This week's selection for The Gaggle Music Club is Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements. Completed in 1945, the symphony is one Stravinsky's most important late works. Commissioned by the New York Philharmonic Symphony Society, the symphony premiered on Jan. 24, 1946 at Carnegie Hall, conducted by Stravinsky himself.

Often called Stravinsky's “first American symphony,” the composition shows his neoclassical language at its most taut: sharp orchestration, motor-like rhythms, lean textures.

Although Stravinsky often denied overt programmatic meaning in his music, he later admitted that the Symphony in Three Movements was a “war symphony.” The first movement, for example, was inspired by newsreel footage of wartime scorched earth tactics. Its violent rhythms and jagged piano writing reflect mechanized destruction. The final movement was inspired by Allied military advances, including the crossing of the Rhine in 1945. The march rhythms and the relentless drive exude a sense of military triumph. It is a major 20th-century war symphonies, though completely different in idiom from those of Shostakovich and Vaughan Williams.

Stravinsky left Europe after the outbreak of World War II and settled in the United States, first in Cambridge, Massachusetts, then in Hollywood. He was financially insecure and eager to find work composing film music. He signed with RKO Pictures and pursued several projects, almost all of which collapsed.

Several passages of the Symphony in Three Movements grew out of abandoned film scores, including “Song of Bernadette” and “Jane Eyre,” both from 1943. Stravinsky sketched the music for “Song of Bernadette,” but the studio executives didn't like it. Stravinsky reworked some of the fragments into the Symphony. Stravinsky drafted a piano score for “Jane Eyre,” but this too was rejected. Some of that score also found its way into the Symphony.

Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements is both concise and dense, and its inner construction shows how his “neoclassical” style had matured over the years.

The work begins with a jarring piano-and-orchestra gesture: stabbing chords and leaping figures. The piano is used percussively, like an extension of the percussion section. The main motif of the first movement is a jagged, syncopated theme in the strings, with irregular accents; it is reminiscent of his earlier "Rite of Spring" style, but leaner. Musically, the movement captures mechanization, relentless drive, destruction — a musical analogue to wartime footage.

The second movement has a lyrical, quasi-pastoral quality, imbued though with irony and distance. It originated from the sketches for "The Song of Bernadette." Its intent, Stravinsky later explained, was to evoke a religious vision. The theme is Introduced by flutes and muted strings. War is presented as contrast to a vision of innocence.

The third movement depicts the advance of the Allied armies across Europe. It has the character of a march — insistent, vigorous, motor-driven. The opening is bright with a syncopated theme in the strings, with the piano acting as a percussive motor. The movement builds up into huge block chords, brass fanfares and pounding percussion. The coda is triumphant, with hammering piano and brass, ending in a blaze of orchestral affirmation.

The Symphony in Three Movements revives some of the raw energy of "Rite of Spring," particularly in its pounding rhythms. But there are also echoes of Stravinsky's neoclassicism. The symphony stands as a bridge between Stravinsky's European neoclassicism and his later American serialist period. The work draws together his 1920s-40s style but intensifies it with wartime violence. After the Symphony in Three Movements, Stravinsky never again composed a large-scale tonal symphony. Instead, he embraced serialism in the 1950s and began to use the twelve-tone technique.

At its 1946 premiere, the composition was hailed as his “American symphony.” Some critics admired its clarity and wartime power; others thought it too fragmented, too cinematic. Today it is regarded as one of Stravinsky's most successful neoclassical orchestral works, alongside "Symphony of Psalms" and "Dumbarton Oaks."

The Symphony in Three Movements stands as Stravinsky’s last great tonal symphony, a wartime work of violence and fractured montage, pulling his neoclassical methods toward something harder, leaner and, yes, more American.

In this performance from 2018, Michael Tilson Thomas conducts the New World Symphony.