The ''Symphony in Three Movements'' is a work by Russian expatriate composer

Igor Stravinsky Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky ( – 6 April 1971) was a Russian composer and conductor with French citizenship (from 1934) and American citizenship (from 1945). He is widely considered one of the most important and influential 20th-century c ...

. Stravinsky wrote the symphony from 1942–45 on commission by the Philharmonic Symphony Society of New York. It was premiered by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra under Stravinsky on January 24, 1946. The ''Symphony in Three Movements'' is considered Stravinsky's first major composition after emigrating to the United States. It uses material written by Stravinsky for abandoned film projects. In 1943, Stravinsky had begun work on rescoring his ballet '' The Rite of Spring''. Although the project was left incomplete, his revisit to this earlier composition appears to have influenced the symphony. The ostinatos and shock tactics of the last movement, for example, recalls the "Glorification of the Chosen One" and "Sacrificial Dance" from ''The Rite'', and some woodwind passages are reminiscent of the ballet's introduction. On the other hand, there are passages forecasting the opera '' The Rake's Progress'', notably the openings of the slow movement and the finale. A typical performance of the symphony lasts 20–25 minutes: The symphony is scored for an orchestra of piccolo, 2

flute The flute is a member of a family of musical instruments in the woodwind group. Like all woodwinds, flutes are aerophones, producing sound with a vibrating column of air. Flutes produce sound when the player's air flows across an opening. In th ...

s, 2

oboe The oboe ( ) is a type of double-reed woodwind instrument. Oboes are usually made of wood, but may also be made of synthetic materials, such as plastic, resin, or hybrid composites. The most common type of oboe, the soprano oboe pitched in C, ...

s, 3

clarinet The clarinet is a Single-reed instrument, single-reed musical instrument in the woodwind family, with a nearly cylindrical bore (wind instruments), bore and a flared bell. Clarinets comprise a Family (musical instruments), family of instrume ...

s in B and A (3rd doubling

bass clarinet The bass clarinet is a musical instrument of the clarinet family. Like the more common Soprano clarinet, soprano B clarinet, it is usually pitched in B (meaning it is a transposing instrument on which a written C sounds as B), but it plays no ...

), 2

bassoon The bassoon is a musical instrument in the woodwind family, which plays in the tenor and bass ranges. It is composed of six pieces, and is usually made of wood. It is known for its distinctive tone color, wide range, versatility, and virtuosity ...

s, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3

trumpet The trumpet is a brass instrument commonly used in classical and jazz musical ensemble, ensembles. The trumpet group ranges from the piccolo trumpet—with the highest Register (music), register in the brass family—to the bass trumpet, pitche ...

s in C, 3 trombones, tuba,

timpani Timpani (; ) or kettledrums (also informally called timps) are musical instruments in the percussion instrument, percussion family. A type of drum categorised as a hemispherical drum, they consist of a Membranophone, membrane called a drumhead, ...

bass drum The bass drum is a large drum that produces a note of low definite or indefinite pitch. The instrument is typically cylindrical, with the drum's diameter usually greater than its depth, with a struck head at both ends of the cylinder. The head ...

piano A piano is a keyboard instrument that produces sound when its keys are depressed, activating an Action (music), action mechanism where hammers strike String (music), strings. Modern pianos have a row of 88 black and white keys, tuned to a c ...

harp The harp is a stringed musical instrument that has individual strings running at an angle to its soundboard; the strings are plucked with the fingers. Harps can be made and played in various ways, standing or sitting, and in orchestras or ...

violin The violin, sometimes referred to as a fiddle, is a wooden chordophone, and is the smallest, and thus highest-pitched instrument (soprano) in regular use in the violin family. Smaller violin-type instruments exist, including the violino picc ...

s I & II, violas,

cello The violoncello ( , ), commonly abbreviated as cello ( ), is a middle pitched bowed (sometimes pizzicato, plucked and occasionally col legno, hit) string instrument of the violin family. Its four strings are usually intonation (music), tuned i ...

s, and

double bass The double bass (), also known as the upright bass, the acoustic bass, the bull fiddle, or simply the bass, is the largest and lowest-pitched string instrument, chordophone in the modern orchestra, symphony orchestra (excluding rare additions ...

es. Stravinsky, who rarely acknowledged extramusical inspirations for his music, referred to the composition as his 'war symphony'. He claimed the symphony as a direct response to events of the

Second World War World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...

in both

Europe Europe is a continent located entirely in the Northern Hemisphere and mostly in the Eastern Hemisphere. It is bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, and Asia to the east ...

and

Asia Asia ( , ) is the largest continent in the world by both land area and population. It covers an area of more than 44 million square kilometres, about 30% of Earth's total land area and 8% of Earth's total surface area. The continent, which ...

. The first movement was inspired by a documentary on Japanese

scorched earth A scorched-earth policy is a military strategy of destroying everything that allows an enemy military force to be able to fight a war, including the deprivation and destruction of water, food, humans, animals, plants and any kind of tools and i ...

tactics in

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...

. The third movement deals with footage of German soldiers goosestepping and the Allied forces' mounting success. Material is drawn from projects that Stravinsky had abandoned or reorganized. The

's presence in the first movement stems from a piano concerto that was left incomplete. Music for

is prominent in the second movement, using themes he had written for the film adaptation of Franz Werfel's novel '' The Song of Bernadette''. Stravinsky was initially informally approached for the writing of the film score. On 15 February 1943 he started writing music for the "Apparition of the Virgin" scene. In the event, no contract was ever signed with him, and the project went to Alfred Newman, who won an Oscar. The third movement unites the first two movements by giving equal emphasis to piano and harp. In contrast to Stravinsky's earlier Symphony in C, the ''Symphony in Three Movements'' is much more turbulent and chromatic. While the Symphony in C is based on abstract ideas, his later symphony makes use of pressing social concerns. From a purely musical standpoint, the Symphony hearkens back to Stravinsky's earlier styles of composition while retaining a firmly neoclassical identity. From 1979 to 1980, the American intermedia artist, Jack Ox, produced three visual mappings from Stravinsky's ''Symphony in Three Movements''.http://intermediaprojects.org/pages/Stravinsky.html

Notes

{{Authority control Symphonies by Igor Stravinsky 1945 compositions Stravinsky, Three Movements Music commissioned by the New York Philharmonic Unused film music Neoclassicism (music)