinsky’s hitherto unknown serial techniques enriches our view of his creative practice and offers solutions to analytical puzzles posed by passages in the late music whose pitch structures could not previously be explained. I also examine, when Stravinsky’s serial games are at their most intricate, how the resulting pitch configurations might justify their complex gestations. In addition, this paper offers an historical precedent for Stravinsky’s serial games in his algorithmic approaches to melody harmonization in The Rite of Spring, thus demonstrating a career-long tendency toward compositional games and rules.
