Anti-Tonal Stravinsky

"I am becoming," said 77-year-old Igor Stravinsky, "not less but more of a serial composer." The reference was to his latest work, a twelve-minute exercise in what the most famed living composer calls "anti-tonality." Titled Movements for Piano and Orchestra, the work had its world premiere last week in Manhattan's Town Hall before an audience that was attentive and respectful, and unmoved.

Stravinsky has experimented more and more daringly in recent years with the serial or tone-row technique developed by his late great rival, Arnold Schoenberg (this technique is built on a freely selected series of individual tones rather than on the limited, key-oriented diatonic scale). But Stravinsky has added some of his own style to the serial method. In his book, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky (Doubleday; $4), Conductor Robert Craft sketched visual projections of musical styles from the simplicity of plain chant via the sound spirals of Atonalist Anton Webern to the newer serialists. Then Stravinsky added his own sketch of his own recent music (see cut). The knobs in the sketch stand for notes, suggest that Stravinsky wants all notes to be heard and considers them more important than do other serial composers, who care more about dynamics and instrumental colors; the leanness of the diagram suggests thinner, simpler orchestration. Says he: "Those younger composers who already claim to have gone beyond, to have exhausted serialism are, I think, making a great mistake.''

Of Movements, Stravinsky adds: "Every aspect of the composition was guided by the forms of the series--the sixes, the quadrilaterals, the triangles . . . The listener has to get down and look up through the series, so to speak." Scored for a moderate-sized orchestra and piano (expertly played at the premiere by Mar-grit Weber), the piece has no continuity in the normal sense. A lean, nervous composition, it proceeds in jagged skips and jumps. Its impetus derives from its rhythms--crotchety, erratic and often as arresting as a movie played at constantly shifting speeds. "One does not find it a memorable experience--at least not yet," wrote the New York Times's Howard Taubman cautiously. "The trouble may be with the backward listener." A more likely explanation: in his increasing concern with structure. Stravinsky may be losing sight of what he is trying to say.

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