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The Progress Of A Motive In Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, Joseph N. Straus

Publications and Research

The progress of this passage from sketch to final version follows what for Stravinsky is a reasonably common pattern in the composition of The Rake's Progress. The initial sketches tend to be rhythmically square and harmonically rudimentary. They often have the appearance of a simple, classical prototype. As musical ideas are brought to a more final state, the sketches often become increasingly free rhythmically and increasingly remote from classical tonal norms harmonically. A significant aspect of Stravinsky's compositional process in The Rake's Progress, as documented by the sketches, involves the explicit transformation of relatively traditional tonal prototypes. In …