On the Rhythm of "The
Rite of Spring"
BY
EDWARD GREEN
I believe that after centuries of thought on the
subject, rhythm, in its full meaning, as been described for the first time
by Eli Siegel. I learned from Aesthetic Realism that rhythm is a oneness
of opposites, and that the opposites which are in rhythm, and which make
it beautiful, are also in me and in every person, and that we need to make
them one. I am grateful to Eli Siegel for showing me that I can learn from
the very art I practice how to have a beautiful and kind life. The study
of rhythm, Mr. Siegel shows, is an education both in beauty and in good
sense.
As much as any composer in the history of music,
Igor Stravinsky stands for what rhythm can do. And of his compositions,
the one seen as having the most powerful and most subtle of rhythms is
his l9l3 ballet score, The Rite of Spring.
In a class of February 23, l966, Eli Siegel explained
that "rhythm begins with sound as accented and unaccented." And he added,
"Anything that seems to be given more insistence than something else in
the field of sound is the beat aspect of that sound. Beat is what
stands out." A simple example of this is 3/4 time, where there is a steady
pulse which receives an accent regularly, every three counts: [EG demonstrates
by clapping]
One of the most famous places in The Rite of
Spring is the music for the dance that follows the rise of the curtain
in Act I, "The Dance of the Adolescents." Stravinsky uses the idea of a
steady pulse, but instead of accenting that pulse in regular units, as
in 3/4 time, he accents it in a way that has astonishing and tremendous
syncopation. On first hearing it almost seems wild. Here it is, with Igor
Stravinsky himself conducting:
[Taped Example # 1]
Technically this is what Stravinsky does: he begins
with a series of identical chords in the strings--32 chords in all--moving
in a strict and steady rhythm of eighth notes. To his series of chords
he brings six sharp accents, produced by the sudden sound of eight French
horns. But the accents divide the 32 pulses not into any regular or predictable
pattern, but into the highly irregular pattern of 9 2 6 3 4 5 and
3 counts. To get a clearer sense of this, I'll play this passage
now on the piano, first slowly--with the groups counted out--and then at
Stravinsky's original tempo:
[EG piano examples]
Syncopation is, essentially, sound being accented
when you don't expect it to be accented. it is, Eli Siegel said in that
class of l966, "contradiction, and also a kind of inner rebellion."
The desire to be contradictory, to be rebellious,
is in people. It has a good side, which is not to accept ugliness, but
to be honestly critical. It also has a bad side, which Eli Siegel showed
me was very much a problem in my life--the desire to rebel against anything
that had too much meaning for me because I associated freedom with being
able to remain separate and superior to the world. That kind of rebelliousness
is contempt, and it is ugly and is against life.
Now the question facing a composer as he works
with sound and writes in an intricate, syncopated way--as Stravinsky does--is
like the ethical question we have when we feel rebellious. The question
is one of purpose--"Why do you want to contradict this thing? Is
it good for that thing to be contradicted? Will rebelling against it help
your life?"
I think what impelled Stravinsky here, and throughout
The Rite of Spring, to use syncopation so intensely and so constantly
was a deep, kind, organic desire to contradict the pain of dissonance with
the energy of rhythm.
In the note to his poem, "The World of the Unwashed
Dish," Eli Siegel writes: "The undesirable, made speedy, seems to be different."
Of itself, the chord Stravinsky reiterates 32 times is exceedingly painful:
[EG illustrates on piano].
It does seem to represent, in sound, a world that
is undesirable--thick with impediment. Had Stravinsky accented that series
of chords in a regular way, say every four counts, it would have sounded
like this:
[EG piano illustration].
Without the syncopation of the original version,
without its surprise and its speed, what we are most conscious of is the
ugliness of that chord. But when that chord is gone at syncopatedly, and
is therefore contradicted, the feeling we get is so different. It no longer
seems to represent a world bogged down in pain, but, on the contrary, a
world with exhilaration in it, and a feeling of release, of freedom. The
surprise in the syncopation makes for speed, and the speed does
make the undesirable seem different. This is contradiction in behalf of
finding the world likeable. It has a beautiful purpose.
Listen now to a longer section from The Rite
of Spring, incorporating this chord, and those syncopations:
[Taped example #2]
In his essay "The Aesthetic Center," Eli Siegel
writes: "Rhythm is any instance of change and sameness seen at once." What
we have just heard is a true exemplification of that great statement.
Now rhythm, like any other element in music, can be both assertive and
muted, and used rightly both ways are beautiful. In our first example,
Stravinsky went for an intensified sense of accent. In our next example
he does just the opposite--he suppresses our sense of accent. Strong
and weak are still here, but listen to how close they have become to each
other, how hard it is to distinguish them:
[Taped example #3]
What we've just heard is the very opening of The Rite of Spring
. This is the music before the curtain rises, evoking the beginnings of
Spring--and the melody is played high in the bassoon, in a register of
that instrument which makes the sound seem both impinging and remote, both
strained and quiet.
Where our first example had angles and edges, this example, with its
muted sense of the beat, is more fluid and even, at times, seems slippery.
We feel sameness and change--we feel rhythm--but how differently the world
is present in this, the more subtle type of rhythm.
What Stravinsky does here, making sure that no great or jarring differences
of strong and weak are heard in the sounds, is deeply akin to how rhythm
is in the Gregorian Chant, and may have been influenced by it. To show
what I mean, here is an instance of Gregorian Chant. Listen for the subtlety
of strong and weak sound:
[Taped example #4]
Had Stravinsky treated the fluid bassoon melody as he treated the intense
music we heard earlier--with a clear-cut, definite sense of strong and
weak--the result might have sounded like this:
[EG piano example].
In "The Aesthetic Method in Self-Conflict," from Self and World
, Eli Siegel writes:
An aspect of rhythm, or of form in time, is the feeling of speed in
slowness, slowness in speed. When music is good, there is a sense of motion
and of pause.
Comparing the two versions of this melody, the more subtly rhythmic one--Stravinsky's
original, and the second, more obviously rhythmic one, we can ask: which
is more beautiful? Which has more of a oneness of speed and slowness, of
motion and of pause? I think the first does, clearly. The surprising thing
is, Stravinsky actually began with the second, rhythmically more blatant,
version and then transformed it. Eric Walter White writes in his book Stravinsky:
The Composer and his Works :
the opening [bassoon] melody...he borrowed from a collection of Lithuanian
folk music.
"The purpose of an artist," Eli Siegel told me in the first class I ever
attended with him, on July 2, l974, "is to get an arrangement of sounds
in such a way that the possibility of reality as both ordinary and surprising
is shown." By itself that folk song is likable, but as Stravinsky altered
it, making the ordinary more surprising, as he stretched it out and made
it more limber, how he deepened it! Through his great rhythmic imagination
he brought out its possibility of expressing a large emotion, a sense of
the hauntingness, the mystery of reality.
So far we have looked at rhythm in The Rite of Spring through
two short examples. For our last example, I'd like to look at "The Glorification
of the Chosen One," a complete dance from Act II. In the class of February
23, l966, Eli Siegel said:
As you hear sound you either get what you expect or you don't; but
since happiness is getting both what you expect and what you don't, the
best rhythms have both.
What Mr. Siegel says here about rhythm can be seen very clearly in this
dance. As we'll hear, it is very economical: it repeats two motions over
and over again. It begins by pounding the ground with an 11-fold repetition
of a chord, and then it contradicts that heaviness by flying up, suddenly,
into the air. These, in essence, are its two motions: a treading in place,
and a sudden burst of change. But even as you come to expect these two
motions, and their alternation, the way Stravinsky composes it, you can
never quite say just when that alternation will take place. Listen now
to this dance from Act II:
[Taped Example #5]
For all its hard-bitten quality, for all its fierceness, its upheaval,
its sense of the world as being in tumult--I think the rhythm of this music
has what Eli Siegel says we need for happiness: the sense of what we expect
and what we don't expect at once. I think it is very beautiful, and I think
the beauty here, as elsewhere in The Rite of Spring , has a very
large meaning, for it is a beauty presented within dissonance.
To see meaning in the world when the world seems harsh and forbidding
is never easy, but have learned from Aesthetic Realism that it is necessary.
It is not enough just to "approve of" the world when it presents itself
to us as nice. Stravinsky, throughout The Rite of Spring, gives
powerful, rhythmic evidence that even in the shrieks, the thuds, the howls
of the world, beauty can be found because the Opposites can be felt.
Stravinsky was one of the most consciously philosophic of composers,
and there is a statement of his, from his book, The Poetics of Music
, that is beautiful. Stravinsky writes: "Music to me is a power which justifies
things."
How music shows that the world can be liked is what I and others have
been so fortunate to be studying in Aesthetic Realism classes. The Opposites
are the justification of things. They are the power Stravinsky felt, the
power he so beautifully uses in The Rite of Spring .
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