Rite Of Spring Research Articles

Музыкальное искусство России начала ХХ века: Expansio

The essay is devoted to the consideration of such a phenomenon as the aggressiveness complex in the history of the Russian musical art of the early XX century. The author focuses on the peculiarities of formation and development of the phenomenon in question in I. Stravinsky’s, S. Prokofiev’s works. In particular, the manifestations of aggressiveness in Stravinsky’s ballet “The Rite of Spring” (1913) are analysed in detail. In addition, attention is paid to musical grotesque, which came into contact with the aggressiveness complex in certain manifestations, in the works of Russian composers of the early XX century. As a result, the author comes to the conclusion that it is important to note the mood of the early XX century itself, its tendency to such manifestations, which resulted from time to time in breakthroughs of open extremism: one of the missions of this century was to open the gateway to the flow of aggressiveness, negativism, rigidity and alienation. That is why it is necessary to reflect not so much on art as on reality itself, which put forward such phenomena that were reflected in the mirror of artistic creativity.

Pathei mathos and skandalon in Le Sacre du Printemps

In spite of abundant research on Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring), an avant-garde ballet that premiered in Paris in 1913, there is no substantive examination of the ballet’s re-imagining of premodern rituality, aesthetics, and performance. In this brief essay, I interpret Igor Stravinsky’s musical score and Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography for Le Sacre in an exposition of two specific terms: pathei mathos (knowledge by ordeal) and skandalon (‘stumbling stone,’ a trap, scandal). As I demonstrate with my exegesis of each term, the celebrated radicality of Stravinsky’s composition and the presumed modernism of Nijinsky’s movement are in fact indebted to Greco-Roman antiquity and the Middle Ages. Ultimately, this essay shows how a high modernist ballet is in fact intimately tied to ancient ritual and medieval gesture.

The rhythm of place and the place of rhythm: arguments for idiorhythmy

This paper examines the relationship between rhythm, place, and race. It argues that Roland Barthes’ concept of idiorhythmy is useful for understanding the politics of rhythm in relation to race. The paper explores how rhythm has been used to think about the interrelatedness of place and mobility – adding dynamism to place. I analyze reactions to the performance of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps to demonstrate how rhythm has been culturally and politically encoded through discursive and conceptual links to geographical imaginaries of place. The paper also explores how rhythm has been used to locate Black people in White western thought, and how it has been mobilized in Black and anti-racist thought. The concept of idiorhythmy is used to suggest the radical possibility of places of other rhythms, outside of the dominant rhythms of the world. Throughout the paper, it is argued that an understanding of rhythm is useful for delineating the interplay between place, race, and power.

Contradictory Late Styles in Djuna Barnes's Poetic Cycles, 1969–82

Abstract Focusing on examples of Djuna Barnes's late published poetry—“Quarry” (1969), “Rite of Spring” (1982), and Creatures in an Alphabet (1982)—this article considers the contradictory ways these poems engage with theories of late style. Barnes's late output offers a unique and somewhat ambivalent case study for examining how the privileging of difficulty and discordance are met and informed by the lived realities of aging and longevity. Paying attention to the publication history of each poem, this article first examines Barnes's redrafting process for “Rite of Spring,” which has been recently reassessed as a conscious, avant-garde experiment, one this article suggests embraced lateness and continuation as a method. Second, the article considers “Quarry” and Barnes's correspondence with publishers Faber and Faber to examine her attitude toward a seemingly finalized poem. Third, this article turns to Creatures in an Alphabet as an example of a supposedly completed project that was left unendorsed by Barnes and the tensions inherent in trying to read a late style into its material. Overall, I suggest that the revisionary nature of Barnes's poetry and its unfinishing state is a late style process, which represents a formal experiment, a creative experience informed by aging, and an example of the cultural investment critics have made in her late works.

Who Saw Her Die? Unfixing the Danse sacrale in Le Sacre du printemps

This article focuses on the last moments of Le Sacre du printemps, which opened in Paris on 29 May 1913 at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. Concentrating on the discourse of the creative practice that brought these moments into being, it seeks to add to our understanding of Le Sacre from the evidence of those most intimately involved with this first production. Analysis of Le Sacre demonstrates the equal viability of a great variety of readings of the work. Such readings are enabled by analysis, which regards any aspect of a creative work and its best interpretation as happily unfixed and unstable. It has sometimes been accepted that the job of critics and theorists is to fix interpretations of creative works and to demonstrate conveniently closed theses about them. Creative artists are not always willing to join their critical colleagues. This was certainly the case with Le Sacre. By reading the final seven seconds of its Danse sacrale through the accounts of the work’s primary creators – composer Igor Stravinsky, designer Nicholas Roerich, and their creative intimates – this article highlights an engrossing instability of intention and interpretation. It questions the idea that Le Sacre is a sacrificial ritual in the light of how Stravinsky himself considered his work in terms of coronation and consecration.

Picture Editing and Music: A Marriage of Invisible Arts

Picture Editing and Music: A Marriage of Invisible Arts

In My Body: An African contemporary dance perspective

During a recent North American tour, Florent Nikéma performed in Pina Bausch’s Rite of Spring. After an October 2022 master workshop held at the Department of Dance, York University in Toronto, Canada, Nikéma was interviewed about his trajectory and contemporary experience in African-based dance vernacular by one of the participating graduate students.

Economies of Reperformance

As the very first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic ebbed in the United States, a new production of Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring (1975) appeared online. Performed on Senegal’s shoreline, Dancing at Dusk resituates Bausch’s choreography within the beach’s formative histories of racialized violence, colonialism, and white supremacy. In this context, the performance also prompts considerations of the relationships between the enduring histories of racial capitalism and the futures of choreographic economies.

The Listener and the Work as the Dualistic Basis for the Morphological Analysis of Music

In morphological analysis, the musical work and the listener are seen as elements of one communicative duality. Each element of this duality may play the role of either subject or object. Morphological analysis takes sound construction as its main target. This makes possible a more flexible approach to analyzing a musical text. The morpheme, one of the cornerstones of morphological analysis, can be defined as a sound construction with a typical set of characteristic features. The other cornerstone, the morph, transforms a morpheme into a genеriс, stylistic “flesh and blood” of a specific musical text, on the basis of polymorphism. From the point of view of morphological analysis, the musical development in the “Introduction” to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring is based on a step-by-step approach to an externally existing object, permitting us to perceive (see or hear) its details. The object itself is polymorphic, i.e., like an embryo, it contains within itself, from the start, every element it needs for further development. The starting point of the “Introduction,” the high-register bassoon melody accompanied by the supporting French horn voice, can be defined as a forest seen in a distance, from where the sound of a shepherd’s horn can be heard. The ten intonational elements of the initial three measures of the ballet are the base from which the form of the “Introduction” is developed.

Russian ballet of the early 20th century in Europe

Familiarization of Europeans with Russian culture through ballet (ballets “Petrushka” by M. Fokine, “The Rite of Spring” by V. Nijinsky, artistic design / scenery by A.N. Benois (“The World of Art”) and N.K. Roerich.

Pina Bausch and the Dancing Body: Social Constructionism and Identity in Nelken, The Rite of Spring and Kontakthof

This article aims to consider the social construct of the dancing body and its role in the building of identity focusing primarily on the female dancing body as exercised in the seminal works of Nelken, The Rite of Spring and Kontakthof by the German expressionist choreographer Pina Bausch. The phenomenological discourse in these works ‘embody the social and cultural
 dynamics in which they are generated’1, making of them unique performative experiences. In these pieces of tanztheater, the characters embodied in the dancing bodies on stage are both, universal and anonymous, and the stories they tell are about human connexions and their consequences in a defined sphere. In these fundamental choreographies by Pina Bausch our perception of dance art leads to a response that goes beyond aesthetic dispositions and forces the spectator into an explorative interdisciplinary journey of self-discovery. As Pina Bausch herself said, ‘it is not about how people moves, but what moves them’ (Pina Bausch in Bringshaw, 2009).

FAGOT İÇİN SEÇİLMİŞ ORKESTRA SOLOLARININ TEKNİK AÇIDAN İNCELENMESİ VE ÇALIŞMA ÖNERİLERİ

During their education, an artist receives soloist training on many concertos and sonatas. However, people whose goal is to become an orchestra artist should be prepared for a possible exam by studying orchestral materials. In this study, four selections that are most likely to be encountered in orchestra auditions and that consist of works from different periods were determined and examined in terms of playing techniques. These works are Scheherazade by Rimsky Korsakov, Ludwig van Beethoven's 4th Symphony, The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky and Maurice Ravel's Piano Concerto in G Major.

Ownership, ontology, and the contemporary dance commons

AbstractThis article considers the “commons” in relationship to contemporary dance in the United Kingdom. I highlight the norms and expectations that shape the sharing of dance in this context by outlining four implicit rules that govern circulation and ownership. I go on to highlight how dance’s circulation outside of legal structures is in part due to its ontology through the examination of choreographer and visual artist Florence Peake’s work RITE (2018) and its relationship to choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) (1913).

How Wild Can It Be?

How Wild Can It Be?

Aesthetic Preference for Nonredundant Complexity: Key to Creativity

The basic principle of all biological and social, and some physical processes is increase of interactive heterogeneity, which evolutionarily raises the sophistication level of intraspecific and interspecific systems. Primates, including humans, and other species of animals such as elephants, are known to create multicolor pictorial patterns on a canvas, holding a painting brush in a hand, or in the case of elephants, wrapping the long "nose" around a painting brush. Therefore the pattern creation has a long evolutionary history. Humans and monkeys branched off 6 or 7 million years ago. Humans and elephants much earlier. Another important consideration is the method of mate selection by females. Females prefer "minority" males. If Type A males and Type B males are mixed, females prefer "minority" males instead of "supernormal" males. The females' preference for "minority" males leads to intraspecific heterogenization, but if females preferred "supernormal" males, it would lead to intraspecific homogenization. There is heterogeneity of individual aesthetic preference types in terms of nonredundant vs. redundant complexity. Some examples of nonredundant complexity are: Picasso's Guernica, and Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps. Aesthetic preferences are expressions of the individual's perceptual/cognitive/cogitative/action types (abbreviated as "mindscape types"). While individuals who prefer nonredundant complexity tend to be creative, those who like redundant complexity tend to be anti-creative. Furthermore, we must become aware that the individual types are not subcultural variations, but they exit across cultural, social, gender, and professional boundaries, and are therefore transgroup occurrences. The individual types also cut across boundaries between species, and are therefore transeidosic. This knowledge is useful in multicultural management. Awareness of transgroupness of individual mindscape types will reduce self-stereotyping and ingroup homogenization, and contribute to reduction of hostility, violence and terrorism between religious, political and ideological groups. In plain language, some persons in other groups are more similar to you than many people in your own group. Psychological tests are available.

Rethinking Igor Stravinsky historically and theoretically — III

The article is a continuation of the author’s reflections on the phenomenon of musical polymorphism (the beginning is in Vol. 124, 2019; the continuation is in Vol. 128, 2020). Stravinsky’s use of the environment, space, motion, dissonance, and Janus morphemes is considered as his inheritance from a tradition dating back to the work of his great predecessors. The musical tableau Sadko by RimskyKorsakov, the introduction Dawn on the Moscow River to Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina, and Borodin’s symphonic poem In the Steppes of Central Asia are a clear confirmation of this. In Sadko Rimsky-Korsakov reveals himself as the founder of musical polymorphism. The multi-element polymorphism of Mussorgsky’s Dawn on the Moscow River forms the basis of the first tableau in Stravinsky’s Petrushka. In the Steppes of Central Asia is an example of a multi-elemental, polymorphic structure, recreated outside an existing object: a native caravan crossing the desert, guarded by a Russian military detachment. Its stereophonic nature appears in the displacement of the textural elements to the rear and the foreground, their spatial compression or expansion, changes to the acoustic volume, sound coloration. Introductory violins octave unison in In the Steppes of Central Asia displays its hidden timbre-polyphonic nature. In the historical perspective, this compositional discovery by Borodin foreshadows a similar approach in Stravinsky’s musical language. The timbrical layering of the unison can be traced in Dances of the Young Girls from The Rite of Spring, The Lullaby in the Storm from The Fairy’s Kiss. The rhythmic ostinato features of Rimsky-Korsakov’s and Borodin’s scores are developed by Stravinsky to the elaborated part of his musical language. The structures with more or less constant, exact repetitions are used in The Rite of Spring, Three Tales for Children, Three Pieces for String Quartet, The Soldier’s Tale, The Wedding, Symphony of Psalms.

Музыкальное искусство России начала XX века: Язычество

The essay presents the origins and features of the development of such a direction in the musical art of Russia at the beginning of the 20th century as “paganism”. The article consistently reveals the issues of the origin of “pagan” imagery, starting with the opera work of M. Glinka (“Ruslan and Lyudmila” (1842)) and A. Borodin (“Prince Igor” (1887)) to its culmination in the works of I. Stravinsky (“The Rite of Spring” (1913)) and S. Prokofiev (Second Symphony (1924)). Particular attention is paid to the consideration of the “pagan” style in general and its fundamental features - manifestations of the primitiveness spirit, “barbarian” beginning (including Fauvist tendencies), “Scythianism”. The influence of the key events of the beginning of the 20th century on the development of the “pagan” direction - the First World War, the Revolution of 1917 is traced. Finally, the final stage that “paganism” passed in the 1920s is described. As a result, the author comes to the following conclusions: despite its short duration, the presence of costs and extremes (aggressiveness, destructive elements, orgiastic pressure up to vandalistic frenzy), the “pagan” direction has become a unique acquisition of Russian music, a genuine discovery in sphere of folk-national themes, reflecting an exceptionally powerful surge of human will and energy, an extremely temperamental expression of hidden forces and aspirations rising to the surface of life.

Last Rites: Self-Representation and Counter-Canon Practices in Classical Music through Radhe Radhe

To commemorate the centenary of the 1913 Paris premiere of The Rite of Spring, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill organised The Rite of Spring at 100. As part of this, the Carolina Performing Arts (CPA) commissioned new pieces interpreting and responding to The Rite. Among these was Radhe Radhe: Rites of Holi, created by the Indian-American composer-scholar and pianist Vijay Iyer, performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble and accompanied by a film about Holi (the annual Hindu harvest festival) assembled by filmmaker Prashant Bhargava. Radhe Radhe eventually took the form of a performance document mediated between live music and film, as well as culturally divergent notions of ‘ritual’.This article will consider Bhargava’s film and Iyer’s score, along with documentation of live chamber performances of the piece and ask: how does ‘western’ classical music represent itself in the 21st century? In what ways is self-representation performed in an intercultural collaboration such as Radhe Radhe that destabilises the dominant whiteness of the classical music canon by reimagining its soundscape in reference to a canonical work such as The Rite? I propose that Radhe Radhe—and Iyer’s score in particular—echoes as a sonic postcolonial ur-text through its engagement with Holi. As an instance of the Deleuzian simulacrum, it represents a radical departure from the cultural politics of ‘everyday colonial racism’ (Levitz, 2017: 163) surrounding the 1913 Rite by employing a collaborative vocabulary that resists the hegemonic performance traditions of western classical music.

The Listener and the Work as the Dualistic Basis for the Morphological Analysis of Music

In morphological analysis, the musical work and the listener are seen as elements of one communicative duality. Each element of this duality may play the role of either subject or object. This paves the way for a more flexible approach towards analyzing a musical text. The morpheme, one of the cornerstones of morphological analysis, can be defined as a sound construction with a typical set of characteristic features. The other cornerstone, the morph, transforms a morpheme into a genеriс, stylistic “flesh and blood” of a specific musical text, on the basis of polymorphism. One bright example of the depth and rapidity of morphic transformations in Tchaikovsky’s music is the finale of his First Piano Concerto. From the point of view of morphological analysis, the musical development in the “Introduction” to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring is based on a step-by-step approach to an externally existing object, making it possible for us to perceive (see or hear) its details. The object itself is polymorphic, i.e., similar to an embryo; it contains within itself, from the start, every element it needs for further development. The starting point of the “Introduction,” the high-register bassoon melody accompanied by the supporting line of the horn, can be defined as a forest viewed in a distance, from where the sound of a shepherd’s horn can be heard. The ten intonational elements of the initial three measures of the ballet provide the base from which the form of the “Introduction” is developed.

Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in the American Midwest

Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in the American Midwest