Wind Symphony (2018)

Through the chinks—
Marks the basement whence a tower in ancient time
Sprang sublime,
And a burning ring, all round, the chariots traced As they raced,
And the monarch and his minions and his dames Viewed the games.

And I know, while thus the quiet-coloured eve Smiles to leave
To their folding, all our many-tinkling fleece
In such peace,

And the slopes and rills in undistinguished grey Melt away—
That a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair Waits me there

In the turret whence the charioteers caught soul For the goal,
When the king looked, where she looks now, breathless, dumb

Till I come.

But he looked upon the city, every side,
Far and wide,
All the mountains topped with temples, all the glades’
Colonnades,
All the causeys, bridges, aqueducts,—and then All the men!
When I do come, she will speak not, she will stand,
Either hand
On my shoulder, give her eyes the first embrace Of my face,
Ere we rush, ere we extinguish sight and speech Each on each.

In one year they sent a million fighters forth South and North,
And they built their gods a brazen pillar high As the sky

Yet reserved a thousand chariots in full force— Gold, of course.
O heart! oh blood that freezes, blood that burns! Earth’s returns

For whole centuries of folly, noise and sin!
Shut them in,
With their triumphs and their glories and the rest! Love is best.

Symphonies of Wind Instruments

In 1908, on the death of his beloved teacher Rimsky-Korsakoff, Igor Stravinsky responded
by composing a work in his memory which was conceived in terms of instrumental ritual and
which he afterwards remembered as the best work of his early period—the Chant funebre —later, unfortunately, lost. Ten years later, the death of
his admired colleague, mentor and friend Debussy caused him to write another memorial composition which stands among his most characteristic and influential masterpieces—the Symphonies of
Wind Instruments, dedicated “To the memory of Claude Achille Debussy.” Debussy died on March 25, 1918. Stravinsky’s earliest sketches for the work that become the Symphonies, including
most of the principal motifs, date from July 1919 and are scored for harmonium. In April 1920, he was invited to contribute a piece to a Debussy memorial supplement of the new musical journal La Revue musicale, and in June he wrote the
final chorale (which had not been among the original sketches). Between July and November, he composed the whole work and scored it for
24 woodwind and brass instruments. The work
is not a “symphony” in the accustomed sense; Stravinsky went back to the word’s ancient connotation of groups of instruments sounding together, and used the plural to indicate that the music is made up of several of these instrumental colloquies. He described it at various times
as “a grand chant, an objective cry,” and “an austere ritual which is unfolded in terms of short litanies between different groups of homogenous instruments.” The overall form of the piece is an apparent challenge to all previously accepted canons of musical architecture. It is a kind of mosaic, made out of discrete blocks of contrasting material, separate yet interlocking, in different but closely related tempi. Stravinsky’s description of the music as a “ritual” however gives the clue to its expressive nature: this is an instrumental liturgy, a burial service, the chorale rounding off the proceedings in something like a Byzantine Alleluia. In this sense Symphonies of Wind Instruments is the forerunner of such later Stravinsky works as the Mass and Requiem Canticles.
—Note by Malcolm MacDonald