motet notes - Stravinsky

In 1960, Cambridge University began drawing up a plan for a new English hymnal, and Stravinsky was among the composers asked to contribute to the new volume. After consulting with his friend Eliot, Stravinsky selected "The dove descending breaks the air" (Part IV of Eliot's "Little Gidding") as the text for the a cappella anthem.
Stravinsky was not one to take the choice of text lightly. Eliot was famous, of course, for his deeply Christian sentiments, and Stravinsky was an equally devout man in his own way; it is fitting that these two giants of twentieth-century creativity should come together through the vehicle of their shared religion.
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The Anthem, which is thoroughly twelve-tone in organization (but which, like many of the composer's serial works, by no means abandons traditional harmonic gestures altogether) comprises two fundamentally interconnected sections of music – one for each of the two stanzas of verse. The first stanza opens to a lengthy duet for alto and soprano, the tenor and bass offering their support only for the final three lines of the seven-line stanza. Precisely the opposite plan is carried out in the second half of the work; now the tenor and bass are given their own duet, and the two upper voices must wait until the fifth, six, and seventh lines of the stanza to join back in. Eliot's text is full of word repetitions, and Stravinsky uses this feature as a means of constructing some very powerful repeated musical gestures. All of the motion at the end of the anthem is directed towards a final resolution to a minor third (outlined by the last two notes of the anthem's tone-row) that seems entirely approachable as a kind of tonal cadence, especially considering the prominent leading tone that immediately precedes it.

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