Born in Russia, Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) was on track to become a lawyer until he began composition studies with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. He started his career in Paris with three ballets written for choreographer Sergei Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes: The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring, the last of which is legendary for (perhaps?) causing a riot at its premiere. The Rite especially was a model of neo-primitivism, in which Stravinsky used very small cells of notes to create orchestral textures that often featured intense, driving rhythms. In the 1920s he largely abandoned his primitivist tendencies and began writing consciously Neoclassical music, which at first baffled his contemporaries, although not as much as his turn to serialism in the 1950s. Still, his music remained popular, and he was consistently seen as a bold and hugely influential composer, perhaps one of the most important of the 20th century. His reputation endures today, with hundreds if not thousands of performances of his works happening every year. He died an American citizen, having moved to California in 1939.
As mentioned above, The Rite of Spring (1913) was one of Stravinsky’s early ballets that made him famous, and it immediately caught a lot of attention. About that possible riot, arranger Robert Buckley raises some questions in the program note for his 2015 Excerpts arrangement:
The premier performance of The Rite of Spring in 1913 is a thing of legends. There are disagreements amongst the people who attended whether it was the music or the choreography that caused the near-riot in the audience. Since then The Rite has been performed regularly and is considered to be one of the most influential works of the 20th century, laying the basis for modern jazz, film music, and even heavy metal. Robert used various sources for this arrangement, including Stravinsky’s own hand written score. The intention was to stay as true as possible to the original and choose the sections that would work well with a wind band. The tempi vary wildly in the various publications as well as in the various recordings – the tempi used here are taken mainly from the Bernstein recording with the London Symphony. This is a very influential and important work and a valued addition to the wind band repertoire.
This note needs some unpacking. That’s coming, but let’s do some listening first. We’ll begin with the arrangement, which is indeed quite faithful to the excerpts it selects as it sets out to make this piece accessible for a mere-mortal band:
The aforementioned Bernstein/London Symphony recording is indeed impressive, especially once you realize that Bernstein is not using a score!!!
The Excerpts begin with a snippet of the “Introduction” from Part I…
…then move into a bit of “The Augurs of Spring – Dances of the Young Girls”:
We get a hefty chunk of “Spring Rounds”…
…before skipping ahead to the slower sections of the “Mystic Circles of the Young Girls”:
We use Stravinsky’s original 11/4 transition to exit this section, but then skip ahead to the more manageable bits of the “Sacrificial Dance”:
As to the claims of genre influence in the program notes, both NPR and The Guardian agree that Stravinsky had an effect on jazz (and I can attest that the opening bassoon solo makes a terrific blues head). Here is just one interpretation by Hubert Laws:
As for film music, a great example is John Williams’s main theme from Jaws, which owes just about everything to Stravinsky, particularly “The Augurs of Spring”:
Regarding metal and The Rite of Spring, David Burke wrote an academic paper about it, and a pair of grad students blogged about it. The connection was also explored in Interlude. I hear it in the insistent ostinatos, affinity for complex meters, and virtuosic (some might say rock-guitar-like) figurations throughout. This video points to one particular moment, the 11/4 bar at the end of the “Mystic Circles of the Young Girls,” as the origin of heavy metal. Here is that bar rendered 103 different times by different ensembles:
There’s even a complete metal guitar arrangement of it:
In addition to Buckley’s arrangement (covered at J. W. Pepper and the Wind Repertory Project), the entire piece has been transcribed for wind by both Terry Vosbein (2011) and Merlin Patterson (1947). These arrangements are not for the faint of heart, but take a listen. Here is Part I of the Vosbein:
And Part II of the Patterson:
There is endless further reading on both the composer and the piece. Stravinsky has biographies on Wikipedia, IMDb, and Boosey & Hawkes, as well as a Foundation in his name with an Internet presence. So much has been written about him in print that the Internet hardly does him justice. But here are some articles from humanitiesweb and Cal Tech (on his religious works), and some quotes from him, just to whet your appetite. As for The Rite of Spring, read up on Wikipedia, the BBC, Britannica, the LA Phil, PBS, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and Not Another Music History Cliche, for starters.
You’ve made it this far, so you deserve some bonus content. In 1987, the Joffrey Ballet recreated Nijinsky‘s the original choreography:
At last, here is a snippet of the Walt Disney company‘s treatment of The Rite of Spring in their 1940 film, Fantasia: