Analysis of Rite of Spring

DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2249.2007.00250.x DANIEL Music MUSA © 0262-5245 Original XXX R ¾⅔ 2006 ¾⅓¼ Analysis Blackwell Articles K. L. fi¾CHUA ½Publishing S Ltd ff¾⅓ ⅜ffi Ltd. Blackwell Oxford, UK Publishing

 . .  R  S:  P A   RITE OF SPRING

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 Music Analysis, 26/i–ii (2007) © 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA

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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 © 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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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 Music Analysis, 26/i–ii (2007)

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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 © 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.


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Ex. 1 ‘The Augurs of Spring’: the ‘Augurs’ chord

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). In fact, this is the sonority that accompanied the riot at the première of the ballet in the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées on 29 May 1913. Although it was Nijinsky’s choreography that caused the uproar, Stravinsky conceived the chord as an integral part of the action on stage; in this sense, his choreographic imagination was instrumental in inciting the riot in musical terms.26 Moreover, this chord was the inception of the Rite of Spring, according to Stravinsky. The sketches suggest that it might not be the very first idea on the opening page (Ex. 2), but Stravinsky intuitively believed it to be the initial inspiration – the first in significance if not in time.27 ‘It was rather a new chord’, he claimed, not only in its notes but in its rhythmic accents which, according to the composer, were ‘the foundation of the whole [work]’, as if it were the biological pulse of the ballet.28 Thus the opening sonority of the ‘Augurs of Spring’ is the emblem of the Rite; in the words of Robert Craft, it is the ‘motto chord’.29 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 Rite can 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 Music Analysis, 26/i–ii (2007)


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Ex. 2 Ideas prior to the ‘Augurs’ chord (from The Rite of Spring Sketches 1911– 1913, p. 3)

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 Tristan chord 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. 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’ © 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.


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Ex. 3 ‘Sacrificial Dance’ (The Chosen One): the return of the ‘Augurs’ chord

Ex. 4 Eric Walter White’s analysis of the ‘Augurs’ chord

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 – E w. 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 A w major tonic. There is, however, no Aw major triad to be found in the vicinity of the movement; neither is there a sense of yearning towards one within the ‘Augurs’ chord itself.37 The chord asserts itself as a particular that will not submit to the conventions of a tonal hierarchy. It is irreducible. Any rearrangement of its notes will turn it into something else. A dominant thirteenth may contain the same notes, but these pitches do not define the chord; its identity, rather, is fixed by the registral position and intervallic spacing of these pitches. The exact notes matter. This is because Stravinsky is the composer of particular sonorities. Hence the chord’s effect is more a question of ‘sound’ than harmony.38 Or, to appropriate a term from Louis Andriessen and Elmer Schönberger, the chord is ‘an object sonore avante-la-lettre’.39 This was probably what Stravinsky meant when he said that his ‘ear accepted [the chord] with joy’. Even Stravinsky’s critics attest to this; in the Rite, complains Constant Lambert, ‘music . . . has Music Analysis, 26/i–ii (2007)


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Ex. 5 7–32 prime form

become a matter of “sonorities”, and any one who can produce a brightly coloured brick of unusual shape is henceforth hailed as an architect’.40 Stravinsky’s architectonic construction turns out to be nothing more than a unique brick. It is as if out of a non-descript pool of dissonances his fingers stumbled upon a particular spacing and register of notes that created an effect so instantly recognisable that it can stand, without structural context, as the ‘motto’ or ‘sound’ of the entire work. If the ‘Augurs’ chord escapes tonal definition, perhaps atonal theory can capture its evasive sounds by projecting the twelve chromatic pitch classes as an all-embracing background; in this way the ‘Augurs’ chord can be defined as 7–32, as Allen Forte does in his analysis of the Harmonic Organization of the Rite of Spring.41 This should neutralise those latent urges of tonality within the chord and focus purely on sonority. But if the identity of the chord is undermined by any re-arrangement of its pitches, then 7–32 is not necessarily the ‘Augurs’ chord at all, since in its prime form it is also something completely different (Ex. 5). This cluster is no closer to the ‘Augurs’ chord than White’s ‘inversion of a dominant thirteenth’. Atonal theory turns out to be no more enlightening than a tonal one, for in Forte’s pitch-class set universe, as with the tonal system, octave and intervallic equivalence still exist; but the ‘Augurs’ chord is simply too particular for such theoretical generalisations. 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 Thus van den Toorn’s inventory of figures includes patterns that are seemingly tonal but are in fact generated by the octatonic scale; these include modal segments [0235], clashing triads, dominant seventh and diminished seventh formations. Indeed, many of these elements make up the ‘Augurs of Spring’. For Taruskin, this is hardly surprising since Stravinsky participated in a Russian tradition handed down from his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov in which symmetrical scales were used to portray the supernatural, from Glinka’s Ruslan to the © 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.


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Ex. 6 Octatonic Collection III

Ex. 7 Octatonic patterns in the ‘Ritual of Abduction’

composer’s Pétrouchka.43 And since the supernatural pervades the Rite, why shouldn’t the octatonic system provide the aura for Stravinsky’s harmonic rituals? There is no doubt that he employed the octatonic scale in the ballet, as even a cursory analysis of the ‘Ritual of Abduction’ would illustrate (Ex. 7); it is ‘a veritable primer’, writes Arthur Berger, ‘of the ways the octatonic scale may be arranged into four major triads or seventh chords’.44 Moreover, in a letter to Florent Schmitt, Stravinsky claimed that he had been playing nothing on the piano during the composition of the Rite except for the music of Debussy and Scriabin; in other words he was inspired by an alignment of non-functional (Debussy) and octatonic (Scriabin) harmony.45 Could the ‘Augurs’ chord, then, be an example of a non-functional type of octatonicism? According to van den Toorn, yes: it resides within octatonic Collection III (Ex. 8). At least it would reside within octatonic Collection III were it not for the Aw and Cw; these pitches have been conveniently removed from the analysis. For a work which, according to van den Toorn, is ‘primarily octatonic’, it is rather embarrassing that the motto chord should be conceived outside the bands of octatonicism.46 Of course, there are ways of legitimising aberrant notes. Van den Toorn argues for a octatonic-diatonic penetration in the Rite, although he Music Analysis, 26/i–ii (2007)


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Ex. 8 Van den Toorn’s analysis of the ‘Augurs’ chord

Ex. 9 ‘Augurs of Spring’: ‘resolution’ into Collection III

prefers to see the F w triad of the ‘Augurs’ chord as an infiltration of Collection I that allows for the interaction of materials outside the primary octatonic structure.47 Whether the ear can actually identify this intercollectional sonority is doubtful; whereas a triad may allude to tonality by virtue of convention, the Fw triad in the ‘Augurs’ chord cannot stand in for Collection I because Collection I is not a social norm. But the octatonic properties of the ‘Augurs’ chord need not be intercollectional; it could simply be ‘an integrated sonority with octatonic qualities’, as Robert Morgan explains,48 in which case Aw and Cw can be regarded as foreign notes encrusted within a more basic octatonic framework; after all, octatonicism is seldom pure, even in such an octatonically conceived movement as the ‘Ritual of Abduction’. As Taruskin puts it in his quasi-Schenkerian analysis of the second and third tableau of Pétrouchka where foreign pitches function as ‘inflections’ around an octatonic collection, ‘there are plenty of black keys in the “Jupiter” Symphony’.49 Thus the Aw and Cw can be regarded as ‘inflections’, appoggiaturas to the purely octatonic formation at No. 14 where the Fw triad (now re-spelt as an E major triad) slips almost imperceptibly into a C major triad (Ex. 9). However, this is analysis by analogy – a kind of ‘tonal’ octatonicism applied to what is simply conjunct motion. Although van den Toorn would certainly not approve of this kind of tonal ‘urge’, he does give priority to the C major © 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.


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Ex. 10 ‘Introduction’, opening melody

triad in his analysis; it is bracketed next to his version of the ‘Augurs’ chord, almost as a replacement for the Fw major triad (see again Ex. 8); this is because he sees the octatonic nodes of Ew and C as structural tones that govern the progress of the music from the ‘Augurs of Spring’ to the end of the ‘Ritual of Abduction’.50 The fleeting twist into a C major triad at No. 14 becomes a permanent theoretical position for van den Toorn in defining the ‘Augurs’ chord, turning its primary significance into a secondary structure.51 So once again the chord loses its particularity, this time to the totality of octatonicism. Octatonicism, like tonality and atonality, is a theoretical option and not a foundation in the Rite. These definitions – tonal, atonal and octatonic – fail to determine the identity of the ‘Augurs’ chord not only in their inability to capture the particular, but in their failure to register its riot. They define the chord only in terms of what it is and not what it does. But this chord is not a neutral category. It shocks. It provokes. The irony in trying to determine what the chord is is that it ends up gesturing towards what it isn’t; it is not a dominant thirteenth, not 7–32 and not in Collection III. And in pointing to what it isn’t, it tells you what it does: it negates. The chord riots by defining itself against the prevailing order. In fact, there is an inkling of its subversive tendency in White’s definition of the ‘Augurs’ chord; he does not claim that it is a dominant thirteenth but an ‘inversion of the chord of the dominant thirteenth’. In other words, the chord is ‘upside down’, requiring some kind of topsy-turvy tonal theory. This is not as bizarre as it may sound. From the perspective of harmonic dualism, for example, such ‘topsy-turvy’ thinking is quite possible; thus David Lewin can analyse the ‘E minor triad’ in the opening bassoon melody of the Rite as an inverted structure, where the B at the top of the semiquaver figure is the ‘root’ of the chord (Ex. 10).52 Technically, an ‘undertone’ explanation will not work with the ‘Augurs’ chord since, if it is to be an exact mirror of the major triad, Stravinsky’s sonority would have to unfold from Ew to Cw then Aw.53 But standing tonal theory on its head in some way would make more sense of Stravinsky’s Ew key-signature that prefaces the ‘Augurs of Spring’; the ‘root’ is on the top and the chord hangs upside down from the Ew surface. In Robert Fink’s term, tonality has been flattened, like the multiple planes of a Cubist painting.54 There is literally no depth to the chord, since it is not controlled by a functional bass note that taps into some underlying tonal perspective, but a surface tonic that is punctual and local, a kind of ‘melodic tonic’ as opposed to a harmonic one, set up by the ostinato figure that precedes it. But if Ew functions as the Music Analysis, 26/i–ii (2007)


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Ex. 11 Pople’s ‘tonicization of Ew’: a resolution?

Ex. 12 Octatonic fragments and the cycle of fifths

surface tension, what are we to make of the harmonies that dangle beneath it? Does this inverted dominant thirteenth, like its right-side up counterpart, require some kind of resolution down under? At No. 16, where Stravinsky interpolates a new block of material, Anthony Pople hears a ‘tonicization of Ew‘ (Ex. 11).55 Is this section, then, some kind of tonal resolution for the ‘Augurs’ chord? Perhaps ‘tonicization’ is too strong a term for the new section, since this music is not strictly tonal and is hardly consonant. This is not E w major. In fact, for van den Toorn, this passage ‘resolves’ the ‘Augurs’ chord as a conglomeration of octatonic fragments (Ex. 12) – the Dw–Bw–Ew–Bw ostinato (cor anglais), a ‘C major’ triad (violins), and a modal [0235] tetrachord (flute and piccolo) – although they are bound together by another system, a cycle of fifths (cellos and basses), that embraces the boundary notes of each octatonic figure. What Pople hears as a tonicisation is actually the sudden arrival of Ew in the bass, creating © 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.


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an illusion of depth, as if this familiar texture were a missing fundamental. But the bottom Ew is as depthless and as unstable as the E w that perches on top of the ‘Augurs’ chord; one does not resolve into the other as its tonal explanation would suggest except as the illusion of an upside-down tonic being turned the ‘right way up’. What appears as cause and effect is instead a juxtaposition of different sonorities ingeniously timed. In this way, the ‘Augurs’ chord remains particular in relation to the new section at No. 16; indeed, its particularity is underlined by its indeterminacy, for as Christopher Hasty points out, inherent in the particular’s sense of the here and now is an openness to the future.56 The chord must remain incomplete to experience the material at No. 16 as a sudden juxtaposition. To attach some quasi-Schenkerian slur from the bottom F w to the Ew or to propose some kind of ‘octatonic resolution’ would suppress what is contingent and abrupt for something closed and ineluctable. The unpredictability of timing which the music celebrates would yield to the inevitability of the whole, and the particularity of the moment – the music’s this-ness – would lose its impact in becoming a progression. To regard the ‘Augurs’ chord as an instant is to erase the tonal background; the possibility of harmonic progression (implied by the dominant seventh, for example) becomes one of harmonic stasis, turning a chord that should bristle with teleological implications into a sonority that can only be juxtaposed against other elements. Thus there is no tonal framework against which to fix its triadic bearings; it can only assert its relative position by sheer repetition. This is why the sound is reiterated, and not resolved; it is retentive rather than progressive. Tonality, if it can be said to function at all in this chord, appears so local that it collapses into a moment, as though a ‘Newtonian’ universe of tonal laws had shrivelled inside the chord to create a ‘quantum’ tonality where the harmonic processes are too tiny to be measured by normative theories of music. This ‘micrological tonality’ is fraught with the contingencies and unpredictable possibilities that Hasty associates with the particular. So how can these atomistic principles be analysed? One way of doing this is to compress the dynamics of tonal motion into a polytonal instant, breaking up the unity of a tonal definition for a stratified explanation. Such an explanation would enable the triads of the chord to define themselves against each other, as dissonances juxtaposed against consonant structures which have been internalised into a vertical moment. This would be a tonality of the here and now. In fact, polytonality was the kind of terminology Stravinsky used to describe his musical language.57 And on a practical level it makes sense; the notation of the chord in Stravinsky’s piano version is split between the hands in a bitonal manner – a dominant seventh chord on Ew and an Fw major triad. However, many analysts reject the idea of polytonality, since it is questionable whether a polytonal theory of music can exist at all. The term betrays its own inadequacy by being a contradiction; polytonality or bitonality, as Allen Forte rightly points out, is an oxymoron.58 This is why there is no systematic theory Music Analysis, 26/i–ii (2007)


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of it.59 Polytonality is merely a descriptive label. If the term means two keys functioning simultaneously, requiring, as it were, a double dose of tonal theory, then this is precisely what doesn’t happen in the Rite of Spring. The ‘Augurs’ chord may divide into two triads, but they do not function as keys within their separate tonal layers, because a single triad, as Schenker would observe, cannot define a key. Indeed Stravinsky’s deliberate reiteration of a single triad signals his refusal to set up a harmonic hierarchy that might make tonality viable. Hence the dominant seventh chord – the defining chord of tonal progression in Rameau’s harmonic theory – is not a dominant seventh on Ew at all; it has no urge to resolve to the tonic Aw. And this is just as well since no proponent of bitonality wants to suggest that the ‘Augurs’ chord is a juxtaposition of Aw and Fw major, but the more dissonant and remote clash between the outer voices of Ew and Fw. It is this dissonant separation of consonant patterns that conjures up the figment of two keys grating against each other when what we have are merely stratified triads. If, as Edward T. Cone suggests, Stravinsky in the Rite of Spring is able to create ‘tonality’ out of ‘a completely static tone or chord of reference’ then these triads are a synecdoche of tonality – a figure of speech without any grammar – and are therefore not strictly tonal in any theoretical sense.60 To use Berger’s terminology, the chord is ‘centric’, ‘organized in terms of a tone center’, but is ‘not tonally functional’.61 Or, more accurately, in Stravinskian language, it is ‘polar’, creating a dissonant tension between opposite poles.62 But this focus on Ew and F w is not a function of tonality but an assumption based on the socially constructed meaning of a triad – a meaning which my analysis will challenge later. As for the D w in the ‘dominant seventh’ formation, this cannot be regarded as a dissonance that requires a resolution to C; it is a motivic infiltration from the ostinato that dominates the movement; in Schoenbergian terms, the harmonic configuration is a motivic chord,63 a fact underlined by Stravinsky in some film footage where he spreads out the sonority on the piano to delineate the Dw –Bw –Ew pattern of the ostinato (Ex. 13).64 So what are we to make of polytonality, given the fact that analysts such as Forte and van den Toorn regard the idea as hopelessly naïve? As a harmonic theory it may be suspect; but what if it were understood as a semiotic theory? After all, if the ‘Augurs’ chord is a synecdoche of tonality, then Stravinsky has reduced tonality to a play of signs, signs that are merely ‘allusions to tonality’, drawn from ‘a repository of conventions and known objects’, as William Benjamin puts it.65 Stock figures, such as the dominant seventh or a fundamental bass texture, are free-floating signifiers detached from their context so that they

Ex. 13 Stravinsky’s ‘analysis’ of the ‘Augurs’ chord on the piano



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no longer function as ‘introversive’ signs, which Kofi Agawu defines as signs that gesture purely within the musical structure, but are ‘extroversive’ ones that gesture to an object that is external to the music, no different from other topics such as ‘horn call’, ‘aria’ or ‘march’.66 Whereas introversive signs function within a system, extroversive signs are local, allowing for contingent mixtures that have no syntactical function; they can be juxtaposed or superimposed at random, producing a polysemy that becomes for Stravinsky a ‘polytonality’. Just as the Classical style breaks the unitary affects of the Baroque with a confusion of topics, Stravinsky uses introversive signs as extroversive ones to create a ‘tonal collage’. Thus polytonality, as a term, registers a radical decontextualisation which dissolves the very system in which (poly)tonality can function as a theory; instead, polytonality is the tonal system reduced to eclectic and stratified signs of a bygone age. Polytonality is a semiotic texture that allows for an ‘instant tonality’. This is why the dominant-seventh formation, for Andriessen and Schönberger, sounds as if ‘Stravinsky [had] discovered the chord again’ after three centuries of use.67 The chord no longer has the same meaning, and tonal theory can no longer make any propositional truth-claims for the chord or identify the rules for its correct use because tonality is no longer literal. In the microscopic structure of the ‘Augurs’ chord, Stravinsky has renamed the triad as another object. Thus to analyse the Rite in a tonal or polytonal manner is probably necessary in that there are tonal elements within the work, but there is no point listening for their literal meaning, as if the tonal elements are about how the music works, because the ‘Augurs’ chord works by excluding the very system it alludes to. This means that the tonal system is significant precisely because it is not there. What is ‘bitonal’ about the chord is the negation of an introversive tonality by an extroversive one, so that the ‘criteria of traditional harmonic analysis’, writes André Boucourechliev, ‘are only applicable, as it were, pro memoria’.68 This sense of ‘negative intertexuality’ enables these extroversive elements to gesture beyond tonality as a system to tonality as a social symbol.69 Polytonality is a form of social semiotics; its relativity explodes the tonal foundations of the nineteenth-century; its oxymoronic nature cancels out the tonal system so that the ‘Augurs’ chord becomes an imaginative act of violence against all that tonality stands for. The tonal power of the ‘Augurs’ chord is not simply a matter of sound but sign. At once brutal and banal, it is deployed to attack the foundations of the past,70 trashing its signifiers with a Neolithic hedonism that is both a form of ridicule and iconoclasm in the modernist urge to shock and negate. It riots in at least three ways. On an institutional level, it is a rebellion against the official establishments that uphold the academic rigours of tonal harmony; indeed, Stravinsky associated ‘the creation of [the Rite] with his hatred of the Conservatory’, and in particular ‘the three syllables . . . pronounced in the order Gla-zu-nov’.71 On a cultural level, it is an act of barbarity against Western civilisation, as though François-Joseph Fétis, who used the term ‘tonalité moderne’ to segregate the musical culture of the West from that of Music Analysis, 26/i–ii (2007)


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the Orient,72 were to have these civilising tones flattened in his face by the very culture tonality was supposed to exclude. Finally, on a social level, it is an assault on the human subject; tonality, which is a ‘reflection . . . of our own interiority as human subjects’, writes Fink, becomes the sacrificial victim, forced to surrender its subjective depth for an objective husk of tonal signs.73 This multivalent, antagonistic use of tonal signs comes to a head with the return of the ‘Augurs’ chord in the ‘Sacrificial Dance’. So tantalising is Stravinsky’s allusion to tonality in the final sections of the ballet that some commentators, such as Robert Moevs, are convinced that the Rite of Spring is in the basic tonality of ‘D minor’.74 At No. 181, D is projected with octave doublings as the prominent pitch that pierces through the texture; its tonal status is corroborated by the funereal oscillations in the bass that pound out its dominant A at Nos. 186–201. What, then, could be more appropriate in the final bar than the return of D to ground the momentum of the Rite with a perfect cadence to match the closure of the victim’s life? Yet these tonal elements are embedded within some of the most dissonant textures in the work; in fact, the mass of material that swirls around D is composed of pitch patterns designed to exclude it as a foreign element. At No. 181, D is only embraced within one layer (ironically, a non-tonal whole-tone fragment), whereas all the other patterns are bent on ejecting D from their sonority (Ex. 14).75 Hence the emphatic assertion of D is a question of tonal survival; indeed, like the sacrificial victim, D is progressively exhausted by the forces around it, until

Ex. 14 ‘Sacrificial Dance’: pitch patterns around D



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it is ground out of existence at No. 184. It returns as a tonal sign at the moment the victim collapses in exhaustion, but this final cadence is no more grounded in D than the lifeless virgin whose body is suddenly lifted up by the ‘Ancestors’ without touching the Earth. Tonality is venerated in the Rite only in its death. At the core of the Rite, then, is a social dissonance. What for Taruskin is a necessary ‘common practice tonality’ in the reception of the Rite, is only a precondition for the demolition of social codes.76 And this was exactly how the early critics reacted to the work, not as new sounds or incomprehensible chaos, but as ‘wrong notes’. One critic wrote: this is the most dissonant music ever written. I would say, after a first and very imperfect hearing, that never has the system and cult of the wrong note been practised with such zeal and persistence as in this score; that from the first bar to the last whatever note one expects is never the one that comes, but the note to one side, the note which ought not to come.77

If the ‘Augurs’ chord encapsulates this cacophony of ‘wrong notes’ then there is no point analysing the ‘wrong notes’ since tonal logic would just correct them. Indeed, some commentators suggest that the reflection of music theory should be by-passed for the immediacy of a phenomenon where the dissonances – the ‘wrong notes’ – are ‘ultimately irreducible’; analysis can only discover its rules, admits Arnold Whittall, ‘if the discords are “translated” into another medium’ that defuses the explosive material of the score.78 André Boucourechliev says much the same: ‘To the analytical eye these aggregates [of the ‘Augurs’ chord] may be transparent enough, but to the ear they have a strangely opaque consistency, like irreducible entities that cannot be resolved into harmonic components. Thus the sacre necessitates a new approach, no longer analytical . . . but phenomenological’.79 The ‘wrong notes’ on the surface define the sonority. ‘The “surface” is therefore the most significant “substance”’, writes Whittall, turning the tonal hierarchy upside down as the ‘wrong notes’ are posited as the right ones. Unprocessed by theory, both Whittall and Boucourechliev hear the ‘Augurs’ chord as an unmediated object of perception; it is pure dissonance, pure impact, an ‘inescapable psychological, aesthetic, element’ which tonal theories can only iron out as a surface decoration and atonal theories deny in order to map out their neutral constructs.80 But to regard these dissonances as pure phenomena is to mistake the experience of the ‘Augurs’ chord for its analysis; this sense of sonic immediacy is only possible through a highly mediated process, where social contracts are being broken – the notes ‘which ought not to come’, as the critic says. The ‘Augurs’ chord cannot signify its pre-linguistic brutality without first transgressing the social codes as ‘wrong notes’; neither can it make a dissonant impact without its allusion to tonality. Dissonance is not a pure phenomenon, but like the tonal objects of the ‘Augurs’ chord, it is an introversive sign that has become extroversive. This is evident in Whittall’s attempt to define the dissonant character of the Rite. Unwilling or perhaps unable to analyse it, Whittall simply registers its Music Analysis, 26/i–ii (2007)


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impact as a challenge to analysis, for what Whittall calls ‘focussed dissonance’ amounts to an anti-theoretical dissonance. Perhaps dissonance is the wrong term here since, technically speaking, dissonances are defined in relation to the very consonant structures that Whittall wishes to jettison in favour of dissonances of a ‘non-functional type’. For him, the clash of consonant triads or poles within the ‘Augurs’ chord is not the source of conflict; these are irreducible dissonances which he locates structurally in the ubiquity of ‘ic 1 (semitone), and its various projections, vertical and horizontal, immediate and long term’.81 So on the one hand these are not tonal dissonances. Whittall writes: [T]he norm for the work as a whole is dissonant not consonant ... . [It] is not one in which predominant dissonances imply unheard consonant resolutions . . . [;] such imagined consonances are unnecessary. The norm is one in which the distinction between consonance and dissonance is preserved. But the conventions of structural significance which attach to these concepts in tonal music no longer apply.82

Clearly, these dissonances are no longer introversive, yet Whittall is acutely aware that ‘ic 1’, as an atonal term, is already too abstract, neutralising the explosive impact that he wants to emphasise; in itself, interval class 1 is not a dissonance. The semitones must stand in for a tonal clash; they must retain ‘the quality of an entity whose consonant resolution would indeed be the octave or unison’, and must be understood from the ‘perspective of tradition’.83 So on the other hand, a focussed dissonance is a tonal dissonance. Whittall’s contradictions indicate that the dissonance of the ‘Augurs’ chord has all the force of a introversive sign but, as an extroversive topic, it carries none of its ramifications. It needs to allude to a dissonance that should resolve (Fw to Ew), but the harmonic context it grates against is no longer structurally relevant except as an object of negation. The particular frees itself from the universal. Thus the dissonant sign is tonally inert but psychologically explosive. This is one reason why ‘ic 1’ seems an anaemic explanation of a ‘focussed dissonance’; the expression of dissonance in the Rite is not the result of an abstract intervallic property; it is an intent – again, a matter of what it does rather that what it is. In this sense a better term for ‘focussed dissonance’ might be ‘tonal noise’. It is noise both metaphorically and literally: metaphorically because noise in communication theory is that which jams communication and disrupts codes; and literally because noise is precisely what the music accompanies on stage. The ‘Augurs’ chord is the sonic equivalent of the thud of adolescent feet with which the ballet opens, ‘tapping out the rhythms of spring’ with a jerky but synchronised form of jumping devised by Nijinsky;84 ‘they repeat the same gesture a hundred times over’ wrote the critic Adolphe Boschot in a review of the dress rehearsal, ‘they stamp [ piétinent] the ground, they stamp, they stamp, they stamp, they stamp and they stamp’.85 Stravinsky even played the music this way at the rehearsals; ‘He stamped his feet on the floor and banged his fist on the piano’ recalls Marie Rambert, ‘jumping up and down’, adds the conductor © 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.


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Pierre Monteux.86 The exact notes matter in the ‘Augurs’ chord precisely because Stravinsky had to fine tune the sonority between tone and noise; it is spaced and pitched to maximise the interference among the distinct triadic shapes at a point where pitch clarity begins to blur into a kind of mass texture. The action of double-stopped down-bows on the strings is an anthropomorphic enactment of the double-footed stomping on stage, producing transient noises at the point of attack which are sporadically intensified by the dense timbre of the horns.87 Such well-attuned noise, in which dissonances are pitched with absolute accuracy, is the kind of controlled racket one would expect from a work whose portrayal of ancient paganism is accomplished within the bourgeois etiquette of the ballet. ‘If M. Stravinsky had wished to be really primitive’, wrote the critic of The Times, ‘he would have been wise to abandon his full orchestra and to score his ballet for nothing but drums’.88 But of course Stravinsky did not wish to be really primitive; he wanted to be really modern by shocking the establishment with the primitive; the Rite is ‘primitive music’, writes Debussy, ‘with all modern conveniences’.89 Tonal noise is a modernist critique of official culture; instead of employing unpitched instruments to signify the pagan world, Stravinsky has turned the agent of musical civility into a barbaric thud, reducing tonality to its very opposite; and to underline the point, the strings, which Stravinsky regarded as ‘representative of the human voice’, are transformed from their expressive role within the nineteenth-century orchestra into a battery of percussion instruments. And this is exactly how Stravinsky ‘composes out’ the ‘Augurs’ chord; what he extrapolates from the notes is not some kind of dissonant implication but accent and pulse; the dissonances proceed by sheer repetition as if the instruments are hammering out rhythms on the drum of the earth. Critics such as Constant Lambert and Cecil Gray who accuse Stravinsky of creating harmonic stasis are correct, as is Adorno, who locates the source of Stravinsky’s language in the terrifying pounding of drums that inflicts irrational blows on the body.90 There is simply no harmonic rhythm; ‘what is baffling’, writes Edward J. Dent, ‘is a form of speech which entirely ignores those principles of syntax which we have been brought up to regard as logical or inevitable ... . [Stravinsky] does not pretend to argue; he just makes noises at us’.91 Noise annuls tonal motion; it is the liberation of the particular as accent. The pitches of the ‘Augurs’ chord may have been a new sound for Stravinsky, but what was more significant for him were their consequence: ‘the accents are even more new’, he says. ‘And accents’, he adds, ‘were really the foundation of the whole thing’.92 As noise, the ‘Augurs’ chord jams tonally-bound ears to hear stasis, but to Stravinsky’s ears the sheer exhilaration of rhythm was a revelation that redefined the meaning of music. At one point in the sketches for the Rite he scribbles ‘music exists if there is rhythm, as life exists if there is a pulse’.93 Stasis only applies to the ‘Augurs’ chord if one expects tonal movement from its dissonances, viewing its motion as an unfolding of a phrase. But Stravinsky calls the ‘Augurs’ chord the Tolchok or ‘impulse’ chord that runs on the adrenalin Music Analysis, 26/i–ii (2007)


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of the moment.94 An irreducible sound demands split-second timing; the punctual is a corollary of the particular, creating a new hearing where it is impossible to stand at a distance to watch the harmonic hierarchy unfold. The particular does not control time by making a harmonic contract with the past in order to close the future; rather, in Hasty’s terms, the particular liberates time as an open duration of multiple possibilites.95 The chord’s repetition may appear to contradict this since the particular is that which is unrepeatable, but each reiteration of the chord is not a static repetition of the same, but a continual articulation of the new that propels the music from instant to instant.96 For Stravinsky, the sudden accents attest to this – they ‘are even more new’; duration is now fraught with the dangers of unpredictable timing. Hence the pulse of life which the composer hears in these accents is, as Jacques Rivière puts it, ‘spring seen from the inside’;97 you have to get inside the ‘Augurs’ chord in order to experience the immediacy of the accents as an instant, as if one were travelling within the rhythmic im-pulses. There is no time to reflect on the slow-motion of tonal progression as if one were outside the moment, waiting for the dissonances to resolve. The pulsations seize the dissonant present as indeterminate events; their rapid succession is experienced as speed; and this speed is gauged by change where the juxtapositions and sudden accents act like objects that hurtle past. Thus the cinematic array of octatonic fragments at No. 16 is hardly static despite the stationary and circular patterns (see again Ex. 11); it is an explosive rush of sound. Stravinsky claimed in a letter to Roerich that he had ‘penetrated the secret rhythms of spring’,98 but in divining the rites of pre-history, he had discovered a rhythmic language that could finally catch up with the pace of modernity. If noise seizes the moment with an urgency that reduces the notes of the ‘Augurs’ chord to a percussive propulsion, then why analyse the ‘Augurs’ chord in terms of pitch? It is pure accent. Indeed, for the young Boulez, what is radical about the ‘Augurs of Spring’ is that it is composed of a ‘genuine rhythmic theme’; the harmonies may be tonally regressive for this proponent of extreme serial composition, but the rhythms far surpass Stravinsky’s harmonic naivety.99 Of course, Boulez’s opposition between a regressive tonality and a progressive rhythmic structure in the Rite is more a matter of ideology than analysis; the rhythmic revolution he seeks is only possible because Stravinsky has disabled the tonal attraction which Boulez derides in the Rite. In fact, Boulez’s rhythmic analysis, with its intricate definitions of tiny cells shuffled into different permutations, is unable to divine the ‘rhythmic theme’ he claims to hear, precisely because there is no tonal definition that would enable the accents and durations to be grasped as an over-arching period; his analysis is more a collage of rhythmic motifs than a closed thematic structure. Stravinsky, however, treats the first 32 reiterations of the ‘Augurs’ chord as a discrete theme, keeping the order of rhythmic accents intact; he even repeats it verbatim at No. 18 (Ex. 15). This purely rhythmic theme is developed in two ways: first, the pattern is cut up into blocks and systematically inserted, segment by segment, against © 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.


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Ex. 15 A paradigmatic analysis of the rhythmic theme

other materials in the ‘Augurs of Spring’ so that they add up to the totality of the theme (see the diagonal lines in Ex. 15). Second, the pattern in bar 3 with its distinctive double off-beat accent is isolated as a recurring head motif (see the vertical lines of motif (x) in the same example).100 It is rhythm that unifies the tableau; the pitches of the ‘Augurs’ chord evaporate after No. 21, but the rhythm remains, both as an underlying pulse and a thematic pattern. In fact there is an entire recapitulation of the rhythmic theme at No. 30 superimposed over the ‘Dances of the Young Girls’,101 followed immediately by an altered repetition at No. 31. The notes are entirely different, no longer related to the ‘Augurs’ chord, but Stravinsky manipulates the original rhythms as if they were a means of structural symmetry or a way of synthesising the contrasting materials of the ‘Augurs of Spring’ and the ‘Dances of the Young Girls’. In the terminology of Edward T. Cone – ‘stratification, interlock and synthesis’ – the rhythmic theme of the ‘Augurs of Spring’ and the melodic Music Analysis, 26/i–ii (2007)


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Ex. 16 Final accents of ‘Dances of the Young Girls’

‘Dances of the Young Girls’ create a vast stratified structure which demands an interlocking of the materials at No. 30.102 Synthesis occurs as the rhythmic accents assimilate the other elements, gathering force towards the close of the movement until they engulf the music. The process begins with a dissonant ostinato at No. 31 based on the syncopated pattern of the head motif (x); the rhythmic connection becomes increasingly clear as Stravinsky reinforces the bass ostinato with the original jabs, which are reiterated with greater intensity until the final bar where the accents suddenly arrest the momentum (Ex. 16). For Adorno these are irrational blows imposed externally on the music by some kind of totalitarian regime, but for Stravinsky this rhythmic violence constitutes a logical development of a theme. They appear irrational because, freed from harmonic control, this rhythmic theme contains no laws of closure that can arrest time retrospectively as form; indeed, the abrupt ending of the tableau signals the indeterminacy of the rhythmic process. If a purely rhythmic theme cannot grasp the whole, then what it structures will remain particular. This includes the recurrences of these accents in the remainder of the ballet, for it is the rhythm and not the pitches of the ‘Augurs’ chord that has repercussions throughout the work. The head motif (x), for example, recurs sporadically as the rhythmic idea of the ‘Dance of the Earth’, the ‘Glorification of the Chosen One’ and, most significantly, the final ‘Sacrificial Dance’ (Ex. 17). These recurrences cannot close the Rite as a thematic construct; they are open associations – elective affinities rather than motivic identities. And in this sense, Stravinsky was right: ‘accents were really the foundation of the whole thing’. To summarise so far: a tonal investigation of the ‘Augurs’ chord has ended up as a rhythmic analysis; tonality as percussion is just one of a series of avantgarde inversions that Stravinsky performs against the cultivated traditions of © 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.


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Ex. 17 The development of motif (x)

the ‘civilised’ world. In the Rite, tonality is deliberately turned on its head: literally, with the tonic on top; hierarchically, with its focus on the dissonant surface; semiotically, with the decontextualisation of introversive signs as extroversive ones; symbolically, by turning the civilising tones of tonality into a barbaric noise; and temporally by turning tonal motion into an instant. The ‘Augurs’ chord is a riot precisely because it overturns the status quo; the particular rebels. Music analysis, unless it is willing to go avant-garde, is too reactionary to withstand such an assault; indeed, it would be ironic for it to civilise the sounds of its own destruction, as if the Rite were an extension instead of a negation of its values. II ‘Emancipation’, writes Ernesto Laclau, ‘means at one and the same time radical foundation and radical exclusion’.103 The analysis in Part I has explored the Music Analysis, 26/i–ii (2007)


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notion of ‘radical exclusion’ in which the particular frees itself against the universal. In Part II, the analysis focuses on ‘radical foundation’; can the particular ground its act of freedom? A riot may overturn the status quo, but does it promise anything more than isolated pockets of resistance? The ‘Augurs’ chord, for all its ‘this-ness’ and ‘now-ness’, would merely be an autistic rebellion if it refuses to engage with its harmonic environment. It would be an act of compositional particularism. Indeed, Adorno speculates that the emancipation of the particular in the Rite of Spring must have ‘horrified’ Stravinsky. ‘Total musical freedom . . . must have appeared as a threat’, he writes. ‘Suddenly [Stravinsky] must have perceived the hopeless situation of all music: how was music which had emancipated itself from all established reference systems to achieve a coherence based purely on its own inner resources?’ According to the philosopher, Stravinsky’s regression into neo-classicism was brought on by ‘the very sources of his own inspiration’ in the Rite; in pulling down the walls of tradition Stravinsky was confronted with an empty freedom which forced him to seek refuge among the ruins.104 The riotous particular is always prone to such dialectical reversals. This is because ‘particularity both denies and requires totality’ for its definition. As Laclau explains: ‘[the totality] is present in the particular as that which is absent ... . [And this] forces the particular to be more than itself, to assume a universal role which can only be precarious and unsutured’. Thus radical exclusion and radical foundation form a contradictory yet necessary impulse in the particular. But this tendency need not result in an Adornian false totality in which the particular imposes an arbitrary universal upon itself. Rather the abyss that Adorno hears in the Rite can be left blank. In Laclau’s words, the universal can stand as ‘an empty signifier’; its content is not yet defined but emerges from the particular so that the relation between the two is one of ‘incompletion and provisionality’.105 The process of emancipation, then, is akin to Kant’s reflective judgement, the very model which Adorno proposes for the future of new music. So whereas in Part I of our analytical riot the universal determines the particular and is therefore radically excluded by it, in Part II the particular gestures towards the universal, turning its acts of negation into one of promise. One way of pursuing this promise is to begin from within, focusing on just the seven pitches of the ‘Augurs’ chord. The desire to construct an external system can be relinquished and the founding act of analysis can start from the particular. At its most extreme, this approach would posit the ‘Augurs’ chord as the system itself so that it functions as the Rite’s ‘chord of nature’, generating the materials of the movement. Pitch-class set theory can even be revived if the ‘Augurs’ chord, in all its particularity, can function as a kind of nexus set, creating a source of abstract harmonic relations in the work. As an unordered collection of pitches, 7–32 may not define the chord, but it can be understood as a theoretical extraction that connects the particular to an unspecified universal. Although Forte himself does not refer to 7–32 as a nexus set, he does regard it as ‘a fundamental structure in the composition’.106 Many of the discrete © 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.


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formations from which Stravinsky fashions the work can be derived from subsets of the ‘Augurs’ chord; the distinctive elements that van den Toorn isolates as the Rite’s vocabulary – the ‘(0235) tetrachord, major and minor triads, dominant seventh chords and 0–11 or major seventh vertical interval span’ – can be gleaned from it;107 one could also add to this list Roy Travis’s ‘dissonant tonic sonority’ which he analyses as a prolongation in the ‘Introduction’, and Taruskin’s 0–5–11/0–6–11 harmonic cell which he hears as the skeletal sonority behind the ‘Augurs’ chord and much of the Rite (Ex. 18).108 As a foundational act, the motto chord can become a source of inner coherence. The sonority ‘constitutes a pole for the entire work’, writes Alexandre Tansman; it ‘gives birth to melodic patterns’, he claims and, according to Robert Morgan, it provides ‘a basic pitch reference’ for the material that ensues.109 Thus an external system is no longer required as a means of coherence because the work contains the genetic codes for its own cells, turning the ballet into a ‘contextual’ work that generates a purely musical logic relative to its own processes.110 By authenticating itself, the Rite becomes as organic as the spring it venerates. Stravinsky was not averse to such organic metaphors, judging by his description of the ‘Introduction’: ‘Each instrument’, he writes, ‘is like a bud which grows on the bark of an aged tree; it becomes part of an imposing whole ... . [A]ll this massing of instruments should have the significance of the Birth of Spring’.111 It is certainly possible to hear the continuation of this ‘Birth of Spring’ in the ‘Augurs of Spring’. Its basic rhythmic energy and dissonant immediacy, after all, advertises the initial chord as the primal sound from which the material of spring could erupt; and sure enough, at No. 14, a flurry of horizontal figures shoots out from this vertical mass. But such an organic vision risks turning the particular into the totality, and might even spiral down that self-referential ‘abyss’ which Adorno hears in Stravinsky’s bid for ‘total musical freedom’.112 Structural autonomy would enslave the emancipation of the particular, divesting the chord of its uniqueness by making its significance purely ‘architectonic’. Its instantaneous impact as the ‘motto’ of the work would be subsumed by the need to petrify its pitches as a permanent fixture. But there is nothing permanent about the chord. In fact, that is part of its unique quality; the chord is so local ‘that it cannot be properly called a motto’ at all, comments Taruskin.113 It disappears after No. 22 and only returns at the

Ex. 18 Travis and Taruskin, core sonorities



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conclusion of the work. So far from being ‘structural’, the ‘Augurs’ chord is an ephemeral sonority, framing either end of the ballet in the ‘Augurs of Spring’ and the ‘Sacrificial Dance’, but leaving the centre too empty for it to constitute a background pool of intervallic relations. The ‘whole’ simply isn’t there to function as the telos of the work or to guarantee its organic coherence. To regard it as a ‘germ cell’ is asking too much of a sonority that is merely one out of seven complexes that Forte isolates as the main harmonies of the Rite; indeed, it is a complex which, apart from the reiteration of the chord itself, is insignificant in Forte’s analysis of the ‘Augurs of Spring’.114 Thus its return in the final movement is not some kind of long-range pitch connection; its identity is more a timbral and textural recall that punctuates the music with the particularity of the original than a purely harmonic association (compare Exs. 1 and 3). Ultimately, the motto is not a fixed reference point from which the harmonies of the Rite can be measured. Of course, one could be less global and confine the motto chord to the material between Nos. 13–22 which constitutes the first self-contained section of the ‘Augurs of Spring’; its status as ‘a basic pitch reference’ would be indisputable since the sonority consumes 53 out of the 71 bars, many of which contain nothing but the ‘Augurs’ chord itself. Repetition alone would make the sonority a self-referential structure.115 However, this would reduce analysis to the obvious. Besides, the music cannot be restricted within Nos. 13–22; Stravinsky conceived the ‘Augurs of Spring’ and the ‘Dances of the Young Girls’ as one movement stretching from No. 13 to No. 36. From this perspective, the motto chord dissolves before it gets a third of the way through the tableau, with only three of its original pitches left in the final bar. To be sure, bits of it survive as melodic fragments splintered from the chord, most notably the intervallic shape of the ostinato and its uppermost pitch Ew (see again Ex. 16), yet this merely indicates that the ‘Augurs’ chord is not something fixed, but a sonority in flux. The movement does not grow organically from the inside, but rather, as André Schaeffner suggests, the whole work ‘grows only by addition from outside, by total and continuous renewal, perpetually abandoning the rhythmicharmonic material on which it seized for a moment so ferociously’.116 So perhaps the ‘Augurs’ chord should be regarded as an agent of change rather than a permanent collection, an on-going relation between the particular and an ‘empty’ universal. This, after all, is the promise of the particular. Its fluidity is already evident with the unfolding of the sonority at No. 14 where the vertical texture is disentangled horizontally. For many analysts, the chord appears to give birth to these melodic patterns, but there is an immediate deviation where a C major triad re-orientates the sound octatonically (Ex. 19a). Or take the theme at No. 19; its pitches are embedded within the underlying ‘Augurs’ chord except for an F Ö which seems to interact with some kind of modal scale lying outside the home sonority (Ex. 19b). Commentators instinctively view the ‘Augurs’ chord as the source from which these fragments emanate, for the chord precedes them in the score. In © 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.


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Ex. 19 ‘Augurs of Spring’

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 Ew, 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). However, hybrid sets, precisely because of their interpretative plurality, can lead to all kinds of sophistry in the desire to satisfy certain theoretical needs. Antokoletz’s analysis may have fused octatonic and diatonic elements together, Music Analysis, 26/i–ii (2007)


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but his octatonic segment is in Collection I, which is unrelated to the focus on Collection III in the ‘Augurs of Spring’, and his diatonic segment removes the very note that becomes a centre of diatonic invention in the movement – G (see Ex. 28c). It is the wrong hybrid. In fact, there is no need to invoke a scalic mixture at all for, as Dmitri Tymoczko observes, the sonority ‘involves all the pitches of the GC [or Aw] harmonic minor scale’.120 Such ‘non-diatonic minor scales’, continues Tymoczko, ‘naturally tend to evaporate under the scrutiny of the analyst predisposed to interpret music in terms of diatonic and octatonic fragments’ precisely because they share ‘six notes with a diatonic collection and six notes with an octatonic collection’.121 The theoretical fixation with octatonic and diatonic mixtures has certainly precluded the possibilities of other scales, but Tymoczko’s alternative explanation is as spurious as Antokoletz’s octatonicdiatonic fusion; ‘GC harmonic minor’ implies the very centre that Stravinsky is at pains to avoid in the movement, particularly given the tendency of the ostinato to form its ‘dominant seventh’. GC/Aw is negligible as a force of harmonic or melodic organisation; its scale might as well be the unordered pitch collection 7–32. The way a collection is ordered, partitioned, centred and assigned a hierarchical structure cannot be assumed as Ethan Haimo rightly insists, but must be tested within the context of the work, otherwise theoretical assumptions will be shown up as mere presumption. One way of testing the order of a collection is to differentiate the pool of pitches from the ripples on the surface where the melodic accents and local patterns draw up boundary lines and locate pitch centres. Stravinsky’s stratification of the vertical and horizontal often employs the surface to define the relationship between the collection and the mode. The ‘Wet-Nurses’ Dance’ in Pétrouchka, for example, is typical of Stravinsky’s harmonic technique of this period (Ex. 21); each bar is saturated with the pitch-collection Ex. 20 Antokoletz’s hybrid set

Ex. 21 Pétrouchka, ‘Wet-Nurses’ Dance’



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C–D–E–F–G–A–Bw, creating a harmonic hum that envelopes the pitches of the melodic line; in itself the harmony is non-hierarchical; it is the melody that gives the harmonic pool a directional force, picking out the order of the collection as a scale centred on F. If the ‘Augurs’ chord is an intersection of possible systems, then it is a more fluid collection of pitches than that of the ‘Wet-Nurses’ Dance’; the ripples on its surface leak into various pools. This leakage is most obvious in the ostinato figure prominently embedded within the upper section of the chord. On the face of it, it seems simple enough to analyse. It precedes the ‘Augurs’ chord as a motivic ‘upbeat’ at the close of the ‘Introduction’, offering a clear segmentation of the sonority. But for many analysts, this ostinato is ambiguously incomplete: it only comprises three pitches, Dw–Bw–Ew. The analytical itch to add G to the concoction is one that Stravinsky does not scratch in his segmentation of the sonority. This is not a segment of a dominant seventh chord; it is a part of an Oriental scale. Or as Taruskin would claim: it is a folk source. In fact, the pattern is commonly found in Slavic folksongs, and is etched in popular consciousness as the initial phrase of the ‘Song of the Volga Boatman’ (Ex. 22a). Lawrence Morton has located the origin of the ostinato in the Juszkiewicz anthology (Ex. 22b), a folk collection which Stravinsky himself acknowledged as the source of the Lithuanian melody that opens the Rite;122 however, as Taruskin points out, the figure ‘is too widespread . . . to warrant positive identification’, since it also appears as the initial four notes of a Dorian folk tune in another collection known to the composer (Ex. 22c).123 The ostinato, Ex. 22a Song of the Volga Boatman

Ex. 22b Juszkiewicz, Melodje ludowe litewskie, No. 34

Ex. 22c Istomin/Lyapunov, Pesni russkogo naroda (p. 232)



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Ex. 23 The Kalindra scale

as a folk segment, implies a modal rather than triadic analysis of the ‘Augurs’ chord; so, as with Taruskin’s folk source, Dw functions as a ‘Dorian’ leading note, pointing to Ew rather than away from it as a dominant seventh towards Aw. This certainly makes more sense of the chord; the ostinato orientates the collection of pitches towards a scale on Ew. Van den Toorn acknowledges this octatonically by arranging Collection III in a descending 2–1 ordering in order to give priority to Ew as a descending Dorian fragment ([0235], where the upper pitch = 0).124 However, this [0235] Dorian fragment fills in the threenote ostinato with a CÖ rather than the Cw of the ‘Augurs’ chord. If Cw is retained, however, then a different modal possibility centred on Ew emerges. Instead of the ‘Russian Dorian’, the resulting mode would approximate to another scale used in the nineteenth century to evoke the Orient. Technically, it is a variant of the so called ‘Gypsy’ scale of the style hongrois, known as the Kalindra scale (Ex. 23),125 although at the time of the Rite the sonority was probably just another Eastern commodity designed by Stravinsky for export to Paris. The pitches of the ‘Augurs’ chord do not form a pure Kalindra scale; the DÖ has been altered to Dw as part of the ostinato, although in practice, the leading note of the Kalindra scale can be flattened.126 What is significant about the scale is its ability to generate Neapolitan relationships typical of style hongrois, pitting the tonic triad against the supertonic.127 All Stravinsky does is to superimpose the Neapolitan elements to produce that ‘polytonal’ clash of the ‘Augurs’ chord – Ew over Fw. If this is the case, then this ‘polytonal’ sound is also an Oriental one. But is this clash the result of the Kalindra scale? Some kind of melodic evidence is required to pick out the mode from the collection if the harmony is to assume a Kalindra orientation. To find this evidence, it is necessary to return to the ‘Introduction’. The material at No. 4, as Pople demonstrates, has a close harmonic and motivic affinity with the first thematic statement in the ‘Augurs of Spring’ at No. 15; in fact, they share the same pitches, despite the enharmonic disguise (Ex. 24). At No. 4 the Oriental mode is unmistakable, with the augmented second interval, so characteristic of the Kalindra scale, etched out by the clarinet. With the reappearance of this material in the ‘Augurs of Spring’, the Kalindra fragment is obscured as a chromatic line, but the pitches on the main beats deliberately punch out the same contour – Bw, Aw, G, Fw (marked with an asterisk in Ex. 24) – as if to affirm the folk origins of the ‘Augurs’ chord. © 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.


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Ex. 24 Kalindra fragments in the ‘Introduction’ and the ‘Augurs of Spring’

Ex. 25 Kalindra-Dorian hybrid

Thus the thematic material of the ‘Augurs’ chord can be interpreted entirely within the Russian tradition as an intersection of two distinctive modal possibilities; an incomplete Dorian ostinato and a Kalindra fragment, forming a hinge either side of Bw, resulting in an altered Kalindra scale on Ew, with the outer pitches of the fragments accentuating the semitonal clash (Ew/Fw triads) of the Kalindra scale (Ex. 25). But there is a major theoretical assumption being made here: why is Ew 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 B w, however, challenges the instinctive focus on Ew. Listen again: the Oriental modes of the ‘Augurs’ chord suggest an entirely different orientation. After all, Ew is absent in the Kalindra segment, and a Dorian reading of the ostinato figure on Ew is at variance with the pitches of the ‘Augurs’ chord which indicate a Phrygian or pentatonic segment centred on Bw (there is no CÖ in the upper segment, only Cw). In fact, if Morton’s folk Music Analysis, 26/i–ii (2007)


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Ex. 26 Bw themes in the ‘Augurs of Spring’

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 Bw-centred fragment (see again Ex. 22). Moreover, almost all the thematic materials in the tableau reiterate Bw as their point of reference (Ex. 26); not only is it the head of the Kalindra motif (Bw–Fw), it is also the tail with its return at No. 26 (Fw–Bw); Bw 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 True, all these themes are harmonised with either an Ew major or Ew minor triad, but any alignment between the surface melody and the triadic core to create harmonic depth is disrupted by Stravinsky; the melodic and triadic elements are stratified. Indeed, their disjunction is employed to defamiliarise the clichés of tonality; the modal figures on the surface render the triad strangely dysfunctional, undermining Ew as an assumed root. Even when the harmony mimics a ‘functional’ texture, Ew is not heard as the tonal anchor. This is clearly evident between Nos. 27 and 30; the theme of the ‘Young Girls’ and the ‘Spring Rounds’ theme are unequivocally embedded within a Dorian scale underpinned by Ew, but the thematic surface focuses the harmony modally on Bw (Ex. 27). Any attempt to recompose the melodies so that they cadence on Ew would result in an inconclusive gesture. David Lewin is correct; the triads © 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.


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Ex. 27 ‘Dances of the Young Girls’: Bw melodic fragments with Ew triads

work upside down; the surface Bw is the ‘root’. As for the ubiquitous Ew – the only significant note that survives to the end of the movement – this is not a melodic centre around which pitches gravitate but merely a straight line drawn across the harmonic canvas. Thus one function of the ostinato is to defamiliarise the Ew triad of the ‘Augurs’ chord so that it no longer sounds like an Ew triad. In fact, Stravinsky does just this when he segregates the vertical sonority into various horizontal groups at No. 14 (see again Ex. 19a). What is odd about his ‘analysis of the differential elements of the chord’ is that Stravinsky does not segment the sonority as a bi-partite structure,129 with two triads juxtaposed a semitone apart; he hears it as a tri-partite structure, in which the ‘dominant seventh’ formation above the Fw arpeggio is deliberately split in two to prevent it from functioning as an Ew triad. The ostinato is severed from the pitch G to focus modally on Bw. G, on the other hand, becomes the centre of another upside down triad (G–Fw–C) that severs itself from the ostinato above by alternating with the Fw arpeggio below. So close is its alignment with the Fw arpeggio that it transforms the major triad (E–GC–B) into a minor triad (E–GÖ–B) in the bassoon line. Stravinsky’s parsing indicates how the melodic fragments, centring on Fw, G and Bw, conceived before the formation of the ‘Augurs’ chord in the sketches, are embodied within the chord as a stratified texture. And oddly, the most significant pitch in this chord for Stravinsky is the seemingly innocuous one of GÖ; this is because it is both the moment of ambiguity and the catalyst for transformation in the ‘Augurs’ chord. GÖ is literally the pivot for the seven pitches of this sonority: Ew–Dw–Bw–GÖ–Cw–Aw–Fw. It is the ‘slash’ within the ‘Augurs’ chord, dividing the Occidental from the Oriental, the tonal from the modal, the triadic from the melodic, and the clichéd from the defamiliarised. GÖ is the hidden focus of Stravinsky’s compositional strategy. It is both the problem and solution of the chord. As such, it demands a particular listening. If further confirmation of this analysis were required, we only need turn again to Ex. 13; it notates the peculiar way Stravinsky spreads out the chord on the Music Analysis, 26/i–ii (2007)


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piano during the filming of the CBS documentary. First he groups the Fw triad, then he places the G before segregating it from the three notes of the ostinato. Listening in this way to this sonority would mean cancelling the tacitly assumed texture of eighteenth-century tonality in which chords are figured from the bass to support an upper line. From this new perspective, the Ew–Fw dissonance would become something of a theoretical red-herring, for the identity of the ‘Augurs’ chord is no longer the generalised clash between the outer voices, as is often presumed, but an inner clash between Bw and GÖ. This is perhaps the new order promised by the riot. Indeed, the entire movement is the working out of this internal partitioning, with GÖ gradually shifting the focus away from the bottom Fw to pit itself against the Bw ostinato. First, GÖ defines itself as the ‘root’ of an upside-down triad that subsumes Fw within its boundaries (Ex. 28a). Second, as the final punctuation of the theme at No. 19, GÖ forms an alternative Phrygian tonic to the reiterated Bws, bringing the tension between the two modal centres to the fore (Ex. 28b). Finally, GÖ usurps Bw as the melodic focus, surfacing as the axis in the ‘Young Girls’ theme at No. 25, with the upside-down triad now extended to embrace an entire scale ‘on C’ (Ex. 28c). The shift of focus obscures the foreground details around Bw, as if the music were retreating back to a distant or hidden plane in the ‘Augurs’ chord.

Ex. 28 The emergence of GÖ as a point of melodic focus



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To underline the harmonic strategy, the exploration of the inner spaces of the ‘Augurs’ chord is visualised in the actual spaces of Stravinsky’s choreographic imagination. The remoteness of GÖ in the final example is enacted on stage, for the adolescent girls have yet to appear (Ex. 28c); only their theme is heard from far away, perhaps from the hills painted behind the giant mound on Roerich’s set. This is evoked by sounding the melody on the French horn, played ‘mais en dehors’. Harmonically, the focus on GÖ at this point blurs the foreground details around Bw, reducing the Ew –Bw –Dw –Bw ostinato to a murmur on the strings. It is only after hearing this G-orientated theme that ‘the adolescent girls’, says Stravinsky, are seen to ‘come from the river’;130 they emerge from a distant harmonic location. As they appear on stage, the harmonic process is reversed. Stravinsky switches focus from the distant pitches associated with GÖ to the foreground pitches of the ostinato by transposing the ‘Young Girls’ theme to Bw (Ex. 29a). By changing harmonic allegiance in this way, the theme reduces the collection around GÖ to a vague hum which eventually disappears at No. 28. With the elimination of the agent of ambiguity and transformation, the harmonic and melodic elements synchronise for the first time in the movement into one system (Ex. 29b). The texture is no less stratified, but the accretion of layers is absorbed within an ‘unimpaired diatonic D-scale on Ew’,131 producing what Taruskin calls ‘sheer inertial accumulation’.132 Finally, out of the friction of Stravinsky’s harmonic language there emerges a sense of ‘consonance’, as if the planetary forces within the ‘Augurs’ chord had come into alignment on Bw. Ex. 29 ‘Dances of the Young Girls’: from ‘dissonance’ to ‘consonance’



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As Stravinsky writes, ‘If . . . an as yet unorientated combination [of sounds] has been found, I shall have to determine the center towards which it should lead. The discovery of this center suggests to me the solution of my problem’.133 Clearly, the ‘Augurs’ chord is not a static dissonance only capable of rhythmic propulsion but a solution to a harmonic problem; it creates vast harmonic motions and dynamic resolutions out of its brittle surfaces. But these procedures do not operate tonally or through prolongational structures; rather, different systems are superimposed to create a forcefield of latent planes that move in layers from at least three dissonant strata (Fw, G, Bw) to two (G, Bw) before ‘resolving’ to one (Bw) by means of common tones, conjunct motion and block transposition. It is a movement from confusion to fusion, or, to borrow Stravinsky’s words, from an ‘unorientated combination’ to a ‘discovery of [a] center’. ‘Nijinsky’, writes Jacques Rivière, ‘created a ballet of a thousand latent directions’ and in the ‘Augurs’ chord, Stravinsky created a sonorous parallel; in the Rite, says Rivière, there is an ‘active ubiquity that permits Stravinsky to proceed in several directions at the same time’.134 The ‘Augurs of Spring’ proceeds from an explosive, multidirectional sonority that narrows down to a unidirectional one. Given this harmonic strategy, it might be argued that Stravinsky was right after all – the ballet is ‘architectonique’. However, the spatial analogy of the young girls emerging from GÖ (background) to Bw (foreground) suggests that the harmonic process is both ‘architectonique’ and ‘anecdotique’; the structural and programmatic elements are not necessarily at variance. After all, Stravinsky originally conceived the ballet as a ‘musico-choreographic work, without plot’, comprising a series of ritual games designed by Roerich, where the chases, tugs-of-war, circular dances and competing forces suggested compositional strategies of juxtaposition, conflict, contrast, resolution and synthesis.135 The Rite may jettison the ‘pantomime’ gestures of the Firebird and Pétrouchka,136 but the harmonic process still enacts a formal game-plan inextricably tied to the events on stage. As Jann Pasler writes, ‘the focus in the [Rite] on abstract relationships [between the arts] rather than a story brought with it the seeds of a new formalism’,137 or what was called at the time ‘Art Plastique’.138 So what is the game-plan behind the harmonic strategy? The opening tableau sets out the male-female conflict that is the force behind the rituals of the entire ballet. On the crudest level, the long-range motion from the stratified layers in the ‘Augurs of Spring’ to the ‘consonant’ collection in the ‘Dances of the Young Girls’ underlines the sexual stereotypes represented by the two dances – one is predominantly male, the other female. The ‘Augurs’ chord is masculine; its texture is muscular, athletic, angular, laconic, dissonant, vertical and original; its violent rhythmic thrust can only be appeased in the stylised rape of the ‘Ritual of Abduction’. The ‘resolution’ into a single unstratified pitch collection is female; the harmonies are bound, decorative and domesticated within folklike thematic enclosures. But the scene is not merely one of sexual difference; in Stravinsky’s description of events, the moment of harmonic alignment on Bw is also one of desexualisation. He writes: © 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.


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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 Bw 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 forcefield 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 Music Analysis, 26/i–ii (2007)


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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 groundbreaking 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 © 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.


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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. Music Analysis, 26/i–ii (2007)


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NOTES The research for this article was partly funded by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. I am also indebted to Brian Hyer and Arnold Whittall for their constructive comments on an earlier version of the text. 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: © 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.


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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.



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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.



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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 Aw 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 (Dw–Bw–Ew–Bw) 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 Aw 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 Ew 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/FC Pétrouchka chord.



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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.



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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.



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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 Bw minor triads and the triadic formations in octatonic Collection III on C, Ew, Gw 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.



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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.



106

 . . 

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.



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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 CÖ in order to descend smoothly to Bw.

127. This is evident later in the same Rhapsody mentioned in n. 126 where A and Bw 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.



108

 . . 

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 Ew 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 © 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.


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(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.

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 Rite unified 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.



Analysis of Rite of Spring

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