Igor Stravinsky's seraphic string writing

[@RyanPower]

Apollo is a really beautiful work, a good gateway to his other music beyond the big 3.

[@interglossa]

Anyone who venerates this work in particular is a true acolyte of Stravinsky. This, the Orpheus ballet, and some pages of the Rake's Progress have so much austere beauty and they have sometimes made me wonder what other works he would have left if he had not had the fling with serialism.

[@StockyScoresRaoraPantheraFC]

Maybe also Perséphone

[@DoranSteven]

It’s very good music but basically Easy Listening; Tchaikovsky meet Hans Zimmer. Surely an acolyte likes more challenging Stravinsky, like his serialism, too?

[@interglossa]

@@DoranSteven for that there is Joseph Straus' YT channel. There you can learn why Stravinsky's hexachord rotations in the Movements are like crystals. Defo for hardcore fans.

[@interglossa]

@@DoranSteven thanks for making me learn who Hans Zimmer is.

[@thanasis_milios]

Quite frankly, i have never been huge on that piece overall, but the apotheosis and the introduction (the latter has some great pandiatonic moments) are so good that make me reconsider my opinion.

[@Whatismusic1234]

This is beautiful music!

[@portmantonal]

Hahaha caught me off guard with that profile pic next to a *positive* comment. Agreed, WIM2.0

[@papycoima]

I see sheet music, I see Stravinsky, I click on vid :)

[@rosiefay7283]

Sounds distinctly sharp to me. Before you showed the score I thought it was a semitone higher.

[@gigogrom216]

damn I go listen to this ballet and all of Stravinsky

[@extanegautham8950]

great, thanks for the introduction!

[@joshua_warner]

thanks for watching!

[@DrStabkill]

I knew as soon as you mentioned pandiatonicism what piece it was

[@miguelpereira1250]

wow

[@Крук-ж7у]

Спасибо 👏

[@BANERJEEWB]

Sounds like if Mozart lived 20 years longer, moving into exotic harmonies, but keeping the Classical forms exact. This piece is emotional, but in a religious way.

[@rominn2184]

What makes you say “religious”..? Insofar as it references Ancient Greek religion/mythology, of course? I suppose you could also see it as sort as meditative, a definite spiritual apotheosis, a culmination and end result of everything that’s come before.

[@BANERJEEWB]

@@rominn2184 actually I didn't notice the description about Greek Gods before. It moves the mind in a similar manner as religious music, of course it's a subjective opinion. There are also obvious similarities to earlier Western religious music (Pre-Beethoven).

[@DoranSteven]

@@rominn2184it clearly draws on the aesthetics of devotional and religious music. It has a simplicity like polyphony; it has plaintive, indirect harmonic development used in pieces like Brahms’ Geistliche Lied or Requiem, and the end of the St John Passion. It's neoclassical, and the simplicity of classicism has served devotional aesthetics at the time of composition and in the years since, and all this is appropriate for a ballet about the Apotheosis of Apollo. ‘Religious’ refers to diverse artistic forms, and adjacent experiences like love, doubt and consolation. It doesn’t mean the music is for playing in a church

[@BANERJEEWB]

@@DoranSteven You've expressed in clear words what's in my or the listeners mind. Gregorian chanting, Masses of Mozart and Haydn, Palestrina.

[@nathanmcadam8966]

Pandiatonicsm is such a useless word

[@leopilsudski8168]

Isn't that the same as the term 'linear harmony'? Just another way contemporary theorists try to describe any unexplainable diatonic-ish changes in modern harmony. I bet Igor just borrowed these chords from his mind with no reason other than the emotional circumstances...

[@shevek5934]

@@leopilsudski8168 "Unexplainable"? It's bad enough to attribute Stravinsky's writing to the arbitrary whims of instinct - you might as well not bother to analyze the piece at all - but it borders on anti-intellectual to go so far as to claim that nobody ELSE could possibly give a more insightful analysis. Stravinsky took longer to compose each of his works than almost any other composer. What was he taking his time on if not to think intentionally about his compositional choices? The inability to analyze this work using standard systems of analysis should not be the end of curiosity, but rather the beginning of a refusal to be satisfied with anything less than an analysis that accounts for the feeling of musical inevitability, that sense one gets that each note in a masterwork was the only possible choice the composer could have made. An analysis, in other words, that gives at least a hint as to how a composer might arrive at those choices on purpose.