After his immigration to the United States, Stravinsky settled in Hollywood. It is hardly surprising that he soon started receiving offers from the film studios. In 1941 he was contacted about a score for a film on the Nazi invasion of Norway. Stravinsky's wife Vera found a collection of Norwegian folksongs in a second-hand bookstore in Los Angeles; this was, apparently, the source for the melodies found in the work. Hollywood did not accept the score Stravinsky submitted and therefore, the composer turned the material into a concert suite, premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra on 13 January, 1944, as Four Norwegian Moods.

Stravinsky stayed so close to the original folksongs that the work may be considered an arrangement rather than an original composition. Even so, one need listen no further than the first entrance of the clarinets in the first movement (after a march-like melody played by a pair of horns), to know that this arrangement could not be by anyone but Stravinsky. One splendid orchestrational idea follows another throughout the four movements of this short suite (“Intrada” – “Song” – “Wedding Dance” – “Cortege”), which ends as it began, with two horns playing in parallel motion.