I've always been intrigued by this little passage in Stravinsky's "Fireworks" (op. 4). It seems to me to be many things all at once, each masterfully handled. It's a nifty little canon, a wonderful use of a germ motive to spin out a melody, and a dramatic statement for horn and trumpet.
You can hear it here, right at the beginning.
I'm sure I'm not the first composer to be inspired by it and interested to know how it came to be. Here's what I have so far...
At first glance it appears to be a simple canon between horn and trumpet. (In the excerpt below, I transposed to the concert key and removed a few longer rests between entrances.)
A closer look reveals that everything grows organically. We start with what I call a germ motive, a little chunk from a diminished harmony that the woodwind and strings opened the piece with. At 1., he varies it with a C#, giving it a more more stable sound. At 2., he extends it by a fourth note which now sounds firmly planted in E major (there is a persitent D# diminished-seventh being spelled out behind in the woodwinds and strings which helps this). Then another idea surfaces, a dotted rhythm at 3. made up of only the notes we've already heard. At 4. we hear something like a sequence, beginning a third higher. Now we hear the pitch A, which firmly cements the dominant sound. At 5., he extended the dotted rhythm with an octave leap. And then, at 6., the MAGIC happens. He strings all the little parts together into one melody and presents that in canon.
It's worth noting that on every downbeat in this last canon (at 6.), we hear the B, C#, D#, or F# we saw at 2. To me, this is a fail-safe to make sure that everything he wrote will work in canon without sounding too wacky.
If I were to try emulating this in my own work, I might start with a germ motive just like Igor, and try developing it one step at a time just like this. I doubt that I could come up with anything halfway decent. But then I might try working backwards. I'd write a solid melody that works in a canon, and then back up 2 bars and start chopping it into pieces. I'd work BACKWARDS, taking it apart one note at a time. What is known about how Stravinksy worked? Did he work backwards to write this? Did he ever?
