The Rite of Spring

             When I listened to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring last weekend, it was the very first time I had ever heard of it.  Without any background information on the piece, I will be honest: it blew my mind.  Seeing as how this is Music History Contemporary, obviously the piece is contemporary, but I had never heard anything like it from any musical era.  After spending a week studying both the piece and Stravinsky, it has become even more exciting for me once learning how it was written and the publicity that surrounded its debut.

            The piece itself is apparently a collage of folk songs tweaked, transposed, and altered to create many of the motifs.  When Dr. Joyce told us this in class, I didn’t believe him at first.  It was so unique-sounding the first time I listened to it; how could it be created from different folk tunes?  Folk tunes are generally happy and simple; this piece has many dark and ominous parts to it, like the very beginning of The Augurs of Spring, Dances of the Young Girls on page 12 of the score.  The strings have staccato eighth notes while the horns have eighth notes on the off beats.  There are a lot of accidentals in this section of the piece.  However, there are many different folk tunes found throughout the piece.  In one of the handouts from class, there are excerpts from this piece, such as measure 49, that sounds particularly close to a Russian folk song called “Spring Rounds.” 

            The publicity surrounding the debut of this piece as an opera was very interesting to learn about as well.  This was written about in an article entitled “The Riot at the Rite: Not So Surprising After All” by Truman Bullard.  Today, music like this is received rather well, because our generation is all for experimentation and being unique.  In the early 1900s, however, this was not the case.  Bullard states in the first paragraph “…that historic premiere turned a fashionable Parisian audience into a mob of shouting, whistling, stamping, and even fist-fighting partisans.”  However, in the rest of the article, we find out that the management of the Ballets Russes, where the ballet premiered, was behind the publicity that caused this uproar.  Diaghilev would invite people to their rehearsals to “admire his original choreography” and then they would leave and talk about it all over Paris.  Before opening night, everybody was talking the ballet and what to expect.  This story about gaining notoriety about the ballet before it was even premiered made me really think when I listened to it again.  Combining that with the short clip we watched of the beginning of the ballet helped me understand how exciting creating this ballet must have been.  The piece itself is exciting and thrilling when you listen to it, even after the first time; why shouldn’t it have come into the world amidst the same type of excitement?