Stravinsky: Petrouchka
PROGRAMME NOTES
written by JASPER CROONEN
Joan Tower Sequoia (1981)
Camille Pépin Les Eaux célestes (2022)
Igor Stravinsky Petrouchka (version 1947)
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24.04.2026 FLAGEY BRUSSELS
26.04.2026 FLAGEY BRUSSELS
Drawing with tones and strings
« You’re a doll. »
It is a line you will almost certainly have heard in American films. Usually it comes from the mouth of a burly cowboy or sheriff, delivered in a half-empty diner along a largely deserted highway to the middle of nowhere. A place where time seems to have stood still. For however well meant — even friendly — the remark may be, today it sounds dated and patronising. There is a trace of condescension in that ‘little doll’.
In this concert, gender roles are turned on their head. With Igor Stravinsky’s Petrouchka, it is the men who end up in the puppet theatre, flanked by two works by female composers.
That said, it is probably best to stress straight away that we should not attach too much importance to the gender of the creators. ‘I hope that I bring a unique aesthetic to my music not as a woman, but as a composer,’ Joan Tower explains in an interview. ‘I honestly cannot hear any difference between music written by a man or by a woman.’ Camille Pépin is equally clear: ‘You should not programme us because we are women. You should programme us because our works are compelling and interesting.’
Extra-musical inspiration
The music itself, then—and compelling and interesting it certainly is in this programme. What unites these three works is their strongly visual, narrative quality. Petrouchka, as ballet music, is the most obvious example. With his score, Stravinsky sets out to give sound to the story of the animated puppet and to illustrate the accompanying choreography for Les Ballets Russes. He bases his melodies on folk tunes, anchoring the scenes in both place and time. An attentive listener can, for instance, deduce from the use of the ‘Song of the Volochobniki’ that the ballet is set in St Petersburg.
The composer also assigns a recurring motif to his protagonist: the so-called Petrouchka chord. To construct it, Stravinsky stacks the triads of C major and F-sharp major on top of one another, producing a chord made up of the notes C#–F#–A#–E–G–C. Because the interval between C and F-sharp is a tritone — the diabolus in musica — the result is an ominous, mocking, venomously threatening sound.
Les eaux célestes
The two other works on this programme are not purely abstract either—that is, they are not pieces devoid of any extra-musical source of inspiration. Les Eaux célestes by Camille Pépin continues the tradition of the symphonic poem, of which Richard Strauss was one of the nineteenth century’s most prominent advocates. The aim here is to depict something purely through music, without the aid of staging or choreography. Strauss, for example, painted nature (Eine Alpensinfonie), literary works (Don Juan, Also sprach Zarathustra), and even the agony of death (Tod und Verklärung) in sound.
In Les Eaux célestes, Camille Pépin recounts in four movements the Eastern legend of Orihime, the weaver daughter of the god of heaven, and Hikoboshi, the celestial herdsman. Like Stravinsky, she links specific motifs to the main characters. Where Stravinsky used a chord — a harmonic motif—Pépin opts for two distinct melodies. The first, F#–E–F#–D–E–C#–F#, alludes to Nuages by Claude Debussy and, through this intertextual gesture, evokes the cloud-weaver Orihime. The second motif (E–F#–A–B–C#) represents her beloved Hikoboshi.
But, again like Stravinsky, Pépin goes a step further. It is not enough to capture the principal characters in sound; her writing also seeks to make clear where the action takes place. She does so by using a pentatonic system, rather than the Western heptatonic scale of seven notes. Pentatonicism is far more common in the traditional music of China and Japan, where this myth originated. Pépin also deploys instruments that evoke associations with the Far East, such as marimba, gong, and celesta, and uses characteristic cellular rhythms found in forms of Chinese theatre like Xiqu.
Sequoia
Of the three, Sequoia is the least overtly programmatic work, although with such a title a nod to the arboretum seems hard to avoid. For Joan Tower, however, the intention was not to refer literally or pictorially to the red-barked giants. Rather, the title points to the act of balance through which nature allows these trees to grow to such staggering heights. In her own work, Tower sought to achieve a similar musical equilibrium. ‘Long ago,’ she says, ‘I recognized Beethoven as someone bound to enter my work at some point (...) Even though my own music does not sound like Beethoven's in any obvious way, in it there is a basic idea at work which came from him. This is something I call the "balancing" of musical energies.’
Even if the title is not meant to be descriptive, it is hard as a listener not to make the connection with the mighty tree. Sequoia is a monumental work, at times boisterous and forceful, much like the towering trunks that assert their presence in the landscape. By giving the piece this title, one cannot help but hear the grandeur of those trees.
In short, these are three works in which music is more than a purely abstract play of sounds. Each in its own way, Stravinsky, Pépin, and Tower use musical means to evoke something tangible: a character, a mythical space, a fragile balance of forces. Petrouchka may be a marionette, but in all three cases the composition itself becomes a kind of puppet theatre, in which the composers pull the strings with sound.
