Stravinsky's Choral Music

Extract

For well over fifty years Stravinsky has been a prolific choral composer, using the medium widely within the framework of larger works, as well as turning out a stream of works which are either exclusively choral or which depend sufficiently on chorus to be categorised alongside such pieces. Even so the flow has never been entirely regular. Of the 102 separate works listed in Eric Walter White's recent survey, 20 are in some sense choral (I include operas like The Nightingale or The Rake's Progress, both of which have appreciable parts for chorus, as well as one like Oedipus Rex, where the chorus is a central and substantial figure in both the music and the drama). But no less than seven post-date The Rake's Progress—a proportion of seven out of 19 works—and all but two of these are settings of religious texts. Out of twelve choral works composed before The Rake only six are religious, and of these half are short unaccompanied settings of liturgical texts.