''Agon'' is a 22-minute

ballet Ballet () is a type of performance dance that originated during the Italian Renaissance in the fifteenth century and later developed into a concert dance form in France and Russia. It has since become a widespread and highly technical form of ...

for twelve dancers with music by

Igor Stravinsky Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (6 April 1971) was a Russian composer, pianist and conductor, later of French (from 1934) and American (from 1945) citizenship. He is widely considered one of the most important and influential composers of the ...

. It was choreographed by

George Balanchine George Balanchine (; Various sources: * * * * born Georgiy Melitonovich Balanchivadze; ka, გიორგი მელიტონის ძე ბალანჩივაძე; January 22, 1904 (O. S. January 9) – April 30, 1983) was ...

. Stravinsky began composition in December 1953 but was interrupted the next year; he resumed work in 1956 and concluded on April 27, 1957. The music was premiered in Los Angeles at

UCLA The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California St ...

Royce Hall Royce Hall is a building on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Designed by the Los Angeles firm of Allison & Allison (James Edward Allison, 1870–1955, and his brother David Clark Allison, 1881–1962) and completed ...

on June 17, 1957, conducted by

Robert Craft Robert Lawson Craft (October 20, 1923 – November 10, 2015) was an American conductor and writer. He is best known for his intimate professional relationship with Igor Stravinsky, on which Craft drew in producing numerous recordings and books. ...

. Stravinsky himself conducted the sessions for the work's first recording the following day on June 18, 1957. ''Agon'' was first performed on stage by the

New York City Ballet New York City Ballet (NYCB) is a ballet company founded in 1948 by choreographer George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein. Balanchine and Jerome Robbins are considered the founding choreographers of the company. Léon Barzin was the company' ...

at the

City Center of Music and Drama New York City Center (previously known as the Mecca Temple, City Center of Music and Drama,. The name "City Center for Music and Drama Inc." is the organizational parent of the New York City Ballet and, until 2011, the New York City Opera. and th ...

on December 1, 1957. The composition's long gestation period covers an interesting juncture in Stravinsky's composing career, in which he moved from a

diatonic Diatonic and chromatic are terms in music theory that are most often used to characterize Scale (music), scales, and are also applied to musical instruments, Interval (music), intervals, Chord (music), chords, Musical note, notes, musical sty ...

musical idiom to one based on

twelve-tone technique The twelve-tone technique—also known as dodecaphony, twelve-tone serialism, and (in British usage) twelve-note composition—is a method of musical composition first devised by Austrian composer Josef Matthias Hauer, who published his "law o ...

; the music of the ballet thus demonstrates a unique symbiosis of musical idioms. The ballet has no story, but consists of a series of dance movements in which various groups of dancers interact in pairs, trios, quartets, etc. A number of the movements are based on 17th-century French court dances –

saraband ''Saraband'' is a 2003 Swedish drama film directed by Ingmar Bergman, and his final film. It was made for Swedish television, but released theatrically in a longer cut outside Sweden. Its United States theatrical release, with English subtitles, ...

galliard The ''galliard'' (; french: gaillarde; it, gagliarda) was a form of Renaissance dance and music popular all over Europe in the 16th century. It is mentioned in dance manuals from England, Portugal, France, Spain, Germany, and Italy. Dance fo ...

and bransle. It was danced as part of City Ballet's 1982 Stravinsky Centennial Celebration. The title of the ballet, Agon, is a Greek word which means “contest”, “protagonist” but also “anguish” or “struggle”.

Form

Stravinsky laid out the ballet in a duodecimal form, with four large sections each consisting of three dances. A Prelude and two Interludes occur between the large sections, but this does not fundamentally affect the twelve-part design because their function is caesural and compensatory: *I. # Pas-de-quatre (4 male dancers) # Double pas-de-quatre (8 female dancers) # Triple pas-de-quatre (4 male + 8 female dancers) *Prelude *II. (First pas-de-trois: 1 male, 2 female dancers) #Sarabande-step (1 male dancer) #Gaillarde (2 female dancers) #Coda (1 male, 2 female dancers) *Interlude *III. (Second pas-de-trois: 2 male, 1 female dancers) #Bransle simple (2 male dancers) #Bransle gay (1 female dancer) #Bransle double (2 male, 1 female dancers) *Interlude *IV. #Pas-de-deux (1 male, 1 female dancer) #Four Duos (4 male, 4 female dancers) #Four Trios (4 male, 8 female dancers)

Instrumentation

''Agon'' is scored for a large orchestra consisting of

piccolo The piccolo ( ; Italian for 'small') is a half-size flute and a member of the woodwind family of musical instruments. Sometimes referred to as a "baby flute" the modern piccolo has similar fingerings as the standard transverse flute, but the so ...

, 3

flute The flute is a family of classical music instrument in the woodwind group. Like all woodwinds, flutes are aerophones, meaning they make sound by vibrating a column of air. However, unlike woodwind instruments with reeds, a flute is a reedless ...

s, 2

oboe The oboe ( ) is a type of double reed woodwind instrument. Oboes are usually made of wood, but may also be made of synthetic materials, such as plastic, resin, or hybrid composites. The most common oboe plays in the treble or soprano range. A ...

English horn The cor anglais (, or original ; plural: ''cors anglais''), or English horn in North America, is a double-reed woodwind instrument in the oboe family. It is approximately one and a half times the length of an oboe, making it essentially an alto ...

, 2

clarinet The clarinet is a musical instrument in the woodwind family. The instrument has a nearly cylindrical bore and a flared bell, and uses a single reed to produce sound. Clarinets comprise a family of instruments of differing sizes and pitches ...

bass clarinet The bass clarinet is a musical instrument of the clarinet family. Like the more common soprano B clarinet, it is usually pitched in B (meaning it is a transposing instrument on which a written C sounds as B), but it plays notes an octave bel ...

, 2

bassoon The bassoon is a woodwind instrument in the double reed family, which plays in the tenor and bass ranges. It is composed of six pieces, and is usually made of wood. It is known for its distinctive tone color, wide range, versatility, and virtuo ...

contrabassoon The contrabassoon, also known as the double bassoon, is a larger version of the bassoon, sounding an octave lower. Its technique is similar to its smaller cousin, with a few notable differences. Differences from the bassoon The reed is consi ...

, 4

horn Horn most often refers to: *Horn (acoustic), a conical or bell shaped aperture used to guide sound ** Horn (instrument), collective name for tube-shaped wind musical instruments *Horn (anatomy), a pointed, bony projection on the head of various ...

s, 4 trumpets, 3

trombone The trombone (german: Posaune, Italian, French: ''trombone'') is a musical instrument in the Brass instrument, brass family. As with all brass instruments, sound is produced when the player's vibrating lips cause the Standing wave, air column ...

s (2 tenor, 1 bass),

harp The harp is a stringed musical instrument that has a number of individual strings running at an angle to its soundboard; the strings are plucked with the fingers. Harps can be made and played in various ways, standing or sitting, and in orche ...

piano The piano is a stringed keyboard instrument in which the strings are struck by wooden hammers that are coated with a softer material (modern hammers are covered with dense wool felt; some early pianos used leather). It is played using a keyboa ...

mandolin A mandolin ( it, mandolino ; literally "small mandola") is a stringed musical instrument in the lute family and is generally plucked with a pick. It most commonly has four courses of doubled strings tuned in unison, thus giving a total of 8 ...

timpani Timpani (; ) or kettledrums (also informally called timps) are musical instruments in the percussion family. A type of drum categorised as a hemispherical drum, they consist of a membrane called a head stretched over a large bowl traditionall ...

tom-tom A tom drum is a cylindrical drum with no snares, named from the Anglo-Indian and Sinhala language. It was added to the drum kit in the early part of the 20th century. Most toms range in size between in diameter, though floor toms can go as la ...

xylophone The xylophone (; ) is a musical instrument in the percussion family that consists of wooden bars struck by mallets. Like the glockenspiel (which uses metal bars), the xylophone essentially consists of a set of tuned wooden keys arranged in the ...

castanets Castanets, also known as ''clackers'' or ''palillos'', are a percussion instrument (idiophone), used in Spanish, Kalo, Moorish, Ottoman, Italian, Sephardic, Swiss, and Portuguese music. In ancient Greece and ancient Rome there was a similar ...

, and

strings String or strings may refer to: *String (structure), a long flexible structure made from threads twisted together, which is used to tie, bind, or hang other objects Arts, entertainment, and media Films * ''Strings'' (1991 film), a Canadian anim ...

. At no point does the entire orchestra play a tutti. Each section is scored for a different combination of instruments.

Music

This was not the first composition in which Stravinsky employed serial techniques, but it was the first in which he used a twelve-

tone row In music, a tone row or note row (german: Reihe or '), also series or set, is a non-repetitive ordering of a set of pitch-classes, typically of the twelve notes in musical set theory of the chromatic scale, though both larger and smaller sets ar ...

, introduced in the second coda, at bar 185. Earlier in the work, Stravinsky had employed a seventeen-tone row, in bars 104–107, and evidence from the sketches suggests a close relationship between these two rows. The Bransle Double is based on a different twelve-tone series, the

hexachord In music, a hexachord (also hexachordon) is a six-note series, as exhibited in a scale (hexatonic or hexad) or tone row. The term was adopted in this sense during the Middle Ages and adapted in the 20th century in Milton Babbitt's serial theor ...

s of which are treated independently. Those hexachords first appear separately in the Bransle Simple (for two male dancers) and Bransle Gay (for solo female dancer), and are then combined to form a twelve-tone row in the Bransle Double. These three dances together constitute the second pas-de-trois.

Original cast

Todd Bolender Todd Bolender (February 27, 1914 – October 12, 2006) was a renowned ballet dancer, teacher, choreographer, and director. He was an instrumental figure in the creation and dissemination of classical dance and ballet as an American art form. A ...

Barbara Milberg Barbara Milberg Fisher (born 1931 in Brooklyn, New York) was an American academic and professional dancer. She was professor emerita of English at the City College of the City University of New York (CUNY), where she taught for 29 years. She p ...

*Barbara Walczak *Roy Tobias *

Jonathan Watts Jonathan Watts is a British journalist and the author of ''When a Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save the World - or Destroy It''. He served as president of the Foreign Correspondents' Club#Beijing, Foreign Correspondents' Club of China fr ...

* Melissa Hayden *

Diana Adams Diana Adams (March 29, 1926 – January 10, 1993) was a principal dancer for the New York City Ballet from 1950 to 1963 and favorite of George Balanchine, later becoming a teacher at — and dean of — the School of American Ballet. Adams was bor ...

* Arthur Mitchell

Italy

When ''Agon'' was performed in Italy in 1965, Stravinsky was particularly pleased with the performance of

ist

Giuseppe Anedda Giuseppe Anneda (born Cagliari, 1 March 1912 – died Cagliari, 30 July 1997) was an Italian mandolin virtuoso who helped the mandolin gain more importance in the classical music world in the 20th Century. He performed with his instrument in conc ...

. "Bravo Mandolino!" shouted Stravinsky at Anedda and caught up with him to congratulate him and shake his hand.

References

Sources * *

External links

''Agon''
Balanchine Trust

by Bonnie S. Jacobi {{Authority control 1957 ballet premieres 1957 compositions Ballets by George Balanchine Ballets by Igor Stravinsky New York City Ballet repertory New York City Ballet Stravinsky Centennial Celebration Twelve-tone compositions