What makes Music and Ballet Revolutionary? We attempt to answer this question, and are inspired at the start by the brilliant reconstruction of Nijinksky's 1912-13 choreography by the Joffrey Ballet's 1987 performances here, a true cinematic accomplishment that still strikes the viewer as totally revolutionary 104 years later.

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One hundred and four years ago, on May 29, 1913, Russian composer Igor Stravinsky debuted The Rite of Spring Ballet in a theater in Paris, a performance whose reception by the audience will always be remembered as the most violent in music history.

In 2017, this ballet is still considered to be a "seminal work of modernism -- a frenetic, jagged orchestral ballet that boldly rejected the ordered harmonies and comfort of traditional composition."

This music left its mark on jazz, minimalism, and other contemporary movements, even art, but to those who watched the performance a little more than a century ago, it was truly scandalous. This ballet was described by Weymouth as "one of the great aesthetic monuments of Western art -- completely assured, startlingly original, brutal, tender, and altogether wonderful." Like Stravinsky's earlier works for the Ballet Russes, The Rite of Spring was inspired by Russian culture, yet, unlike them, it challenged the audience with its chaotic percussive momentum.

[Igor Stravinsky's grandson, John, was in my mother's second grade class at Leal Elementary school in Urbana, Illinois, the home of the University of Illinois. My school was about six blocks from the sprawling campus. He was son of Soulima (Igor's son), who was a professor of composition at the University of Illinois.

My mother always came home with interesting stories about all of her charges, but she particularly liked Johnny Stravinsky. He early on gravitated away from music towards sports; indeed, he is now, 62 years later, recognized all over the world as a sports writer.

One day, young Stravinsky approached my mother and told her that Sir Thomas Beecham, Conductor of both the London Philharmonic and the Royal Philharmonice Orchestras, at that point, probably about 77 years old, was coming to their house for the weekend as a guest, and would she like to come and sleep with him? Of course, an innocent young child who was thinking more of a sleepover, at the age when kids had slumber parties and pillow fights. Everyone got a big laugh out of that one....]

Here is a photo essay on Stravinsky's progeny, including John:

.katyachilingiri.com/stravinsky.html

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The Joffrey's 1987 performances were painstakingly reconstructed from Nijinksky's 1912 -1913 original notes, and are a brilliant cinematic accomplishment!

Joffrey Ballet 1987 Rite of Spring (1 of 3)

.youtube.com/watch?v=jF1OQkHybEQ

Joffrey Ballet 1987 Rite of Spring (2 of 3)

.youtube.com/watch?v=iH1t0pCchxM

Joffrey Ballet 1987 Rite of Spring (3 of 3)

.youtube.com/watch?v=C_7ndqgwxcM

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I must thank by Amar Toor writing in The Verge for his brilliant insights on what this momentous anniversary ultimately means.

One of my favorite music critics and author of program notes, Peter Gutmann, wrote this earlier, in 2001:

"The 28-year old Stravinsky was the toast of Paris. Igor Stravinsky In 1910, he had launched his career with the hugely successful Firebird, a delightful ballet with a fanciful story and gorgeous music in the grand and familiar style of Tchaikovsky. For the next season he wrote Petrouchka which, while more modern, was anchored in memorable folk tunes and offered a charming tale of intrigue among established Commedia del'Arte characters. It was with such wonderful memories firmly in mind that society audiences anticipated yet another fabulous but essentially traditional entertainment."

George Benjamin in 2013 wrote in the UK Guardian:

"Written on the eve of the first world war and the Russian revolution, the piece is the emblem of an era of great scientific, artistic and intellectual ferment. No composer since can avoid the shadow of this great icon of the 20th century, and score after score by modern masters would be unthinkable without its model."

The conductor, Pierre Monteux, was introduced to the score when the composer played it for him on the piano. He recalled: "The very walls resounded as Stravinsky pounded away, occasionally stamping his feet and jumping up and down to accentuate the force of the music. Not that it needed such emphasis." Monteux thought Stravinsky was 'raving mad' and predicted the music would cause a scandal, but his assessment fell short of the full scale-riot that it provoked!

Details surrounding the events of May 29th, 1913 are apocryphal. Most of what we know comes from newspaper articles plus a few eyewitness accounts. "To this day, experts debate over what exactly sparked the incident; was it the music or the choreography? Was it a publicity stunt or was it genuine social warfare? However, all historians agree that Stravinsky's grand debut ended in "mayhem and chaos."

The disturbances commenced with the opening notes of the ballet, a high pitched bassoon solo that brought sarcastic laughter from even this sophisticated Parisian audience.

From Lucy Moore's May 4th 2013 article in the UK Daily Mail:

Even though the first strains of Sacre are hauntingly delicate, the unusually high register used by Stravinsky for the opening bassoon solo caused a commotion. The composer Camille Saint-Saëns hissed to his neighbor: "If that's a bassoon, I'm a baboon."

This esteemed Parisian audience then began to jeer more loudly as the orchestra progressed into the dissonant score, with the snarling rhythms and pounding drums inside the only recently opened The Theatre Champs-Ã?lyse'es.

By the time the dancers arrived on the stage as directed by choreographer, Vaslav Nijinsky of the Ballets Russes. Dressed in costumes intended to represent pagan Russia, they gyrated and performed what were then and probably still are violent convulsive motions, far removed from the graceful pas de deux of more traditional ballets, which were in fact quite appropriate for the ballet's them of pagan sacrifice.

The audience's derisive yelling and shouting became so loud that the ballerinas couldn't even here the orchestra, thus forcing Nijinksy to utter the commands from backstage!

According to PBS Music Notes:

"The intensely rhythmic score and primitive scenario -- a setting of scenes from pagan Russia -- shock audiences more accustomed to the demure conventions of classical ballet. The complex music and violent dance steps depicting fertility rites first draw catcalls and whistles from the crowd, and are soon followed by shouts and fistfights in the aisles. The unrest in the audience escalates into a riot.

The Paris police arrived by intermission, but they restored only limited order. Chaos reigns for the remainder of the performance. Nijinsky and Stravinsky are despondent. However, Sergei Diaghilev, the director of Les Ballets Russes, comments that the scandal was 'just what I wanted.'"

The two groups in the audience began to fight with each other, even throwing vegetable at the orchestra and up on the stage. About forty people were forced to leave, but the performance continued to the end.

Harvard University professor Thomas Kelly explained:

One of the reasons that the Paris premiere of The Rite of Spring created such a furor was that it shattered everyone's expectations. The evening's program began innocently with a performance of "Les Sylphides." However, as the follow-up piece, "The Rite of Spring" turned out to be anything but spring-like. One of the dancers recalled that Vaslav Nijinsky's shocking choreography was physically unnatural to perform. 'With every leap we landed heavily enough to jar every organ in us.' The music itself was angular, dissonant and totally unpredictable. The pagans on-stage made pagans of the audience." Despite its inauspicious debut, Stravinsky's score for "The Rite of Spring" today stands as a magnificent musical masterpiece of the twentieth century."

In the introduction, Stravinksy called for a bassoon to play higher in its range than anyone else had ever done. In fact, the instrument was virtually unrecognizable as a bassoon. When the curtain rose and the dancing began, there appeared a musical theme without a melody, only a loud, pulsating, dissonant chord with jarring, irregular accents. The audience responded to the ballet with such a din of hisses and catcalls that the performers could barely hear each other. The ballet's premiere managed to instill in the audience the true spirit of the music.

The music critic at French daily Le Figaro, Henri Quittard, wrote that the ballet was an "exercise in puerile barbarity," basically intimating the idea that Stravinsky must have been corrupted by both Nijinsky and Sergei Diaghilev (the impresario who founded the Ballets Russes).

The audience was disturbed by both Stravinsky's score and Nijinsky's choreography, and some still speculate that all of this must have been orchestrated as an elaborate publicity stunt on the part of Diaghilev, or even as an operation planned by disgruntled traditionalists.

The London Daily Telegraph's Ivan Hewett wrote this very recently, just last week:

"Stravinsky had scored a massive hit the previous year with Petrushka, which added an exciting element of modernist collage to colorful Russian folklore. Vaslav Nijinsky, the choreographer, had caused a minor scandal a few months previously, with his blatantly erotic portrayal of the lovesick faun in Debussy's L'Après-midi d'un faune. Stravinsky was hoping the new ballet would be an even bigger hit than Petrushka."

"From all indications I can see that this piece is bound to 'emerge' in a way that rarely happens," he wrote gleefully to Nicholas Roerich, who was the guiding spirit behind the ballet's vision of pagan Russia.

At a deeper level, the music negates the very thing that for most people gives it meaning: the expression of human feelings.

As Stravinsky put it, "there are simply no regions for soul-searching in The Rite of Spring."

This is what separates it so decisively from Stravinsky's hit of 1911, Petrushka. Therein, we're immersed in a human world, which exudes the very specific cultural ambiance of Russia. It's true that the main characters are puppets, rather than rounded human beings. But they have characters, even if they're somewhat rudimentary, and at the end there's even a suggestion that Petrushka might have a soul.

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Daniel Weymouth, associate professor of composition and theory at Stony Brook University, wrote:

"The stories of the 'near riot' may have become exaggerated over time. There is evidence that the ruckus started between two factions at the Paris Opera -- those who liked things tame and 'pretty' and those who were eager for something new -- who were already primed for a confrontation." By the early 1900s, Paris had become an important pivotal bridge between tradition and modernism, and this accelerated with the unveiling of the Eiffel Tower in 1889, the huge metallic structure that drew scathing critiques, controversy, and millions of tourists. Telephones and elevators were arriving in homes, and there was a looming sense of change and technological upheaval. Picasso explored Cubist representations, and Gertrude Stein and other Parisian writers tested the limits of language, to try to transcend prior forms of literature."

This all seems to have boiled over with the premiere of Rite of Spring, an "explosive cultural shift unlike any in recent memory. It's difficult to imagine any single piece of art sparking the kind of turmoil that Stravinsky's did a century ago. Stravinsky's fierce discordance and rhythms and his strange forced melodies are very much avant-garde.

The French writer Jacques Rivière observed after the performance:

"There is something profoundly blind about this dance. There is an enormous question being carried about by all these creatures moving before our eyes. It is in no way distinct from themselves. They carry it about with them without understanding it, like an animal that turns in its cage and never tires of butting its head against the bars."

Dissonance, complex rhythms, and repetitive melodies still seem avant-garde, and Stravinsky himself once said that "there are simply no regions for soul-searching in The Rite of Spring."

Eric Charnofsky, a composer and lecturer at Case Western Reserve University, wrote this:

"One result of the so-called 'riot' was that Stravinsky effectively became the world's leading contemporary composer, the one whose subsequent musical ventures defined 'modernism' in the minds of audiences and critics."

On May 29, 2013, Mariinsky Ballet celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Rite of Spring with a performance at the same theater where it debuted to boos and violence, and the ballet was broadcast live on national television, plus being live-streamed on a large outdoor display in front of the Hôtel de Ville in central Paris.

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The Rite of Spring is divided into two parts:

I. Adoration of the Earth

Introduction

The Augurs of Spring: Dances of the Young Girls

Ritual of Abduction

Spring Rounds

Ritual of the Rival Tribes

Procession of the Sage

The Sage

Dance of the Earth

II. The Sacrifice

Introduction

Mystic Circles of the Young Girls

Glorification of the Chosen One

Evocation of the Ancestors

Ritual Action of the Ancestors

Sacrificial Dance (The Chosen One)

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A really interesting article from the LA Times that addresses how the Nijinksky version was reconstructed and by whom:

Review: Joffrey Ballet returns with reconstructed 'Rite of Spring'

February 03, 2013|By Laura Bleiberg

click here

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and another from the New Yorker, with a skeptical cast which impugns the artistic integrity of the reconstruction, a critical attitude which I do not at all share, but one nonetheless worth reading:

THE LOST NIJINSKY Is it possible to reconstruct a forgotten ballet?

.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/05/07/the-lost-nijinsky

(Article changed on May 25, 2017 at 01:25)

(Article changed on May 25, 2017 at 01:44)

(Article changed on May 25, 2017 at 01:48)

Authors Website: https://www.facebook.com/groups/592985284186083/

Authors Bio:

Early in the 2016 Primary campaign, I started a Facebook group: Bernie Sanders: Advice and Strategies to Help Him Win! As the primary season advanced, we shifted the focus to advancing Bernie's legislation in the Senate, particularly the most critical one, to protect Oak Flat, sacred to the San Carlos Apaches, in the Tonto National Forest, from John McCain's efforts to privatize this national forest and turn it over to Rio Tinto Mining, an Australian mining company whose record by comparison makes Monsanto look like altar boys, to be developed as North America's largest copper mine. This is monstrous and despicable, and yet only Bernie's Save Oak Flat Act (S2242) stands in the way of this diabolical plan.

We added "2020" to the title.


I am an art gallery owner in Santa Fe since 1980 selling Native American painting and NM landscapes, specializing in modern Native Ledger Art.


I have always been intensely involved in politics, going back to the mid's 1970's, being a volunteer lobbyist in the US Senate for the Secretary General of the United Nations, then a "snowball-in-hell" campaign for US Senate in NM in the late 70's, and for the past 20 years have worked extensively to pressure the FDA to rescind its approval for aspartame, the neurotoxic artificial sweetener metabolized as formaldehyde. This may be becoming a reality to an extent in California, which, under Proposition 65, is considering requiring a mandatory Carcinogen label on all aspartame products, although all bureaucracies seem to stall under any kind of corporate pressure.


Bills to ban aspartame were in the State Senates of New Mexico and Hawaii, but were shut down by corporate lobbyists (particularly Monsanto lobbyists in Hawaii and Coca Cola lobbyists in New Mexico).


For several years, I was the editor of New Mexico Sun News, and my letters to the editor and op/eds in 2016 have appeared in NM, California, Wisconsin, New York, Maryland, the Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, and many international papers, on the subject of consumer protection. Our best issue was 10 days before Obama won in 2008, when we published a special early edition of the paper declaring that Obama Wins! This was the top story on CNN for many hours, way back then....


My highest accomplishments thus far are

1. a plan to create a UN Secretary General's Pandemic Board of Inquiry, a plan that is in the works and might be achieved even before the 75th UN General Assembly in September 2020.


2. Now history until the needs becomes clear to the powers who run the United Nations: a UN Resolution to create a new Undersecretary General for Nutrition and Consumer Protection, strongly supported ten years ago by India and 53 cosponsoring nations, but shut down by the US Mission to the UN in 2008. To read it, google UNITED NATIONS UNDERSECRETARY GENERAL FOR NUTRITION, please.


These are not easy battles, any of them, and they require a great deal of political and journalistic focus. OpEdNews is the perfect place for those who have a lot to say, so much that they exceed the limiting capacities of their local and regional newspapers. Trying to go beyond the regional papers seems to require some kind of "inside" credentials, as if you had to be in a club of corporate-accepted writers, and if not, you are "from somewhere else," a sad state of corporate induced xenophobia that should have no place in America in 2020!

This should be a goal for every author with something current to say: breaking through yet another glass ceiling, and get your say said in editorial pages all over America. Certainly, this was a tool that was essentially ignored in 2016, and cannot be ignored in the big elections of 2020.


In my capacity as Editor of the Santa Fe Sun News, Fox interviewed Mikhail Gorbachev: http://www.prlog.org/10064349-mikhail-gorbachev