MODERNISM

• Among the composers of the early twentieth century, no two had

greater influence on the course of Western musical history than Igor
Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg. Their ideas about Modernist music
were very different, and, in the course of time, they developed
contempt for each other. Yet so compelling were these artists’
respective visions that they came to dominate the Modernist era.
Stravinsky, after perfecting flamboyant Modernist ballet, moved on to a
more restrained idiom called Neo-classicism, while Schoenberg began
with uncompromising atonal music and ultimately developed the
twelve-tone system of composition.
 IGOR STRAVINSKY (1882–
1971)
• For three-quarters of the twentieth century, Igor Stravinsky personified the cultural pluralism and stylistic
diversity of cutting-edge art music. He created Modernist masterpieces in many traditional genres: opera,
ballet, symphony, concerto, church Mass, and cantata. His versatility was such that he could write a ballet
for baby elephants (Circus Polka, 1942) just as easily as he could set to music a Greek classical drama
(Oedipus Rex, 1927). Throughout his long life, he traveled with the fashionable set of high art. Although
reared in St. Petersburg, Russia, where his father was a leading operatic bass, he later lived in Paris, Venice,
New York, and Hollywood. Forced to become an expatriate by the Russian Revolution (1917), he took French
citizenship in 1934, and then, having moved to the United States at the outbreak of World War II, he became
an American citizen in 1945. He counted among his friends the painter Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), the
novelist Aldous Huxley (1894–1963), and the poet T. S. Eliot (1888–1965). On his eightieth birthday, in 1962,
he was honored by President John F. Kennedy at the White House and, later in the same year, by Russian
Premier Nikita Khrushchev in the Kremlin. He died in New York in 1971 at the age of eighty-eight. Though
working in the esoteric world of Modernist art music, Stravinsky achieved—and consciously cultivated—
celebrity status.
• Stravinsky rose to international fame as a composer of ballet music. In 1908, his early scores
caught the attention of Sergei Diaghilev (1872–1929), the legendary impresario (producer) of
Russian opera and ballet. Diaghilev wanted to bring Russian ballet to Paris, at that time the
artistic capital of the world. He sensed that the fashionable French, who were currently crazy
about all things exotic, would clamor to see ballet full of Russian folklore and exotic
“Orientalisms.” To this end, Diaghilev formed a dance company he called the Ballets russes
(Russian Ballets) and hired, over the course of time, the most progressive artists he could
find: Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse for scenic designs, and Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel,
and Stravinsky, among others, as composers. Stravinsky soon became the principal
composer of the Diaghilev’s “export company,” and the Ballets russes became the focus of
his musical activity for the next ten years. Accordingly, the decade 1910–1920 has become
known as Stravinsky’s “Russian ballet period.”
• With the onset of World War I and the temporary disappearance of
large symphony orchestras in Europe, Stravinsky, along with others,
developed a style called Neo-classicism, which emphasized classical
forms and smaller ensembles of the sort that had existed in the
Baroque and Classical periods. Stravinsky’s Neo-classical period
extended from 1920 until 1951, when he adopted the twelve-tone
technique of Arnold Schoenberg, which he continued to pursue until his
death. Although Stravinsky’s style continually evolved over the course
of his nearly seventy-year career, his particular brand of Modernism—
the “Stravinsky sound”—is always recognizable.
• In simple terms, his music is lean, clean, and bracing. Stravinsky does not write
“homogenized” sounds, as occur when the winds and strings together join on a
single line, but rather distinctly separate timbres. He downplays the warm strings,
preferring instead the tones of piercing winds and brittle percussion. While his
orchestra can be large and colorful, its sound is rarely lush or sentimental. Most
important, rhythm is the vital element in Stravinsky’s compositional style. His beat
is strong, but often irregular, and he builds complexity by requiring independent
meters and rhythms to sound simultaneously. All of these stylistic traits can be
heard in his ballet The Rite of Spring. This watershed of musical Modernism,
Stravinsky’s most famous work, stunned and angered the audience at its explosive
1913 premiere.
LE SACRE DU PRINTEMPS (THE RITE OF
SPRING, 1913)
• Igor Stravinsky composed three important early ballet scores for Diaghilev’s dance company: The
Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (1913). All are built on Russian folk tales
—a legacy of musical nationalism —and all make use of the large, colorful orchestra of the late
nineteenth century. Yet the choreography for these Russian ballets is not the elegant, graceful
ballet in the Romantic tradition, the sort that we associate with Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake and The
Nutcracker. These are modern dances with angular poses and abrupt, jerky motions. Dancers do
not soar in tutus; wearing primitive costumes, they stomp the ground. Indeed, the aesthetic that
Stravinsky uses here is called Primitivism, an artistic mode of expression also seen in the
paintings of Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), Picasso, and Matisse. Primitivism attempts to capture the
unadorned lines, raw energy, and elemental truth of non-Western art and apply it in a Modernist
context. In The Rite of Spring, Stravinsky expresses these elements through pounding rhythms,
almost brutal dissonance, and a story that takes us back to the Stone Age.
THE PLOT
• The plot of The Rite of Spring is suggested by its subtitle: Pictures of Pagan Russia. Part 1,
“The Kiss of the Earth,” depicts the springtime rituals of primitive Slavic tribes. In Part 2, “The
Sacrifice,” a virgin dances herself to death as an offering to the god of spring. Before the
curtain rises on Part 1, the huge orchestra plays an Introduction. This music unfolds gradually
but inexorably, from soft to loud, from one line to many, and from tranquil to cacophonous,
suggesting the earth’s flora and fauna coming to life with the beginning of spring. The first
scene, “Augurs of Spring,” features jarring accents and ear-splitting dissonance. Yet lyrical,
almost sensuous moments are found in the score, especially when Stravinsky incorporates
folk music, whether quoting authentic Russian songs or (more commonly) composing his own
melodies within this folk idiom. Despite the folkloric element, however, the bulk of the
composition came from within. As Stravinsky declared, “I had only my ears to guide me. I
heard and I wrote what I heard. I am the vessel through which The Rite of Spring passed.”
THE PREMIERE
• Although The Rite of Spring has been called the great masterpiece of modern music, at its
first performance it provoked not admiration, but a riot of dissent. This premiere, the most
notorious in the history of Western music, took place on an unusually hot evening, May 29,
1913, at the newly built Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris. Le beau monde (high society)
packed the house, paying double the usual ticket prices. Yet from the very first sounds, many
listeners voiced, shouted, and hissed their displeasure. Some, feigning auditory pain, yelled
for a doctor, others for two. Arguments and flying fists abounded as opponents and partisans
warred over this Russian brand of Modernist art. To restore calm, the curtain was lowered
momentarily, and the house lights were turned on and off. All in vain. The musicians still
could not be heard, and consequently, the dancers had difficulty following the pulse of the
music. The disorder was experienced firsthand by a visiting critic of the New York Press, who
reported as follows:
• I was sitting in a box in which I had rented one seat. Three ladies sat in front of me
and a young man occupied the place behind me. He stood up during the course of the
ballet to enable himself to see more clearly. The intense excitement under which he
was laboring, thanks to the potent force of the music, betrayed itself presently when
he began to beat rhythmically on the top of my head with his fists. My emotion was so
great that I did not feel the blows for some time. They were perfectly synchronized
with the beat of the music! In truth, the violent reaction to The Rite of Spring was in
part a response to the Modernist choreography by twenty-three-year-old Vaslav
Nijinsky (1890–1950), which sought to obliterate any trace of classical ballet.
Nijinsky’s dance was just as “primitive” as Stravinsky’s score. But what aspects,
specifically, of Stravinsky’s music shocked so many in the audience that night?
PERCUSSIVE ORCHESTRA
• First, a new percussive—one might say “heavy metal”—approach to the
orchestra is present. The percussion section is enlarged to include four
timpani, a triangle, a tambourine, a guiro, cymbals, antique cymbals, a
bass drum, and a tam-tam. Even the string family, the traditional
provider of warmth and richness in the symphony orchestra, is required
to play percussively, attacking the strings with repeated down-bows at
seemingly random moments of accent. Instead of warm, lush sounds,
we hear bright, brittle, almost brutal ones pounded out by percussion,
heavy woodwinds, and brasses
IRREGULAR ACCENTS
• Stravinsky intensifies the effect of his harsh, metallic sounds by placing them where they
are not expected, on unaccented beats, thereby creating explosive syncopations. Notice
in the following example, the famous beginning of “Augurs of Spring,” how the strings
accent (>) the second, fourth, and then first pulses of subsequent four-pulse measures. In
this way, Stravinsky destroys ordinary 1-2-3-4 meter and forces us to hear, in succession,
groups of 4, 5, 2, 6, 3, 4, and 5 pulses—a conductor’s nightmare!
POLYMETER
The rhythm of The Rite of Spring is complex because Stravinsky often
superimposes two or more different meters simultaneously. Notice in
Example 29.2 that the oboe plays in 6 8 time, the E♭ clarinet plays in 7
8 , while the B♭ clarinet is in 5 8. This is an example of polymeter—two
or more meters sounding simultaneously.
POLYRHYTHM
• Not only do individual parts often play separate meters, but they also sometimes project two or more
independent rhythms simultaneously. Look at the reduced score given in the example below. Every
instrument seems to be doing its own thing! In fact, six distinct rhythms can be heard, offering a good
example of polyrhythm—the simultaneous sounding of two or more rhythms.
OSTINATO FIGURES
• Notice also in Example 29.3 that most of the instruments play the same
motive over and over at the same pitch level. Such a repeating figure,
as we have seen, is called an ostinato. In this instance, we hear
multiple ostinatos. Stravinsky was not the first twentieth-century
composer to use ostinatos extensively—Debussy had done so earlier in
his Impressionist scores (see Ch. 27). But Stravinsky employs them
more often and for longer spans than did his predecessors. In The Rite
of Spring, ostinatos with fast tempos give the music its incessant,
driving quality.
DISSONANT POLYCHORDS
• The harsh, biting sound heard throughout much of The Rite of Spring is often created by
two triads, or a triad and a seventh chord, sounding at once. What results is a polychord—
the simultaneous sounding of one triad or seventh chord with another. When the
individual chords of a polychord are only a whole step or a half step apart, the result is
especially dissonant. In the example, the passage from the beginning of “Augurs of
Spring,” a seventh chord built on E♭ is played simultaneously with a major triad built on F♭
IGOR STRAVINSKY, THE RITE OF SPRING (1913)
INTRODUCTION AND AUGURS OF SPRING