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ABSTRACT
The riot that greeted the Rite of Spring only found its analytical counterpart some
70 years after its première, with factions headed by Pieter van den Toorn, Richard
Taruskin and Allen Forte. But the analytical tussle was hardly a genuine riot in as
much the differing camps subscribed to a premise of authenticity in order to
stabilise the work under a universal concept: the result was a Riteunified by theory.
The scholars may have battled with each other, but the music was not allowed to
have its own riot. This article suggests a more contingent analysis of the Rite,
focussing on the rebellion of the particular against the universal. The point is not to
champion an anarchic or barbaric reading of the music, which is often attributed to
the work because of the ballet's violent content, but to open the possibility of a new
order that arises from the rioting particular.
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The Rite of Spring started with a riot. Legend has it that it was the music that
incited the audience with its barbaric rhythms and dissonances. In fact it was the
choreography that provoked the scandal: ‘Un docteur, un dentiste, deux dentistes’
shouted its detractors as dancers mimicked movements that seemed to require
some kind of medical attention.1 In a sense, Nijinsky's Rite was precisely what the
doctor had ordered, judging by Diaghilev's comment after the performance: ‘exactly
what I wanted’, said the impresario.2 As for the music, not even the dancers could
hear it for all the noise; Nijinsky had to shout out numbers in the wings to keep
them together.3 According to one reviewer, ‘at the end of the Prelude the crowd
simply stopped listening to the music so that they might better amuse themselves
with the choreography’.4 Obviously Stravinsky could not share Diaghilev's
satisfaction; he was angry.5 Not only was the ballet mocked, but his music –
indeed, the very idea of the Rite which he had honed with the painter and
ethnographer Nicolas Roerich – had been eclipsed by the work of Diaghilev's lover,
and the consolation of some fresh oysters a few days later fortuitously provided the
illness that was to prevent the composer from ever having to see
Nijinsky's Rite again.6
Stravinsky wanted the Rite to be his; all that noise at the première had to be
eliminated, along with the clutter that seemed to clog up his music. First, Nijinsky's
choreography had to go; its eurythmics that tried to choreograph every note as an
enactment of pagan ritual was replaced in 1920 by the more abstract movements
of Léonide Massine. And although Roerich's designs were retained for this
production, the abstraction of the choreography had already neutralised their
meaning, for Stravinsky wanted to suppress ‘all anecdotal detail’ in order to re-
package the Rite as a purely ‘musical construction’; the work was now
‘architectonique’, he said, as opposed to ‘anecdotique’. There were to be no more
‘scenes from pagan Russia’ to espouse Roerich's mystical pastoral of Neolithic
bliss. Stravinsky even went as far as to eliminate his own extra-musical
contribution; his famous dream of a sacrificial virgin dancing herself to death was
no longer the vision that inspired the work but was sidelined as a secondary ‘idea
that came from the music’.7 The ‘music itself’ became the slogan by which he
removed the fingerprints from the collaborative project.8 Not only did this erase the
trauma of the première from his memory, but it destroyed any evidence that would
attach his name to the orientalism, exoticism and nationalism which was beginning
to look out-of-date in the brave new world which emerged after the First World War
(1914–18) and the Russian Revolution (1917). The social order in which the work
was created had collapsed and Stravinsky campaigned to turn the noisy ballet into
the silent structure of a score that could forget its history. At last, having eliminated
its origins, the music could be heard as absolute, pure and structural – and so
become the earth-shattering masterpiece of twentieth-century music.
The purely musical riot is a fiction of music history.9 It was not until the 1980s that
music analysts actually gave the ‘music itself’ the riot it deserved. Pieter van den
Toorn, Richard Taruskin and Allen Forte headed the various factions that would
wage what was literally a pitched battle over the identity of the Rite. Wielding their
octatonic, tonal and pitch-class set theories, they simulated the original riot inciting
each other to higher forms of critical violence – not least in the pages of this
journal.10 Their analyses were in fact far more subtle and eclectic than the
cardboard cut-outs that they accused each other of but, as with most ideological
riots, the finer points were irrelevant. In a riot what counts is noise. But why make
such a racket over a few notes? What could possibly be at stake to justify the
fracas? Nothing less than the meaning of ‘the music itself’ and the survival of music
theory as its dominant discourse; indeed, all that Stravinsky had fought for – the
‘purely musical construction’ of a work – was under threat. With hindsight, this riot
was the final bout of a fight in which the emerging forces of a new historicism, led
by Taruskin, seemed bent on knocking out the claims of music analysis, rendering
the ‘purely musical’ purely meaningless. In particular, Forte's pitch-class set
analysis, intended to unleash the modernist elements in the Rite as a radical atonal
structure, was ridiculed by Taruskin as an ahistorical abstraction, if not a figment of
Forte's music-theoretical imagination.11 The unbridled ‘progress of theory’ as the
future of music's revelation was something to be distrusted and, to the horror of
hard-core analysts, Taruskin regressed to that seemingly inadequate ‘ad hoc’ type
of tonal analysis that they had tried to eradicate from Stravinsky's music. 12 But that
was precisely the point: Taruskin wanted to regress, to return to origins, to tease
out the embryonic clues in the historical and folkloric sources and so tie this work
to tradition, specifically to Stravinsky's Russian tradition that would make
the Rite look old and its sounds conform to some kind of tonal ‘common practice’
that emerged from the nineteenth century.13 For Taruskin, the authenticity of
the Rite of Spring lay in its genesis and not its progress; his wrangling over pitch-
structures, which looted van den Toorn's octatonic theories for historical purposes,
was a way of authenticating the Rite at its roots, and so relocate its identity from
the free-floating constructions of music theory to the very memories Stravinsky
wanted to forget.14 A purely musical riot turned out to be the death of the purely
musical.
But it is questionable whether the music itself really got to riot. The analytical
factions, for all their differences, were united under one fundamental cause:
modernity's quest for cultural legitimacy. This desire to stabilise a revolutionary
work as some kind of ‘Urtext’ or ‘Ursatz’ is an attempt to transcend the passing
fashions of modernity, to capture an act of history as a timeless moment. 15 So
despite their radical rhetoric, the analytical rioters wanted to authenticate the Rite,
to preserve its eternal significance either by fixing it in history as an ‘original’
version or by removing it from history as a musical structure. Either way, the ballet
is made absolute as a transcendent event in the progress of modern music: for
Taruskin the Rite‘made the Russian universal’;16 for Forte, it is the new made
objective. But to impose these universal and objective values on the Rite is to
police it under the law of the whole. In verifying the work, the analytical rioters
disciplined a radical score to consolidate their conservative positions, granting it a
coherent system or a continuous tradition that ultimately suppressed the riot. An
‘authentic Rite’ cannot run amok.
Thus to authenticate the Rite is to contradict it. This has been a perennial problem
since the genesis of the work. Indeed its reception history has been the
authentication of the very foundations that the music seeks to explode. 17 This
friction is already evident at the inception of the ballet: Roerich's pastoral
primitivism, intended to authenticate the ballet as a Slavic ritual rooted in the cycle
of nature, is unmasked by the violence of the music as an Edenic delusion. Indeed,
it is apt that Stravinsky's only contribution to the scenario – the virgin sacrifice – is
the one inauthentic element of the ‘plot’ that nonetheless terrorises Roerich's
spiritual vision of pagan Russia. The same could be said of the folk sources in the
sketches: if they are ethnographically correct – chosen to validate Roerich's rituals,
as Taruskin claims – then the origin they promise is deracinated by the force of
abstraction that obliterates their identity in the score;18 many of these folk tunes
have been flattened by Stravinsky into quartal and whole-tone patterns; they no
longer resemble the source in any meaningful way.19 Of course, such abstraction,
in turn, would become Stravinsky's defence of the work as an architectonic
structure. This is what van den Toorn calls the ‘edifice’ behind the extra-musical
‘scaffolding’; for him, the task of music theory is to survey the foundation on which
this edifice stands in order to certify the work as an authentic construction.20 But
there is no foundation behind the rickety scaffolding. The music's autonomous
structure is merely a retrospective claim violently imposed by the composer on an
unruly and heterogeneous ballet. In this respect, Adorno's notorious polemic
against Stravinsky in the Philosophy of New Music is right: Stravinsky tried to
authenticate his music in an age where authenticity was no longer viable; with the
loss of any binding authority within modern society, Stravinsky simply posited
objectivity as a façade imposed from the outside with a totalitarian force, leaving
the inside empty.21 In the modern world, the authentic is the false. Believing
Stravinsky's rhetoric of objectivity in the 1920s, Adorno probably misjudged
the Rite, ridiculing it as an allegory of proto-fascist deception: the human subject
(the inside) is sacrificed for the pseudo-objectivity of the mob (the outside);
individual expression is absorbed into the collective without mercy. 22 Stravinsky
thought he had eradicated the ‘anecdotal detail’ from the Rite by imposing an
architectonic aesthetic but, as far as Adorno was concerned, his objective
construction merely internalised the plot: the interpretative subject is annihilated by
the unyielding objectivity of the score.23
For Adorno, the musical aesthetic espoused by the later Stravinsky sides with the
oppressors;24 the individual cannot truly riot. Consequently, an analysis that verifies
the Rite as an objective construction would only reinforce Adorno's point; its
unifying systems would be totalitarian, imposing on the music a structure from the
outside. But what if analysis were to allow the music to riot? What if it were to
facilitate the work in defacing the foundations of official culture? Perhaps such a
reading will bring to the surface the unruly and contingent elements in the music
and so undermine the ‘authentic Rite’. But how is music analysis to do this? For a
start, it must jettison the ‘authentic’– the false totality – and focus on
the particular – the individual. In turn, the particular would have to riot. And for the
particular to riot it would have to challenge the totality in two ways: first, its
relationship with the totality would have to be one of negation; the particulars will
define themselves in rebellion against the prevailing order, subverting it, mocking it
and ridiculing its claims to power. Secondly, the relationship would have to be one
of speculation; the unrest, if it is to be productive, must point to a new vision of
what is possible without enforcing any rules; the particulars cannot supplant the
totality and so forfeit their identity in becoming a mob, but they can gesture towards
an emergent whole to which they relate in a contingent and open manner. This
kind of riot would resemble an aesthetic rebellion in as much as the aesthetic is
defined by Kant as a form of reflective judgement that searches for unknown
universals from the particular of an artwork. In fact, Kant's reflective judgement is
Adorno's vision of what new music might promise a world that craves for
authenticity. It would therefore be ironic if the Rite were to satisfy Adorno's vision
by having a riot. He writes:
Aesthetic judgements appear as if in obedience to a rule, as if thought were
governed by a law. But the law, the rule contained in artistic judgement is, to
paraphrase Kant, not given, but unknown; judgements are passed as if in the dark,
and yet with a reasoned consciousness of objectivity. Our search for musical
criteria today should proceed along much the same paradoxical lines; in other
words, we should search for an experience of necessity that imposes itself step by
step, but can make no claim to any transparent universal law. Actually we miss the
point if . . . we posit something like rules where none exist, but only an infinitely
sensitive and fragile logic, one that points to tendencies rather than fixed norms
governing what should be done or not done.25
So let's have a riot.
I
This analytical riot is in two parts: in Part I the particular rebels against the false
totalities; in Part II the particular holds out the possibility of an emergent order. To
prevent the analysis from deviating prematurely towards the whole, the focus will
be on the particularity of one chord, albeit one that repeats itself two hundred and
twelve times in the ‘Augurs of Spring’ (Ex. 1).
Figure Ex. 1 .
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Ideas prior to the ‘Augurs’ chord (from The Rite of Spring Sketches 1911–1913, p. 3)
Surely, such an ‘authentic’ sonority demands a definition. Its significance as both
the inception and the foundation of the work promises to unlock the language of
the ballet; analyse this right, then the Ritecan be analysed. Unfortunately,
Stravinsky claimed that he had no theoretical justification for this chord; his ‘ear
simply accepted it with joy’.30 And the numerous analyses of it have only re-
enforced Stravinsky's statement that there is ‘no system whatever’ in the Rite by
virtue of their very contradictions.31 The chord cannot be ‘authenticated’, but
protests against the prevailing order, refusing to be subsumed under some
theoretical system; in fact, it merely spawns them. As such it functions as the
twentieth-century counterpart to the Tristan chord which, as Jean-Jacques Nattiez
demonstrates, has provoked numerous analytical explanations under different
ideological guises.32 The ‘Augurs’ chord and the Tristan chord flaunt their ambiguity
as a radical moment in music history, justifying their dissonances in the name of
female self-sacrifice. Both sonorities, to borrow Ernst Kurth's description of
the Tristan chord, are ‘independent chord structure[s]’; both function as a kind of
vertical ‘leitmotif’.33 But tonally, their kinship is one of negation rather than
resemblance: the Tristanchord pushes the boundaries of the tonal system to create
a yearning for death that is satisfied when Isolde's dissonances dissolve into the
consonant totality of the final cadence; death for Wagner is universal. Stravinsky's
chord, on the other hand, is tonally inert (Ex. 3). It may recur in the final ‘Sacrificial
Dance’ transposed down a semitone, but the death envisaged here is more a
matter of fact than of yearning; it is not a connection that attempts to draw the
threads of the work together as a moment of completion, but a contingent re-
assertion that violently breaks through the ballet.
Figure Ex. 3 .
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‘Sacrificial Dance’ (The Chosen One): the return of the ‘Augurs’ chord
There is no denying that the chord is a conglomeration of tonal remnants, but what
kind of tonality is this? According to Pierre Boulez, the Rite consists of ‘powerful
attractions set up round poles that are as Classical as could be: tonic, dominant,
and subdominant’.34 If this is the case, then the ‘Augurs’ chord should function
effortlessly within the tonal system with ‘the triad and its extensions as the basis of
harmony’.35 So is it a tonic, dominant or subdominant? For Eric Walter White the
sonority is an ‘inversion of the chord of the dominant thirteenth’.36 This chord is like
an extreme extension of Rameau's harmonic theories, a massive pile-up of thirds,
creating a single dissonant entity; the triads do not operate on recalcitrant planes,
but are bound together by a fundamental bass – . Of course, in order to ground
the chord in this way, White has to re-arrange the notes – as in Ex. 4a. This is
entirely feasible within the tonal system since chords do not lose their identity by
inversion or registral transfer. But to re-arrange Stravinsky's chord in this way is not
simply to re-pattern the notes, but to impute a harmonic background that will turn
the ‘Augurs’ chord back into those yearning dissonances of the Tristan chord (Ex.
4b), replete with a sense of harmonic progression and consonant resolution
towards an major tonic.
Figure Ex. 4 .
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Figure Ex. 4 .
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The definitions provided by Forte and White are at least correct in their
contradiction; the ‘Augurs’ chord is neither tonal nor atonal, and yet simultaneously
promises both. An analysis that champions either extreme would succeed only by
erasing what is particular about the sonority. What Pieter van den Toorn offers in
his codification of the octatonic system, however, is a theory that can
accommodate the contradiction without rearranging the notes of the ‘Augurs’
chord. His brand of octatonicism is neither tonal nor atonal yet retains qualities of
both. It can create triadic formations that perch on four symmetrically organised
nodes [0369], neutralising, at least in theory, a tonal hierarchy based on an
asymmetrical division of the octave (Ex. 6).42
Figure Ex. 6 .
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Figure Ex. 7 .
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Figure Ex. 8 .
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Figure Ex. 9 .
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Figure Ex. 10 .
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Figure Ex. 11 .
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Figure Ex. 13 .
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Figure Ex. 15 .
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Figure Ex. 18 .
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‘Augurs of Spring’
Figure Ex. 19 .
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‘Augurs of Spring’
Commentators instinctively view the ‘Augurs’ chord as the source from which these
fragments emanate, for the chord precedes them in the score. In the sketches,
however, it is the other way round; these melodic fragments come first on the page
along with a host of other figures (see again Ex. 2). So, if anything, the fragments
‘give birth’ to the chord. They are not contained within the sonority, but criss-cross
it. The ‘Augurs’ chord is an intersection of their myriad directions. Hearing the
sonority in this way would mean hovering between possibilities where octatonicism,
tonality and all kinds of modes and scales are in perpetual play, creating the
‘undecidability’ that Whittall regards as a necessary stance in Stravinsky
analysis.117 Such a Derridian reading would subvert the notion of a single origin in
favour of an endless and indeterminate productivity.118 The ‘Augurs’ chord becomes
an entrance to many systems, as if Stravinsky were beginning in transition,
creating a plurality of possibilities. Thus the stereotypical view of Stravinsky's music
as static would give way to a dynamic approach to his harmony.
One way of registering this fluidity is to see the chord as a hybrid set which can
function as a pivot ‘from one sphere to another’. Elliot Antokoletz, for example,
describes the ‘Augurs’ chord as ‘an almost perfect fusion or maximal intersection of
octatonic and diatonic spheres’;119 he lays out the seven notes of the chord as a
scale and explains how the removal of , on the one hand, would leave the
remaining pitches as an octatonic segment, whereas the removal of G, on the
other hand, would leave a diatonic segment (Ex. 20).
Figure Ex. 20 .
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Figure Ex. 28 .
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Figure Ex. 28 .
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Figure Ex. 25 .
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Kalindra-Dorian hybrid
But there is a major theoretical assumption being made here: why is the modal
centre of the melodic lines? Is it because its triad within the chord beguiles the
theoretical eye with its tonal texture? The fact that these two fragments hinge
around , however, challenges the instinctive focus on . Listen again: the
Oriental modes of the ‘Augurs’ chord suggest an entirely different orientation. After
all, is absent in the Kalindra segment, and a Dorian reading of the ostinato
figure on major theoretical assumption is at variance with the pitches of the
‘Augurs’ chord which indicate a Phrygian or pentatonic segment centred on major
theoretical assumption (there is no major theoretical assumption in the upper
segment, only major theoretical assumption). In fact, if Morton's folk source – or for
that matter the ‘Song of the Volga Boatman’– is taken as a model instead of
Taruskin's Dorian alternative, then this Slavic pattern gravitates towards the lower
note; the ostinato is a -centred fragment (see again Ex. 22). Moreover, almost all
the thematic materials in the tableau reiterate as their point of reference (Ex.
26); not only is it the head of the Kalindra motif ( – ), it is also the tail with its
return at No. 26 ( – ); is the reiterated pitch of the theme at No. 19, the theme
of the ‘Young Girls’ at No. 27 and the pre-emptive ‘Spring Rounds’ theme at Nos.
29 + 3.128
Figure Ex. 26 .
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Figure Ex. 27 .
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Figure Ex. 29 .
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Figure Ex. 29 .
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In the first scene, some adolescent boys appear with a very old woman ... . The
adolescents at her side are the Augurs of Spring, who mark in their steps the
rhythm of spring, the pulse-beat of spring.
During this time the adolescent girls come from the river. They form a circle which
mingles with the boys’ circle. They are not entirely formed beings; their sex is
single and double like that of a tree. The groups mingle but in their rhythms one
feels the cataclysm of groups about to form.139
The mingling of these prepubescent figures is a momentary release from the
sexual conflict that is about to erupt: these are unidirectional harmonies for a
unisexual moment. In fact, the ‘Dances of the Young Girls’ in the sketches stop
abruptly at the moment of ‘consonance’;140 the game, it seems, has come to a
premature end. The ‘Ritual of Abduction’, which comes immediately after this
dance in the final version, is not sketched until some twenty pages later, 141 and it is
only after this material that Stravinsky begins to work on transitional ideas that will
connect the two movements together.142 It is as if he had discovered a new game
strategy,143 a transition to a game of mass rape, or as Stravinsky describes it, ‘the
cataclysm of groups about to form’. The virility of spring, for Stravinsky, is not found
in the mingling of the sexes, but in the aggression of differentiation.144 After the
‘consonant’ stasis, the young girls’ theme slips down a semitone from to A (Nos.
30–37), and the harmonies begin to split into recalcitrant layers. The propulsive
accents of the ‘Augurs’ chord return, superimposed over the ‘Dances of the Young
Girls’, until the masculine pulsations take over the final bar (see again Ex. 16).
Although in Cone's terminology there is a synthesis of materials here, this male-
female stratification is more a collision of opposing forces latent in the ‘Augurs’
chord. With the assertion of male dominance, conflict erupts and the chase begins.
The emphatic return of these accents is a call to riot.
And this is perhaps what the ‘Augurs’ chord ultimately is – an incitement to riot. It is
a provocation that demands a new order without prescribing any laws for the
future. Enclosed in this particularity is a multivalent core from which a contingent
order may arise. The chord is a junction where various possibilities are held in
suspended animation; its scalic structure is a force-field of octatonic, diatonic,
triadic and folkloric bits that negate and renegotiate each others’ meaning in search
of a harmonic strategy that is less theoretically dogmatic than dramatically
impulsive. Crammed together, these elements create the ultimate ‘focussed
dissonance’. This is not a dissonance based on pitch; it is one of simultaneously
stratified signs and systems that turn the ‘Augurs’ chord into a dynamic source of
social and sonic conflict. In other words: a riot.
III
‘I am the vessel through which Le Sacre passed’.145 With these words, Stravinsky
concluded his recollections of the origins of the Rite some 45 years after its
première. By turning himself into an empty vessel that funnels the Rite into being,
Stravinsky validates the work as a piece of absolute music, stripping away the
trappings of time and space with all the contingencies and particularities of the
work's history; the concrete reality of the Rite evaporates into the metaphysical,
generalised as an abstract structure that is no longer the property of the balletic
body but of pure thought itself, as if the music were some kind of spirit that passed
through the mind of the young composer. As absolute music, the Rite can
transcend history as a modern icon, acquiring a canonic status to be verified by
music analysis as a universal principle.
It is ironic that Stravinsky needed to purify his music through a Teutonic filter, for
this suppresses the very elements which define the Rite as a radical assault on the
metaphysics of German music that dominated much of the nineteenth
century.146 The Rite is, after all, an adoration of the earth. Unlike Schoenberg,
Stravinsky does not seek the ‘spiritual in music’ by liberating the psyche from the
body to escape the materiality of sound; he liberates music by discovering matter.
This is in fact Adorno's insight into Stravinsky's music, but it is also Adorno's
blindness, for the philosopher's Teutonic prejudice can only see in this ‘animosity
against the anima’ the objectification of the body that turns the Rite into a ‘monad
of conditioned reflexes’.147 The visceral, tactile, somatic energy that harangues
Adorno's ears is the blaspheme of the material particular against the absolute. It
detunes the cosmos of intellectual forms and hurls music down to earth with a
ground-breaking thud that relocates the origins of music away from the universal
towards the particular: this music, Stravinsky seems to say, is not found in the
voice of the soul, but in the pulsations of the human body; it does not originate from
the harmony of the spheres but in the material clods of the earth; its identity is not
merely located in abstract pitch structures but in the noises and textures of socially
mediated signs; its sounds are not pure but encrusted with history. In the Rite,
matter matters, because it is matter that particularises – it embodies things.
The Rite is, to adapt Rivière's phrase, ‘un ballet biologique’.148 That Stravinsky
came to deny this is a betrayal of the work, for what he does in the ‘Augurs’ chord
is to heighten the particular, concentrating its identity as an instant that embodies
the gestures and noises of the ballet. His fixation with the minutest details of
timbre, spacing, attack and accent hones the material properties of sound, just as
his mixture and negation of signs pin-points its social meaning. The material
particularities and local histories from which the eclectic components of the chord
arise do not need to be eradicated in the name of absolute music; rather what
Stravinsky wanted to forget in his later years are the very ‘constraints’ that the
young composer embraced as a source of liberation.
Thus music analysis does not need to generalise the Rite, it needs to particularise
it. The tendency of analysis towards the general, however, has made the particular
appear unanalysable, as if the non-identical can only be grasped in its immediacy.
Frederick J. Smith's reaction is typical: the ‘Augurs’ chord is simply the
‘juxtaposition of two hands on the keyboard’, he states; it ‘was never conceived
intellectually,’ he continues; ‘there is no harmonic analysis called for ... . It was this
bodily placing of hands which gave birth to the sound and not some theoretical
idea that made it possible’.149 Such talk reinforces the opposition in Western
philosophy that separates mind from body. But who thinks without a body? 150 Why
should the material particular defy analysis? Should it not rather liberate it?
Analysis can even inhabit the ‘bodily placing of hands’ that Smith champions.
Stravinsky may have stumbled across the ‘Augurs’ chord at the piano, but there is
a kinaesthetic knowledge in the ‘way of the hands’,151 a knowledge that realises in
the flesh the ‘infinitely sensitive and fragile logic’ that Adorno calls for. 152 In the
‘Augurs’ chord, Stravinsky's fingers, which were programmed for triadic, folkloric
and octatonic doodlings, were probing for solutions to various ethnographic,
choreographic and compositional games, as his own partitioning of the chord at the
piano demonstrates (see again Ex. 13); this manual process is a somatic form of
Kantian reflective judgement. Indeed, Stravinsky himself described his
compositonal logic as an improvisatory search for unknown solutions guided by an
earthy, bodily instinct:
A composer improvises aimlessly the way an animal grubs about. Both of them go
grubbing about because they yield to a compulsion to seek things out ... . So we
grub about in expectation of our pleasure, guided by our scent, and suddenly we
stumble against an unknown obstacle. It gives us a jolt, a shock, and this shock
fecundates our creative power.153
Smith's ‘anti-theoretical’ stance should goad analysis into action, not simply by
protecting the particularity of the chord in negative terms, but positively by
attending to the microscopic details of sound, sign and temporality to hear how
Stravinsky teases out even the most obscure relations in order to improvise an
open future from the creative ‘shock’ of this chord. Riots are not governed by pre-
ordained rules. Stravinsky does not impose an external order on the music, as
Adorno would have us believe, but freely inclines his ear to the plurality of sounds
latent in the ‘Augurs’ chord, divining from the particular and the contingent possible
orders and structures. Such a sound demands a theoretical openness where
everything has to be re-examined and re-negotiated – bass notes, triads,
dissonances, modes, scales, textures and received signs. There is no longer an
automatic connection to tradition or theory but a highly mediated, localised relation
where subtleties in the way the sound is arranged can re-define the meaning of
what seems familiar or obvious about the ‘Augurs’ chord. Only by ‘grubbing about’
in this way can analysis follow Stravinsky's scent and discern in the ‘Augurs’ chord
the rightness of its ‘wrong notes’ and the strangeness of its clichés.
NOTES
1
Marie Rambert, Quicksilver: An Autobiography (London: Macmillan, 1972), p. 64.
2
See Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky (London: Faber,
1979), pp. 46–7.
3
Stravinsky and Craft, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky, p. 46.
4
Louis Vuillemin, ‘Le Sacre du Printemps’, Comœdia Illustré, 31 May 1913; reprinted in François
Lesure (ed.),Anthologie de la Critique musicale: Igor Stravinsky: Le sacre du printemps:
Dossier de Presse (Genève: Editions Minkoff, 1980), p. 21. The translation is taken from
Truman C. Bullard, The First Performance of Igor Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps (PhD diss.,
University of Rochester, 1971), I: p. 144.
5
Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Expositions and Developments (London: Faber and Faber,
1959), p. 143.
6
There were only seven performances of the original Ballets Russes production, four in Paris
and three in London; these were followed by two Russian concert premières under Serge
Koussevitzky in February 1914, and then a triumphant concert performance under Pierre
Monteux at the Salle Pleyel in April where the composer was carried on the shoulders of some
audience members after the performance.
7
Michel Georges-Michel with Stravinsky, ‘Les deux “Sacre du Printemps”’, Comœdia, 14
December 1920; reprinted in Lesure (ed.), Le sacre du printemps: Dossier de Presse, p. 53.
Sections of this interview have been translated in Vera Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Stravinsky
in Pictures and Documents (London: Hutchinson, 1979), pp. 511–12, and Minna Lederman
(ed.), Stravinsky in the Theatre (London: Peter Owen, 1951), p. 24.
8
See Richard Taruskin, ‘A Myth of the Twentieth Century: The Rite of Spring, the Tradition of
the New, and “The Music Itself”’, Modernism/Modernity, 2/i (1995), pp. 1–26. On the Rite as a
collaborative project, see Jann Pasler, ‘Music and Spectacle in Petrushka and The Rite of
Spring’, in Jann Pasler (ed.), Confronting Stravinsky: Man, Musician, and Modernist (Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 53–81.
9
See Taruskin, ‘A Myth of the Twentieth Century’, pp. 7–14.
10
See ‘Letter to the Editor from Richard Taruskin’ and ‘Letter to the Editor in Reply to Richard
Taruskin from Allen Forte’, Music Analysis, 5/ii–iii (1986), pp. 313–37.
11
‘Letter to the Editor from Richard Taruskin’, p. 313.
12
See ‘Letter to the Editor from Richard Taruskin’, p. 315, and ‘Letter to the Editor in Reply to
Richard Taruskin from Allen Forte’, pp. 329 and 333.
13
See Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works
through Mavra (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), I: pp. 849–966, and ‘A
Myth of the Twentieth Century’, p. 14; see also Forte's remarks on Taruskin's ‘ultra
conservative’ historical perspective in ‘Letter to the Editor in Reply to Richard Taruskin from
Allen Forte’, pp. 332–6.
14
Despite Taruskin's allergy to authenticity elsewhere, he is obviously not immune to it himself;
see ‘The Pastness of the Present and the Presence of the Past’, in Richard Taruskin, Text and
Act: Essays on Music and Performance(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 90–154.
15
See Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), p. 9.
16
Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, I: p. 965.
17
Authenticity is modernity's search for the absolute in the absence of its possibility. This is
evident even in Stravinsky's preoccupation with the Rite during his lifetime: he was anxious to
bequeath a definitive Rite of Spring to posterity, but all he achieved by constantly rewriting its
history and revising the score was to undermine his own attempts to authenticate the work,
spawning so many versions of the Rite that the piece does not exist as a single entity. There is
not even an authoritative score of the work, let alone the authentic ‘interpretation’ that
Stravinsky wanted his revisions and recordings to enforce. See Robert Fink, ‘“Rigoroso (
= 126)”: The Rite of Spring and the Forging of a Modernist Performing Style’, Journal of the
American Musicological Society, 52/ii (1999), pp. 299–362.
18
Stravinsky admitted to the use of one folk source (the opening bassoon melody) which is more-
or-less intact as a theme; he revealed this information in André Schæffner's
biography Strawinsky (Paris: Éditions Rieder, 1931), p. 43, n. and plate xxi. Other sources
found by Lawrence Morton, although treated in a cellular fashion by Stravinsky, are still
recognisable. Taruskin, in trying to account for all the folk-like snippets in the sketches has to
resort to a higher level of abstraction in order to connect the source to the score. See
Lawrence Morton, ‘Footnotes to Stravinsky Studies: “Le Sacre du Printemps”’, Tempo, 128
(1979), pp. 9–16, and Richard Taruskin, ‘Russian Folk Melodies in the Rite of Spring’, Journal
of the American Musicological Society, 33/iii (1980), pp. 501–43; revised in Stravinsky and the
Russian Traditions, I: pp. 891–923.
19
See, for example, Taruskin's discussion of a source melody in Ex. 4 of his ‘Russian Folk
Melodies in The Rite of Spring’, p. 517; revised in Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, I: p.
909.
20
Pieter C. van den Toorn, Stravinsky and the Rite of Spring: The Beginnings of a Musical
Language (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987), p. 2.
21
Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music (1949), trans. by Anne G. Mitchell and
Wesley V. Blomster (London: Sheed and Ward, 1987), pp. 135–60. Adorno regards tonality as
the musical equivalent of the Hegelian Absolute, that is, as the foundation that has collapsed in
twentieth-century music, making any objectively binding law in music highly problematic;
instead of negotiating the difficulties, Stravinsky simply imposes an objective style as if
authenticity were still possible without further reflection. On tonality as the Hegelian absolute
see Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Edmund Jephcott
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), p. 21.
22
Ironically, Adorno's reading of the Rite is shared by its champion, Richard Taruskin; see ‘A
Myth of the Twentieth Century’, pp. 14–21. This odd pairing has also been noticed by Tamara
Levitz, ‘The Chosen One's Choice’, in Andrew Dell’Antonio (ed.), Beyond Structural Listening?
Postmodern Modes of Hearing (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), pp. 73–80.
23
For Stravinsky, the performer is not an ‘interpreter’ but an ‘executant’ who follows the
instructions laid down by the composer in the score; see Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in
the Form of Six Lessons, trans. Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl (London: Oxford University
Press, 1947), pp. 121–35; as is well known, these Norton lectures, given by Stravinsky at
Harvard, were ghost-written by Pierre Souvtchinsky.
24
Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, p. 145, and Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Stravinsky: A
Dialectical Portrait’, in Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, trans. Rodney
Livingstone (London: Verso, 1992), p. 149.
25
Theodor W. Adorno, Sound Figures, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1999), p. 148.
26
Robert Craft in Stravinsky (New York: St Martin, 1992), pp. 233–48, suggests from evidence in
Stravinsky's annotations of a four-hand piano score in his possession that ‘Stravinsky had
composed the choreography at the same time as the music’; these annotations are published
as an appendix in Igor Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring: Sketches 1911–13 (London: Boosey and
Hawkes, 1969). Although this is a disputable conclusion, it is clear that Stravinsky was closely
involved with the choreography, despite his attempts to distance himself from Nijinsky's work
after the première. Indeed, in a letter to Max Steinberg dated 5 June 1913, Stravinsky states
that ‘Nijinsky's choreography was incomparable . . . everything is as I wanted’; the translation is
taken from Vera Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents, p. 102.
For a concise discussion of these issues see Peter Hill, Stravinsky: The Rite of
Spring (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 105–17, and Levitz, ‘The Chosen
One's Choice’, pp. 80–4.
27
See Robert Craft, ‘“The Rite of Spring”: Genesis of a Masterpiece’ and ‘Commentary to the
Sketches’ in Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring: Sketches 1911–13, pp. xvii and 4. The opening
page of the sketches displays Stravinsky's thoughts with calligraphic precision, as if the
composer wanted to commence with absolute clarity; the ideas are so crystallised that most
commentators believe that they were fashioned at the piano before the composer committed
them to paper. The page begins with fragmentary ideas which are to be bound together as the
material from the second half of the page demonstrates. Although Stravinsky conceded to
Craft's suggestion that the ‘Augurs’ chord may not have been the first idea, since it was the
composer's habit to compose from top down, the chord initiates the actual composition of the
work in the sketches; the snippets above are ‘random’ ideas.
28
Quoted from film footage of the composer at the piano in the CBS documentary Portrait of
Stravinsky, directed by David Oppenheim; first broadcast 3 May 1966.
29
Vera Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents, p. 597.
30
Craft, ‘“The Rite of Spring”: Genesis of a Masterpiece’, p. xvii.
31
Stravinsky and Craft, Expositions and Developments, p. 147.
32
See Jean-Jacques Nattiez, ‘The Concepts of Plot and Seriation Process in Music Analysis’,
trans. Catherine Dale, Music Analysis, 4/i–ii (1985), pp. 107–18.
33
Ernst Kurth, Harmonik und ihre Krise in Wagners ‘Tristan’, quoted in Carl
Dahlhaus, Schoenberg and the New Music, trans. Derrick Puffett and Alfred Clayton
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 126.
34
Pierre Boulez, Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship, trans. Stephen Walsh (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1991), p. 56.
35
Taruskin, ‘Letter to the Editor from Richard Taruskin’, p. 318.
36
Eric Walter White, Stravinsky: The Composer and his Works (London: Faber, 1966), p. 211.
37
The only possible tonic for this dominant would lie outside the tableau, in the
‘Introduction’preceding the ‘Augurs of Spring’, where the initial bassoon melody returns at the
close transposed down a semitone from A minor to minor, steering the harmonies towards
the ‘Augurs’ chord.
It could be argued that the ‘Introduction’ functions as a tonal fulcrum for the ‘Augurs of Spring’,
turning the movement into a giant dominant domain attached to a slender melody borrowed
from a collection of Lithuanian folk music (see again n.18). Folk tunes are, of course, tonal;
Stravinsky must have been acutely aware of the possibility of a dominant function at this point
because the introduction of the ‘dominant seventh’ ostinato ( ) that coagulates at
the top of the ‘Augurs’ chord is directly adjacent to the folk melody. What is significant is the
composer's meticulous renunciation of this fundamental tonal relationship (tonic-dominant); he
harmonises the ostinato to ensure that its adjacency to minor is heard as a juxtaposition
and not a functional connection, with semitonal clusters and octatonic formations that prevent
the ostinato from aligning itself with an major triad. The thematic and harmonic fragments
may gravitate towards the ‘Augurs’ chord at this point, but it is not a tonal transition. Any sense
of tonality is merely a localised phenomenon, linked to a folk source.
38
See Edward J. Dent, ‘Le sacre du printemps’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 18 June 1921;
reprinted in Lesure (ed.), Le sacre du printemps, Dossier de Presse, p. 71.
39
Louis Andriessen and Elmer Schönberger, The Apollonian Clockwork: On Stravinsky, trans.
Jeff Hamburg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 231. The authors are referring to the
C/ Pétrouchka chord.
40
Constant Lambert, Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline (London: Hogarth Press, 1985), p.
91.
41
See Allen Forte, The Harmonic Organization of ‘The Rite of Spring’, (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1978). Sections of the Rite are also discussed in Allen Forte, The Structure of
Atonal Music (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973), pp. 33, 76, 86–8 and 144–60.
42
See Pieter C. van den Toorn, The Music of Igor Stravinsky (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1983), pp. 48–72.
43
See Richard Taruskin, ‘Chernomor to Kashchei: Harmonic Sorcery; or, Stravinsky's
“Angle”’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 38 (1985), p. 103.
44
Arthur Berger, ‘Problems of Pitch Organization in Stravinsky’, in Benjamin Boretz and Edward
T. Cone (eds.),Perspectives on Schoenberg and Stravinsky (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1968), p. 139.
45
Letter dated 21 July 1911, quoted in Andriessen and Schönberger, The Apollonian Clockwork,
p. 239. Debussy's influence on the Rite should not be underestimated. Stravinsky writes: ‘Le
Sacre owes more to Debussy than to anyone except myself’; see Stravinsky and
Craft, Expositions and Developments, p. 142, n. 1.
46
Pieter C. van den Toorn, ‘Some Characteristics of Stravinsky's Diatonic Music. Part
Two’, Perspectives of New Music, 15/ii (1977), p. 61, and Stravinsky and the Rite of Spring, p.
151.
47
Van den Toorn, Stravinsky and the Rite of Spring, pp. 152 and 178.
48
Robert Morgan, Twentieth-Century Music (New York: Norton, 1991), p. 97.
49
Richard Taruskin, ‘Chez Pétrouchka: Harmony and Tonality chez Stravinsky’, 19th-Century
Music, 10/iii (1987), p. 286.
50
Van den Toorn, The Music of Igor Stravinsky, pp. 106–16.
51
There is no doubt from the sketches that the link between the E major and C major triads was
formed at the inception of the piece (see the semiquaver figurations in the top two systems
of Ex. 2). However, this merely suggests that there is a linear connection from the ‘Augurs’
chord to the quasi-octatonic segments in the tableau, and not some underlying octatonic
system in which the ‘Augurs’ chord can be integrated.
52
David Lewin, ‘A Formal Theory of Generalized Tonal Functions’, Journal of Music Theory, 26/i
(1982), pp. 41–3.
53
For a summary of tonal dualism see Henry Klumpenhouwer, ‘Dualistic Tonal Space and
Transformation in Nineteenth-Century Musical Thought’, in Thomas Christensen (ed.), The
Cambridge History of Western Music Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002),
pp. 456–70.
54
Robert Fink, ‘Going Flat: Post-Hierarchical Music Theory and the Musical Surface’, in Nicholas
Cook and Mark Everist (eds.), Rethinking Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p.
121.
55
Anthony Pople, Skryabin and Stravinsky: 1908–1914 (New York: Garland, 1989), p. 270.
56
Christopher Hasty, ‘Toward a Timely (or Worldly) Music Theory – Some Ideas from American
Pragmatism’, paper delivered at The University of Texas at Austin, 5 March 2003; see also
Christopher Hasty, Meter as Rhythm(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Of related
interest to the analysis of the particular is Jerrold Levinson's Music in the Moment (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1997), although his emphasis on concatenation is less relevant to
Stravinsky's collage technique. The complex dialectical negations in Adorno's idea of the
moment, explored in depth by Berthold Hoeckner in Programming the Absolute: Nineteenth-
Century Music and the Hermeneutics of the Moment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2002), is probably too melancholic and too much entangled with German Idealism to
illuminate the Stravinskian instant.
57
See Stravinsky and Craft, Expositions and Developments, p. 136, and Craft, ‘“The Rite of
Spring”: Genesis of a Masterpiece’, p. xvii. Darius Milhaud in Entretiens avec Claude Rostand,
2nd edn (Paris: Zurfluh, 1992), pp. 48–9, suggests that the harmonies of the Rite inspired the
compositional exploration and research on polytonality in the 1920s. Indeed, the term was
already applied to the Rite at its première; an article in Le Matin described the ballet as
‘résolument polyrythmique et polytonale’; see A. D., ‘Théâtre des Champs-Élysées:
1ère Représentation du Sacre du Printemps’, Le Matin, 30/10685, 30 May 1913, p. 3.
58
Allen Forte, Contemporary Tone Structures (New York: Columbia Teachers College Press,
1955), p. 137. For similar criticism of polytonality see: Pieter C. van den Toorn, ‘Some
Characteristics of Stravinsky's Diatonic Music’, Perspectives of New Music, 14 (1975), pp.
104–38, and The Music of Igor Stravinsky, pp. 63–5; Arthur Berger, ‘Problems of Pitch
Organization in Stravinsky’, pp. 123–54; and Benjamin Boretz, ‘Metavariations: Part IV,
Analytic Fallout’, Perspectives of New Music, 11 (1972), p. 149.
59
Or at least, in the words of Daniel Harrison, bitonality has been ‘under-theorised’; see his
‘Bitonality, Pentatonicism, and Diatonicism in a Work by Milhaud’, in James M. Baker, David W.
Beach and Jonathan W. Bernard (eds.), Music Theory in Concept and Practice (Rochester,
NY: University of Rochester Press, 1997), p. 394. On the early history of the idea, see Francois
de Médicis, ‘Darius Milhaud and the Debate on Polytonality in the French Press of the
1920s’, Music & Letters, 86/iv (2005), pp. 573–91.
60
Edward T. Cone, ‘Analysis Today’, in Paul Henry Lang (ed.), Problems of Modern Music (New
York: Norton, 1962), p. 43.
61
Berger, ‘Problems of Pitch Organization in Stravinsky’, p. 123.
62
Stravinsky, Poetics of Music, pp. 35–7; see also William W. Austin, Music in the Twentieth
Century: From Debussy through Stravinsky (London: Dent, 1966), pp. 260–1.
63
Arnold Schoenberg, Structural Functions of Harmony (London: Faber, 1969), p. 194; see also
Dahlhaus, Schoenberg and the New Music, pp. 125–7.
64
CBS documentary, Portrait of Stravinsky.
65
William E. Benjamin, ‘Tonality without Fifths: Remarks on the First Movement of Stravinsky's
Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments’, In Theory Only, 2/xi–xii (1977), pp. 58–9.
66
V. Kofi Agawu, Playing with Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 26–79.
67
Andriessen and Schönberger, The Apollonian Clockwork, p. 57.
68
André Boucourechliev, Stravinsky, trans. Martin Cooper (London: Victor Gollancz, 1987), p. 71.
69
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London:
Methuen, 1981), p. 137.
70
See Taruskin on the distinction in Russian thought between kul'tura (the artificial culture of the
intelligentsia) and stikhiya (the elemental spontaneity of the people) in Stravinsky and the
Russian Traditions, I: pp. 850–4.
71
See Craft, ‘“The Rite of Spring”: Genesis of a Masterpiece’, p. xxiv.
72
See Brian Hyer, ‘Tonality’, in Christensen (ed.), The Cambridge History of Western Music
Theory, pp. 748–50.
73
Fink, ‘Going Flat’, pp. 132–3.
74
Robert Moevs, review of Allen Forte, The Harmonic Organization of the ‘Rite of Spring’, Journal
of Music Theory, 24/i (1980), p. 103.
75
The ‘dominant’ A is also subject to the same dissonant treatment in the final bars of the work
where it is set against minor triads and the triadic formations in octatonic Collection III on
C, , and A.
76
See, for example, Taruskin, ‘Letter to the Editor from Richard Taruskin’, pp. 313–18, and ‘Chez
Pétrouchka’, pp. 265–7.
77
Pierre Lalo, ‘Considerations sur “Le Sacre du Printemps”’, Le Temps, 5 August 1913, reprinted
in Lesure (ed.), Le sacre du printemps: Dossier de Presse, pp. 33–4; the translation is taken
from Hill, Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring, p. 93. Similarly Adolphe Boschot, in L’Écho de Paris,
30 May 1913, suggested that to create the harmonic effect of the Rite, one merely needed to
‘play on two pianos . . . transposing [the music] by a tone in one part but not the other’;
reprinted in Lesure (ed.), Le sacre du printemps: Dossier de Presse, p. 16.
78
Arnold Whittall, ‘Music Analysis as a Human Science? Le Sacre du Printemps in Theory and
Practice’, Music Analysis, 1/i (1982), pp. 51 and 50.
79
Boucourechliev, Stravinsky, p. 71.
80
Whittall, ‘Music Analysis as a Human Science?’, pp. 46 and 50.
81
Whittall, ‘Music Analysis as a Human Science?’, p. 50.
82
Whittall, ‘Music Analysis as a Human Science?’, p. 45.
83
Whittall, ‘Music Analysis as a Human Science?’, pp. 50–1.
84
Given the images and movement that inspired the composition of the Rite (see, for example,
Stravinsky's letters to Roerich and Findeizen reprinted in The Rite of Spring: Sketches 1911–
13, appendix, pp. 27–33), it is probable that Stravinsky conceived the tapping out of the rhythm
of spring before Nijinsky choreographed it. See n. 26 on Stravinsky's involvement with the
choreography.
85
Boschot, L’Écho de Paris; reprinted in Lesure (ed.), Le sacre du printemps: Dossier de Presse,
p. 16.
86
Quoted in Roger Shattuck, ‘The Devil's Dance: Stravinsky's Corporal Imagination’, in Pasler
(ed.), Confronting Stravinsky, pp. 90 and 87.
87
Since the Rite was composed at the piano, it is obvious that the hands also function as the
stomping feet!
88
H. Colles (unsigned), ‘The Fusion of Music and Dance: “Le sacre du printemps”’, The Times,
12 July 1913; reprinted in Lesure (ed.), Le sacre du printemps: Dossier de Presse, p. 64.
89
Letter to André Caplet, 29 May 1913, in François Lesure and Roger Nichols (eds.), Debussy
Letters, trans. Roger Nichols (London: Faber, 1987), p. 270.
90
See: Lambert, Music Ho!, pp. 49–50 and 91; Cecil Gray, A Survey of Contemporary
Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924), pp. 137–42; and Adorno, Philosophy of Modern
Music, pp. 155–7.
91
Dent, The Nation and Athenaeum; reprinted in Lesure (ed.), Le sacre du printemps, Dossier de
Presse, p. 71.
92
Quoted from footage of the composer at the piano in the CBS documentary, Portrait of
Stravinsky.
93
Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring: Sketches 1911–13, p. 36. See also Craft, ‘“The Rite of Spring”:
Genesis of a Masterpiece’, p. xxxiii.
94
Quoted in Boucourechliev, Stravinsky, p. 80.
95
Hasty, ‘Toward a Timely (or Worldly) Music Theory’.
96
Although there is no harmonic hierarchy, there is a metrical one, since the accents syncopate
against the 2/4 metre set up by the ostinato figure. A purely metrical hierarchy, however, is just
as open to the future as the reiteration of the ‘Augurs’ chord, since it has no internal system of
closure; it, too, renews and propels the music from moment to moment, albeit on a higher
rhythmic level.
97
Jacques Rivière, ‘Le Sacre du Printemps’, La nouvelle revue française, November 1913;
reprinted in Lesure (ed.),Le sacre du printemps: Dossier de Presse, p. 47.
98
Letter to Nicolai Roerich, Clarens, 6 March 1912; translated by Stravinsky in The Rite of
Spring: Sketches 1911–13, appendix, p. 31.
99
Boulez, Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship, pp. 56 and 68.
100
This rhythmic pattern, as Boulez points out, also shapes the accents of the melody at No. 19;
see Ex. 19b.
101
The ‘Augurs of Spring’ and the ‘Dances of the Young Girls’ form one movement. Stravinsky
conceived the dances as a continuous choreographic action rather than separate pantomimes
and was particularly pleased with the ‘smooth jointure’ between the two. See Stravinsky's letter
to Roerich, 13 November 1911; reprinted in The Rite of Spring: Sketches 1911–13, appendix,
p. 30.
102
Edward T. Cone, ‘Stravinsky: The Progress of a Method’, Perspectives of New Music, 1 (1962),
pp. 18–20.
103
Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s) (London and New York: Verso, 1996), p. 6.
104
Adorno, ‘Stravinsky: A Dialectical Portrait’, p. 160.
105
Laclau, Emancipation(s), pp. 15–16.
106
Forte, The Structure of Atonal Music, p. 76.
107
Van den Toorn, Stravinsky and the Rite of Spring, p. 141.
108
Roy Travis, ‘Towards a New Concept of Tonality’, Journal of Music Theory, 3/ii (1959), pp.
257–84; Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Tradition, I: pp. 937–48. Taruskin is, of course,
thinking the other way round here – the ‘Augurs’ chord as an extension of a more basic
element, rather than the generator of material; in the end, as far as harmonic unity is
concerned, it amounts to saying roughly the same thing. However, Taruskin in a later article
seems less convinced by his earlier arguments; see Taruskin, ‘A Myth of the Twentieth
Century’, p. 19. Taruskin borrows the 0–5–11/0–6–11 harmonic cell from van den Toorn's The
Music of Igor Stravinsky.
109
Alexandre Tansman, Igor Stravinsky (New York: Putnum, 1949), p. 143; Morgan, Twentieth-
Century Music, p. 97.
110
‘Contextual’ is a term used by Milton Babbitt to describe music ‘which defines its materials
within itself’, providing ‘alternatives to what were once regarded as musical absolutes’; see his
‘Who Cares if you Listen?’, reprinted in Barney Childs and Eliot Schwartz (eds.), Contemporary
Composers on Contemporary Music (New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1967), pp. 244–5.
111
Igor Stravinsky, ‘Ce que j’ai voulu exprimer dans Le Sacre du Printemps’, Montjoie!, 8, 29 May
1913; reprinted in Lesure (ed.), Le sacre du printemps: Dossier de Presse, p. 14. The
translation is by Edward B. Hill, Boston Evening Transcript, 12 February 1916; reprinted in
Vera Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents, pp. 524–6. This
résumé of the Rite, ghost-written by the editor of Montjoie!, was persistently disavowed by
Stravinsky; however, the evidence points to Stravinsky as the author. See Vera Stravinsky and
Robert Craft, Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents, pp. 522–6.
112
Adorno, ‘Stravinsky: A Dialectical Portrait’, p. 160.
113
Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, I: p. 947.
114
Roman Vlad, Stravinsky, trans. Frederick and Ann Fuller (London: Oxford University Press,
1960), p. 31; Forte, The Harmonic Organization of ‘The Rite of Spring’, p. 132; the other
complexes are 7–16, 7–31, 8–28, 8–23, 8–18 and 8–16.
115
As Craig Ayrey writes, ‘the principle of repetition on all levels . . . [allows for] the formation of a
self-referential system of prolongational structures’. See his ‘Berg's “Scheideweg”: Analytical
Issues in Op. 2/ii’, Music Analysis, 1/ii (1982), p. 196.
116
Schæffner, Strawinsky, p. 95; quoted in Boucourechliev, Stravinsky, p. 73.
117
Whittall, ‘Some Recent Writings on Stravinsky’, Music Analysis, 8/i–ii (1989), pp. 173–5.
118
Or what Roland Barthes calls ‘connotation’; see Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 1–16.
119
Elliot Antokoletz, ‘Interval Cycles in Stravinsky's Early Ballets’, Journal of the American
Musicological Society, 39/iii (1986), p. 608.
120
Dmitri Tymoczko, ‘Stravinsky and the Octatonic: A Reconsideration’, Music Theory Spectrum,
24/i (2002), p. 78. There is an error in the text; instead of ‘harmonic minor’ the original reads
‘melodic minor’. However, it is clear from Tymoczko's Ex. 7 that ‘harmonic minor’ is intended.
121
Tymoczko, ‘Stravinsky and the Octatonic’, pp. 80–2.
122
Morton, ‘Footnotes to Stravinsky Studies’, p. 14. Morton's folk tune reproduced in Ex. 22b has
been transposed to correspond to the pitches of the ostinato; the original starts on A.
123
Taruskin, ‘Russian Folk Melodies in The Rite of Spring’, p. 532; revised in Stravinsky and the
Russian Traditions, I: p. 904. Taruskin's folk tune reproduced in Ex. 22c has been transposed
to correspond to the pitches of the ostinato; the original starts on C.
124
Van den Toorn, Stravinsky and the Rite of Spring, pp. 144–5.
125
I am indebted to Shay Loya for introducing me to the complexities of these Verbunkos modes.
126
See, for example, Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 13 in A Minor. The Rhapsody opens with a
flourish on a pure Kalindra scale to establish its harmonic and melodic credentials, but in bars
11–12 (see below), the octave figurations in the left hand outline a Kalindra scale on D, with its
leading note flattened to in order to descend smoothly to
.
127
This is evident later in the same Rhapsody mentioned in n. 126 where A and triads are
juxtaposed against each other (bars 40–
42).
128
The sketches show that Stravinsky had intended ‘Spring Rounds’ to follow the ‘Augurs of
Spring/Dance of the Young Girls’, hence the ‘early’ appearance of the ‘Spring Rounds’ theme:
see Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring: Sketches 1911–13, pp. 6–8.
129
Vlad, Stravinsky, p. 30.
130
Stravinsky, Montjoie!; reprinted in Lesure (ed.), Le sacre du printemps: Dossier de Presse, p.
14; translation taken from Vera Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Stravinsky in Pictures and
Documents, pp. 524–6.
131
Van den Toorn, The Music of Igor Stravinsky, p. 103. Note again the theoretical bias
towards in the description.
132
Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, I: p. 954.
133
Stravinsky, Poetics of Music, p. 37.
134
Rivière, La Nouvelle revue française; reprinted in Lesure (ed.), Le sacre du printemps: Dossier
de Presse, pp. 43 and 39.
135
Igor Stravinsky in an interview with the Daily Mail, 13 February 1913; quoted in Vera Stravinsky
and Robert Craft, Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents, p. 95.
136
Letter from Stravinsky to Nicolai Findeizen, Clarens, 2 December 1912; reprinted in
Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring: Sketches 1911–13, appendix p. 33.
137
Pasler, ‘Music and Spectacle’, p. 81.
138
See Levitz, ‘The Chosen One's Choice’, p. 83. ‘Art plastique’ was architecturally conceived;
concerning this new form of dance, Daniel Chennevière, in ‘La musique
choregraphique’, Montjoie!, i–ii (1914), writes: ‘Choreographic music . . . must be
constructed architecturally and rhythmically . . . in order to mix with the geometric schemes of
the choreography and to penetrate it. This music was born with Le sacre du Printemps’ (my
emphasis; the translation is taken from Levitz, ‘The Chosen One's Choice’, p. 83).
139
Stravinsky, Montjoie!, pp. 524–6.
140
See Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring: Sketches 1911–13, p. 6.
141
Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring: Sketches 1911–13, pp. 29–33.
142
Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring: Sketches 1911–13, p. 34.
143
The orchestration and details of this transition were only realised following the completion of
the work; see Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring: Sketches 1911–13, pp. 120–2.
144
In the ballet's final ‘Sacrificial Dance’, the virgin is surrounded by the male dancers (the
Ancestors) only.
145
Stravinsky and Craft, Expositions and Developments, p. 148.
146
See my Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999).
147
Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, pp. 173 and 200.
148
Rivière, La nouvelle revue française; reprinted in Lesure (ed.), Le sacre du printemps: Dossier
de Presse, p. 47.
149
Frederick J. Smith, The Experiencing of Musical Sound: A Prelude to a Phenomenology of
Music (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1979), pp. 70 and 178.
150
In order to criticise Stravinsky, Adorno has to understand the Rite in terms of a passive,
reactive body; however, in Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1973),
pp. 266–39, Adorno advocates the body that thinks: thinking cannot be separated from need.
151
See David Sudnow, Ways of the Hands: The Organisation of Improvised Conduct (Cambridge,
MA and London: MKT Press, 1993).
152
Adorno, Sound Figures, p. 148.
153
Stravinsky, Poetics of Music, pp. 55–6
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