When Igor Stravinsky’s ballet Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) premiered during the 1913 Paris season of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, its avant-garde music and jarring choreography scandalized audiences. Today it is considered one of the most influential musical works of the twentieth century. In this volume, the ballet finally receives the full critical attention it deserves, as distinguished music and dance scholars discuss the meaning of the work and its far-reaching influence on world music, performance, and culture. Essays explore four key facets of the ballet: its choreography and movement; the cultural and historical contexts of its performance and reception in France; its structure and use of innovative rhythmic and tonal features; and the reception of the work in Russian music history and theory. This version also includes audio and visual supplements designed to enhance understanding of this classic piece.
Table of Content
List of Audio-Visual Materials
Foreword: A Total Art-Work: Memorable Resonances and Reverberations in The Rite / Stephen Walsh
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration
Introductory Essay: Stravinsky’s Russia: The Politics of Cultural Ferment / Donald J. Raleigh
Part One: Dancing Le Sacre Across the Century
1. A Century of Rites: The Making of an Avant-Garde Tradition / Lynn Garafola
2. The Rite of Spring as a Dance: Recent Re-Visions / Stephanie Jordan
3. Re-Sourcing Nijinsky: The Rite of Spring and Yvonne Rainer’s Ro S Indexical / Gabriele Brandstetter
4. Death by Dancing in Nijinsky’s Rite / Millicent Hodson
Part Two: Le Sacre and Stravinsky in France
5. Le Sacre du Printemps: A Ballet for Paris / Annegret Fauser
6. Styling Le Sacre: The Rite’s Role in French Fashion / Mary E. Davis
7. The Rite of Spring, National Narratives, and Estrangement / Brigid Cohen
8. Formalizing a ‘Purely Acoustic’ Musical Objectivity: Another Look at a 1915 Interview with Stravinsky / William Robin
9. Racism at The Rite / Tamara Levitz
Part Three: Observations on Le Sacre in Russia
10. Commentary and Observations on Le Sacre in Russia: An Overview / Kevin Bartig
11. Stravinsky, Roerich, and Old Slavic Rituals in The Rite of Spring / Tatiana Baranova Monighetti
12. Orchestral Sketches of Le Sacre du Printemps in the National Library of Russia / Natalia Braginskaya
13. Yuri Nikolaevich Kholopov: His Analytical Comments on The Rite of Spring / Grigory Lyzhov
14. Leonard Bernstein’s 1959 Triumph in the Soviet Union / Olga Manulkina
15. The Rite of Spring in Russia / Svetlana Savenko
16. ‘I Penetrated the Mystery of the Spring Lapidary Rhythms:’ Baroque Topoi in The Rite of Spring / Elena Vereshchagina
17. ‘The Great Sacrifice:’ Contextualizing the Dream / Tatiana Vereshchagina
18. An Interview with Composer Vladimir Tarnopolski / Edited and with an Introductory Note by Christy Keele and John Reef
Part Four: The Sounds of Le Sacre
19. The Physicality of The Rite: Remarks on the Forces of Meter and Their Disruption / Pieter C. van den Toorn
20. How Not to Hear Le Sacre du Printemps? Schoenberg’s Theories, Leibowitz’s Recording / Severine Neff
21. Rethinking Blocks and Superimposition: Form in the ‘Ritual of the Two Rival Tribes’ / Gretchen Horlacher
22. Stravinsky at the Crossroads after The Rite: ‘Jeu de rossignol mécanique’ [Performance of the Mechanical Nightingale] (1 August 1913) / Maureen A. Carr
23. Dissonant Bells: The Rite’s ‘Sacrificial Dance’ 1913/2013 / Marianne Kielian-Gilbert
24. Revisiting The Rite in Stravinsky’s Later Serial Music / Lynne Rogers
25. Dionysos Monometrikos / Stephen Walsh
Plenary Essay: Resisting The Rite / Richard Taruskin
Bibliography / Compiled by Letitia Glozer, Sara Hoffee, and John Reef
List of Contributors
Index
About the author
Severine Neff is the Eugene Falk Distinguished Professor of Music Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is author of The Musical Idea and the Logic, Technique, and Art of Its Presentation (with Patricia Carpenter); Coherence, Counterpoint, Instrumentation, Instruction in Form; and The Second String Quartet in F-Sharp Minor, Op. 10: A Norton Critical Score. She served as Editor-in-Chief of Music Theory Spectrum.Gretchen Horlacher is Professor of Music at the Jacobs School of Music, Indiana University at Bloomington. She is author of Building Blocks: Repetition and Continuity in Stravinsky’s Music.
Maureen A. Carr is Distinguished Professor of Music Theory at The Pennsylvania State University. She is author of After the Rite: Stravinsky’s Path to Neoclassicism (1914–1925), Multiple Masks: Stravinsky’s Neoclassicism in Stravinsky’s Works on Greek Subjects, and two facsimile editions for A-R Editions: Stravinsky’s Pulcinella: A Facsimile of the Sources and Sketches, and Stravinsky’s Histoire du soldat: A Facsimile of the Sketches.
John Reef is Assistant Professor of Music Theory at Nazareth College.
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