The Ellington Century (35 page)

Around the time he wrote
Agon
Stravinsky stated that “the intervals of my series are attracted by tonality; I compose vertically and that is, in some sense at least, to compose tonally.”
⁸
This music immediately sounds more tonal than most Schoenberg and Berg because Stravinsky used tonally affirming octave doubling of pitches, which the others usually avoided. If Stravinsky had followed serial rather than tonal logic in this Bransle he might have constructed his two-part counterpoint by superimposing the two hexachords to create a twelve-tone aggregate. He did combine a statement of I (in the violins) with II (in the brass), but the versions he used share three common pitches:

I: C-D-E
-F-E-A

II: B
-B-D
-D-E-A

Stravinsky seems to have chosen his pitches not in order to get to twelve but to outline a tonal progression from C to G and back; he even used the inverted retrograde forms of both hexachords to crawl back to C at the cadence (where the trombone adds a Monkish minor second below the C in the violin.

In the short middle section Stravinsky did oppose two complementary hexachords:

D-E-F-G-F#-B

A-B
-C-D
-E
-A

He voiced them, however, to suggest two jazz chords: G7 (in the piano) and C7 (in the clarinets). Stravinsky himself pointed out the jazz character of this passage, a character perhaps most obvious in its rhythm and timbre, but underscored by its harmonies. He even ended the coda jazz style, with a G7 chord with two statements of Hexachord II in the bassoons:

A-B
-C-D
-E
-A

D
-E
-E-F#-G (C)