2. Stravinsky

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971). The succès de scandale that followed the first performances of The Rite of Spring in 1913 has made it perhaps the most notorious modernist composition of the twentieth century. Though it was the famous impresario Sergei Diaghilev who commissioned the work for his ballet troupe, Stravinsky was adamant that the work should be able to stand on its own as a concert piece, and we will somewhat arbitrarily leave aside the dramatic aspects for purposes of this discussion. In any event, Stravinsky did not see the music as illustrating the ballet, but rather regarded the ballet as a visual extension of the musical devices employed in the work. There is indeed little to relate in the way of plot in The Rite of Spring. Wrote Stravinsky in his autobiography, "I saw in imagination a solemn pagan rite: wise elders, seated in a circle, watching a young girl dance herself to death. They were sacrificing her to propitiate the god of spring."

Your first reaction might be to find irony in the fact that this icon of modern music was motivated by an impulse so common in nineteenth-century Romantic music, the fascination with a mythic national/ethnic past (in this case, Russia's). Suppress that urge, for irony suggests an underlying incongruity between intended and actual outcomes, when modernist musical technique was in fact never the artistic tabula rasa polemically portrayed by the generation that followed Stravinsky and Schoenberg. The Rite of Spring drew heavily upon folk melodies, but simply refused to do so with the kind of ham-handed tunefulness and oom-pah rhythms that one encounters in so many ethnographic musical arrangements tricked up as original "artistic" compositions. Stravinsky strenuously denied these sources, even as he devoted remarkable effort to scholarly study of ethnographic texts. The Augurs of Spring, the Ritual Abduction, and the Spring Rounds sections from Part I were all taken from an anthology of Lithuanian folk songs compiled by a Polish priest named Anton Juszkiewicz. Other tunes came from compilations by Stravinsky's own teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov. Other tunes seem to have been transcribed by Stravinsky himself during summers at his family estate in Ukraine. Insofar as nineteenth-century nationalist currents served as motives for this kind of historicizing spadework, they can properly be said to have been crucial sources for modernism in music.

Whole books have been written about The Rite of Spring, but let's just take a few small examples of innovation. As you listen, note how the composer repeatedly changes the time signature, breaking down the sense of rhythm that might otherwise lend structure to the work. And rather than employ different combinations of the more pleasant thirds and sixths:

, 

Stravinsky relies heavily on more austere fourth intervals

 

in the opening, a hint of the greater chromatic violence to come. In the second portion of Part One, The Augurs of Spring, we encounter the most famous chord

 

of the entire piece. This is perhaps the most concise illustration of what Stravinsky did to the diatonic system. You might think this is somehow atonality, but it is actually bitonality, using two keys at once. There is a nice E major triad (though Stravinsky's notation conceals this):

 

And a perfectly reasonable E-flat major triad

that happens to have an added seventh to make this

. 

Add them together and you get this:

. 

Paris was shocked! Without further ado, listen to a complete performance of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring: 

Part 1:

 

Part 2:

.

For a taste of Sergei Prokofiev's own experimentation with primitivism, try the somewhat less earnest "Tshushbog and the Dance of the Spirits"

from his Scythian Suite (1915), likewise built around myths of pre-historic forerunners north and east of the Black Sea. Listen for similar rhythms of "enemy on the attack" later in the fifth movement of Alexander Nevsky (below).