The impetus for this week’s video, my tran­scrip­tion of Stravin­sky’s Symphonies of Wind Instru­ments, goes back about a year, and touches on almost every aspect of my musical life. It’s a piece I’ve known for awhile, and I’d turned to it as an example of “modular” form for a couple of my compo­si­tion students, but in doing so, realized I didn’t fully under­stand it myself. It’s famously cryptic music, put together from lots of little stylized, angular gestures, which recur and evolve in intri­cately nested patterns. But the core of it is the last few minutes—a spacious, mournful chorale based around plain­spo­ken minor-7^th chords that casts the preced­ing music in an entirely differ­ent light. I think it’s one of the most moving passages in all of Stravinsky—not in a heart-on-the-sleeve way, but more like the feeling of walking from a small room into a vast cathedral.

This music, as it turns out, was composed for an album of short pieces in memory of Debussy contributed by various composers, exactly 100 years ago. Stravin­sky expanded and elab­o­rated on it in the first version of Symphonies of Wind Instru­ments that same year (the word “symphonies” used rather self-conciously in the antique sense, to mean “sounding together”). In discov­er­ing this, and playing through those wonder­ful chords, trying out differ­ent voicings, I began to wonder if the rest of the piece would be possible to play on the piano, too. So the tran­scrip­tion began more as a way of studying Stravin­sky’s compo­si­tional process, trying to figure out how this seem­ingly unbal­anced struc­ture stood up so well.

At the same time, I’d begun writing a piece for flute-viola-harp trio, and Stravin­sky’s modular forms began to have an effect on that, too. In my writing, I’m usually quite concerned with the tran­si­tions between things—hiding them, blending them, obvi­at­ing the need for them in various crafty ways—but here was a chance to try some­thing differ­ent. The material still develops, moving from thing to thing, it’s just that the seams are exposed, and in fact, become impor­tant musical events in themselves.

Over the summer, I started prac­tic­ing the tran­scrip­tion I’d finished, which had turned out to be quite a thorny nine minutes of music. Stravin­sky’s wide chord spacings and unpre­dictable layer­ings make for some real pianis­tic puzzles. At times, this demanded some triage—figuring out which notes to forgo, in which octaves, to retain the greater sense of harmony and orches­tra­tion. I thought it would be inter­est­ing to see the musical and logis­ti­cal solu­tions behind some of these, so I filmed the finished version in the combi­na­tion “hands-down/s­core follower” style, which owes a creative debt to Robert Edridge-Waks’s I Still Play videos from this past spring. Between teaching, to writing, to perform­ing, and produc­ing a video record­ing, Symphonies has been a mainstay of my year, and I can’t think of another 100-year-old I’d have preferred to spend it with.

N.B. if you’re inter­ested in a real Stravin­sky schol­ar’s analysis of the piece, I recom­mend this Taruskin talk (though the perfor­mance in it is a little rough).