With Understanding Comes Appreciation
The composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein said of one passage, "That page is sixty years old, but it's never been topped for sophisticated handling of primitive rhythms...", and of the work as a whole, "...it's also got the best dissonances anyone ever thought up, and the best asymmetries and polytonalities and polyrhythms and whatever else you care to name."
Oks, first things first specially for the sake of new comers. The Rite of Spring, original French title, Le sacre du printemps (Russian: Весна священная, Vesna svyashchennaya), is a 1913 ballet with music by the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, original choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky, and original set design and costumes by archaeologist and painter Nicholas Roerich, all under impresario Serge Diaghilev. The music's innovative complex rhythmic structures, timbres, and use of dissonance have made it a seminal 20th century composition.
In his attempt to continue to represent his fascination with Slavic folklore, Igor Stravinsky premiered his third successive ballet, Le Sacre du printemps (more commonly referred by its English translation “The Rite of Spring”) in the late spring of 1913. Like The Firebird and Petrushka ballets before it, Rite is founded upon the neoclassical terrain that was still fairly early in formation during the early part of the 20th century. In these two works, Stravinsky began distancing himself from conservative musical understandings, creating new inventions to express his colourful atonal aspirations. His radical innovations led to new ideas sprouting into improvements on the quality of dissonance and rhythm combined.
His experimentations eventually paved the way to his preliminary sketches for Rite on the pianoforte. Simply how one could possibly condense such a large scale of compositional material into one instrument is still beyond many. The backbone vertebrae (girders, if you like) are made of melodic asymmetry (micro and macro), colourful accentuation and articulation (melodic and harmonic), and complex rhythmical fluctuations. All of these ideas were already tried and tested in former works by others, but in a conservative fashion. Here, Stravinsky uses them as the sole chassis for work, setting it apart from all other investigations thus far. Despite its apparent intense complexity, Rite is completely listenable, and not as mechanical as its score sometimes suggests.
In two parts, the score delves between dense and sparse orchestration. Unlike many other works for large orchestra, Stravinsky uses each instrument from its lowest to highest range, and plays with the instrumentalist’s skill from undemanding melodies, to obscure cross hashes of polyrhythms. The first part “Adoration of the Earth” initiates the work through an ominous bassoon melody, which he returns to on many occasions throughout the number. It’s fairly simple, yet distinct, and clear amid the clouded accompaniment of dissonant layers from other instruments. The introduction, which lasts a little under four minutes, could be sampled as what the rest of Rite offers in terms of surprise and joy. However, as the lasting plucked notes of the violins stretch to a point of uncertainty, the full orchestra engages in a violent mash of heavy off-beat brass accentuation, known as “Dance of the Adolescents.” From here the score flows in and out of remaining ideas which were first introduced in the introduction, but they are presented alongside clever accompaniment to maintain a devout interest from the audience, giving a more subdued quality, before returning to percussive chaos, back again to beauty and so forth.