Octet (Stravinsky)

The Octet for wind instruments is a chamber-music composition by Igor Stravinsky, completed in 1923.

Stravinsky’s Octet is scored for an unusual combination of woodwind and brass instruments: flute, clarinet in B♭ and A, two bassoons, trumpet in C, trumpet in A, tenor trombone, and bass trombone. Because of its dry wind sonorities, divertimento character, and open and self-conscious adoption of "classical" forms of the German tradition (sonata, variation, fugue), as well as the fact that the composer published an article asserting his formalist ideas about it shortly after the Octet's first performance, it has been generally regarded as the beginning of neoclassicism in Stravinsky's music, even though his opera Mavra (1921–22) already displayed most of the traits associated with this phase of his career (Walsh 2001, §5).

According to Stravinsky, he composed the Octet fairly rapidly in 1922. After completing the first movement, he composed the waltz that would become the fourth variation of the middle movement. Only after composing this waltz did the idea come to him that it might be a good subject for a variation movement. The seventh variation, a fugato, especially pleased Stravinsky, and the following third movement grew out of this final variation (Stravinsky and Craft 1963, 71). One biographer concludes that Stravinsky began composing the Octet after returning from Germany to Biarritz late in the autumn of 1922, and completed the score on 20 May 1923 (White 1979, 308–309).

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