ABSTRACT
Stravinsky’s style of composition underwent numerous changes during his long creative career. Yet in each of his works his music retains an unmistakably Russian character. Stravinsky’s themes in his music of Russian inspiration are firmly embedded within the interval of a fifth. The falling cadences of a perfect fourth are much in evidence. The melodies are remarkably short; they generate variations by adding swift grace notes in a manner of the Russian popular popevka, a characteristic melodic strain of ancient Russian extraction. (In binary melodic structure, typical of Russian folk music, such a popevka often opens with a zapev, a pre-melody, and concludes with a pripev, a post-melody. These Russian words are all derived from the root pev, the past participle form of the verb pet, to sing.) Within this narrow melodic compass, Russian modality offers a field of rich intervallic variety. It allows a free interchange of the major and minor modes; in the dissonant superimposition of a major triad upon the minor of the same tonic a homonymic bitonality is created. Such a bitonal homonymic triad is employed explicitly by Stravinsky as a thematic motto in his early choral work Zvezdolikyi; it also serves as the opening chord in the second part of Le Sacre du Printemps. When such homonymous major and minor triads are involuted horizontally, a semitone formed in the center of the chord provides a starting point for chromatic developments.
