Rite Of Spring Research Articles

Recent Works Examined

Average Strawinsky criticism in this country has for thirty years been drab and reach-me-down.The formulae are as follow: “Strawinsky started brilliantly, much too brilliantly. Firebird and Petrouchka were a coruscation that burned out his genius before he was thirty. The slag was already beginning to show in The Rite of Spring. Thereafter, perverse man, he wrote not with his blood and nerves and basic impulses, as all true music must be written, but with a desiccated though agile brain. He had nothing to say and no style of his own in which to say it. Every new work since 1913 has been a futile academic experiment, form without ‘content’. There has been no creative continuity: only a restless hopping from trick to trick and mode to mode. The general effect is dust-dry, brittle, comfortless. He gives us not music but broken glass”‥

THE TWO TRENDS OF MODERN MUSIC IN STRAVINSKY'S WORKS

PERPETUAL recreation of itself is an attribute of genius. ^A Once a height attained, the eternal ascension toward summits yet unscaled again begins. Hence nothing is more disconcerting to the crowd than genius. Those who after much effort have gained an understanding of the work of a certain year, find themselves replunged the year following, into lack of comprehension by its new work. An instance in point was when after the tardy triumph of the Sacre du Printemps, his le Rossignol baffled Stravinsky's most ardent partisans. And, in truth, the abyss stretching between these two works is a profound one: the pieces for string quartet which succeeded even accentuated the new path which Stravinsky was following. One feels that for him the Sacre represents a point of arrival, the perfect expression of one kind of music. Yet this music does not satisfy him: he seeks to go beyond it, to penetrate into domains unknown. And of these researches his latest works have been