Emergent Temporalities in Stravinsky’s “Le Sacre du Printemps”

Abstract

Abstract It has been suggested that time is a description of movement and relative change measured or compared against a standard, whether against sun and clocks in the physical world, or against mental constructs, such as the human experience of a subjective ‘now’. The human brain perceives rates of motion and change through both its sensory systems and its higher order processing pathways, and it seems, is uniquely equipped by its structures to derive a range of temporalities across both the physical and non-material worlds. Because we are perceptive and creative in both physical and abstract domains, we are able to make precise clock-time measurements and evaluate the effects of motion and forces in physical space (as in Einstein’s Theories of Relativity) and also distinguish the subjective temporalities that emerge as different qualities of motion expand our mental space to construct abstract meaning. This paper looks at the movement patterns of Stravinsky’s ‘Le Sacre du Printemps’, a musical score for the ‘Ballets Russes’ which caused a riot at its première at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris in May, 1913. With hindsight, its first audience was much disturbed, perhaps not only by the highly dissonant sounds accompanying ‘primitive’ movements and the act of self-sacrifice, but also subliminally, by the work’s stark portrayal of pure temporalities: its activity, structure and organised complexity exposed them—and still exposes us, 100 years later—to the raw process of being and becoming, to both actual and emergent temporalities. In the course of ‘Le Sacre du Printemps’, Stravinsky’s organisation of motion, of both rhythm and pitch, transforms our temporal experience from that of the here and now, the physical ‘closeness between man and earth’, to that of the highly abstract ‘triumph of the human spirit’, in what he called ‘a single endless dialogue, an inconceivable conversation’. The means by which, and the point at which each of the four levels of organised movement emerges, is interesting in the light of our ability to construct temporality in both the physical and non-material realms. At the reductionist level, the work’s movement away from the ‘here and now’ invites connections and relations with current ideas about time in physics, while its marriage of rhythms in sound and space, its association of sound and gesture, and its organisation of motion creates a temporal entity whose effect upon the psyche is consistent with what is now known about the brain’s higher-order processing of music and movement.