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 Eli 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 p.7
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 p.8
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 .