Movements shows that Stravinsky in his seventies was, once again, several steps ahead of his audiences, as he had been so many times during his long career. The question as to why the composer adopted the twelve-tone technique in the 1950s has often been asked. Part of the answer certainly has to do with his desire to impress the new generation, especially Pierre Boulez, with whom he had become friendly. While Arnold Schoenberg was alive, he never would have given his great rival the satisfaction of following in his footsteps. But after 1951, he could feel that he had the field all to himself.

There is no doubt that Stravinsky, with the help of his assistant Robert Craft, threw himself into the study of serial techniques with great enthusiasm. For Movements, he prepared detailed interval charts and devised whole new permutational systems. The work was commissioned by Swiss hotel tycoon Karl Weber for his pianist wife, Margrit, who had exclusive performing rights for a year. Finally, however, it was a young American pianist, Charles Rosen, who ensured the work's success. (Rosen later achieved considerable renown as a musicologist as well.)

In serial music, pitch sequences are subjected to a set of stringent rules. That is why, when listening to such music, the most interesting factors are those that cannot be derived from those rules and bear witness to the composer's musical imagination. Of course, Stravinsky always emphasised that he had been guided by his ear, not his brain, even when setting up the rules. The listener, however, does not primarily hear only pitches, but timbres, dynamics, and forms as well, and these parameters were determined exclusively by the ear.

The work consists of five short movements, played without pause. Stravinsky composed brief bridge passages in between the movements, in which the soloist is silent. The first bridge passage is scored for woodwind, the second for strings, the third for brass, and the fourth marks the only time in the work when the whole orchestra joins together for a short tutti passage.

The individual instruments often play brief motifs of no more than two or three notes; this is a technique Stravinsky had taken over from Anton Webern. Yet the lively rhythms and mixed meters had been a constant presence in his music since The Rite of Spring. Now Stravinsky, learning from Stockhausen and Boulez, enriched his stylistic vocabulary by complex asymmetrical divisions. In this context, the ending of the first movement is particularly interesting, as it resembles a four-line “song” that stops at regular intervals on a long-held cadential tone.

Movements is considered to be one of Stravinsky's most difficult works. Yet George Balanchine choreographed it, just as he did so many of the composer's works – making clear that, for all the serial techniques used, the Russian master was still thinking primarily in terms of musical gestures.