Behind the Notes in Stravinsky's Rite of Spring

Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring

The most influential classical work of the 20th century, establishes a new musical frontier of dissonance, primitive rhythms, and colors/textures.

Less than a year after the premiere of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, a Parisian audience reacts to the premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring with the riot heard around the musical world, propelling this third Nijinsky-commissioned ballet into the stratosphere where it still remains, the most notorious and highly regarded masterpiece of the 20thcentury. Stravinsky’s dream of a Russian pagan sacrifice in an atmosphere of wild primitivism became an actual sacrifice of tonality for the God of Spring, and with it, the birth of the modern musical world.  

Stravinsky’s Dream
While he was completing The Firebird, Stravinsky said “…there arose a picture of a sacred pagan ritual: the wise elders are seated in a circle and are observing the dance before death of the girl whom they are offering as a sacrifice to the god of Spring in order to gain his benevolence.” He wrote later “I wished to express the bright reawakening of nature, which is restored to new life—a full, spontaneous reawakening, a reawakening of universal conception.”

Rite of Spring Premiere
The premiere on May 23, 1913 was greeted with pandemonium— whistling, feet stamping, even honked auto horns. Debussy stood up imploring people to listen to the music. The curtain was dropped mid-scene and Stravinsky fled the theater in distress: “I knew the music so well and it was so dear to me that I couldn’t understand why people were protesting against it prematurely without even hearing it through.” Doesn’t that sound similar to Schoenberg’s protestations to reactions to his own music? But unlike Schoenberg, Stravinsky overcame opposition. A year later, in 1914, Pierre Monteux conducted Rite of Spring as a concert work, and that performance was a rapturous success. Stravinsky was carried out of the theater like a conquering hero and the Rite of Spring achieved its mark on eternity.

A Leap of Sonic Imagination
The miracle of Stravinsky’s three early ballets is that within four years, they span a stylistic change even greater than say Beethoven’s entire stylistic evolution of three periods over his lifetime. Petrushka is a quantum leap beyond The Firebird in the way it establishes entirely original techniques of compositional editing, polytonality, and rhythmic/ostinato layering. Yet The Rite of Spring seems twice as revolutionary as even Petrushka, taking the brilliant orchestration of Firebird and the new collage and rhythmic techniques of Petrushka, and adding them both to an unprecedented world of dissonance and energy. 

This is not Schoenberg’s atonality, where melodies and chords are so chromatic that they never permit a single tonal center to dominate, but rather two to a dozen different tonal layers, all simultaneously competing and merging into original sonic textures. For instance, the famous dissonant chord of the Dance of the Adolescents is actually a superimposition of two different tonal chords—E major and E flat dominant 7th.  The deliciously other-worldy sound that begins the second part of Rite of Spring is actually 3 different tonal triads sounding together—D minor, E flat minor, and C sharp minor. 

Where Schoenberg in Pierrot Lunaire conceives what he insisted was the next evolutionary step in music, Stravinsky looked into an imagined past, a primitive world that preceded the straitjacket of tonal organization and square rhythms. He mined motives in Russian folk music to evoke perhaps their original creative essence. They recur in uneven lengths and on different beats. They double in fourths or seconds instead of tonal thirds, and sometimes in a ragged fashion, not quite together, the way friends sing Happy Birthday together in different intervals and varying rhythms and speed. Stravinsky builds atmospheric webs layering many different folk motives together, each developing in its own irregular way so that no clear meter seems at play.

Then there is his rhythmic revolution. From the very first measures, Stravinsky combines several tricks of notation—changing meter, tuplets, and grace notes—to create a melody that when performed sounds freely improvised, divorced from any regular sense of pulse.  in the final Sacrificial Dance, practically every measure is written in a different meter. It becomes impossible to predict an accent pattern. And many of those meters are irregular—2/16, 3/16, 4/16/5/16, 2/8, 3/8, 5/8, 7/8, etc. Borrowing from African drumming, Stravinsky also includes polyrhythms—different looped patterns layered on top of one another. On top of these devices are his additive rhythms, figures that never repeat the same way, instead adding and subtracting notes to create chains of irregular lengths. As Schoenberg was emancipating dissonance with atonality, Stravinsky here emancipates rhythm from the symmetrical constraints of tonal music. The rhythmic structures that neatly divide music into either two or three equal parts are disintegrated.

Structure of the Rite of Spring
The Rite of Spring seems a long work, but like Pierrot Lunaire, it is actually a collection of short pieces, specifically 13 pieces between one and five minutes each, organized in two large parts. Part 1 is The Kiss of the Earth with seven pieces; Part 2 is The Exalted Sacrifice with 6 pieces:

Part 1—Kiss of the Earth: 1. Introduction, Augurs of Spring and Dance of the Young Girls, 2. Ritual Abduction, 3. Spring Rounds, 4. Ritual of the Two Rival Tribes, 5. Procession of the Sage, 6. The Kiss of the Earth, 7. The Dancing Out of the Earth

Part 2—The Exalted Sacrifice: 1. Introduction, 2. Mystic Circle of the Young Girls, 3. Naming and Honoring of the Chosen One, 4. Evocation of the Ancestors, 5. Ritual Action of the Ancestors, 6. Sacrificial Dance

Orchestration of the Rite of SpringStravinsky’s orchestration is so original that countless essays have been written on just the very opening bassoon solo. By pushing the bassoon to its highest register, Stravinsky creates a strained and rough sound that invokes a primitive instrument that disguises the sophisticated bassoon. Later a bass clarinet memorably burbles like bubbling tar pits through a thick orchestral soup. Flutes, oboes, and clarinets descend in chromatic scales so quickly that it’s impossible to identify their color; instead we hear a swoosh and swooping that conjures descending birds of prey. With constant shifting of unique instrumental combinations, extended techniques like fluttertongue in the winds and harmonic glissandi in the strings, and a layering of vastly different sounds and textures, Stravinsky transforms the symphony orchestra into a sonic jungle of exotic colors that seem to come from an earlier, raw primeval era. 

Comparing Stravinsky’s revolution to Schoenberg’s
Pierrot Lunaire and Rite of Spring are both equally revolutionary works that break apart the tonal language and open up new musical worlds of harmony and color. In escaping tonal gravity, they both achieve a level of dissonance unprecedented in other music at that time. This is worth keeping in mind, because by and large, concert audiences to this day still listen to music from a tonal framework. And despite the relative popularity of both works, they also established the trend that continues to alienate the majority of concert audiences to contemporary music. The majority of listeners still have not made that shift in musical language. 

There are many ways to climb a mountain, and Schoenberg and Stravinsky took different paths. Schoenberg increased the density of chromaticism to keep any one key center from gaining a toehold. He observed the trajectory of music history towards increasing dissonance and intentionally pushed it beyond the edge. This density creates a continual maximum dissonance as well as innumerable original harmonies. Schoenberg felt that by eliminating the resolution of dissonant harmonies to a tonal center, he was effectively eliminating the concept of dissonance itself. However, a continual barrage of chromatic density creates intensity, but also fatigue. We need to expend a great deal of “listening energy” to truly hear the recurring musical ideas within Schoenberg’s density.  

Stravinsky created a similar level of density not by imagining the future, but by reimagining the past. Layering different modes simultaneously and superimposing complex chords on top of each other is another way to obscure a key center and produce a high level of dissonance. Stravinsky intensified this dissonance further by incorporating and reimagining the complexity of non-Western rhythm. The complexity of Western harmony requires symmetrical rhythms. Stravinsky eliminates those square rhythms and the harmony also stars to float and lose its straitjacket of coherence.  Sounds shift relative to each other forward and backward, sliding freely. To keep this from chaos, Stravinsky relies heavily on ostinatos—repeated fragments or rhythms that the ear can hold on to as an anchor to all the complexity. The Rite of Spring is filled with these ostinatos. We nod our heads subconsciously, even if we can’t quite tap our feet—the repetition is too irregular! Ostinatos provide the grounding for jazz and rock music. They are the most elemental musical force perhaps. Maybe that is why Stravinsky’s modernism captivated the imagination and enthusiasm of so many listeners, whereas Schoenberg’s modernism became an enthusiasm for the elite. Stravinsky was a huge stretch, but lovers of Romantic era music could groove to its rhythms. Schoenberg, on the other hand, took a dedication to hear classical structure amidst a thicket of unrelenting chromatic density.

Despite the revolutionary nature of these works, neither Schoenberg or Stravinsky continued to write other works in the same style. Instead, they continued to explore in unexpected directions. One went from intuition to systematic rigor, the other from instinctive primitivism to objective classicism. But these two pieces, Pierrot Lunaire  and The Rite of Spring, both of which preceded the first World War, stand as pillars for musical modernism, influencing concert music even to this day over a hundred years later. 

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