The Rite of Spring at 100 ed. by Severine Neff, Maureen Carr, and Gretchen Horlacher, with John Reef (review)

In his plenary essay to this collection celebrating the centenary of Igor Stravinsky's landmark composition and its danced manifestations, Richard Taruskin throws cold water on assessments of The Rite of Spring [Vesna ] as an avatar of modernist difficulty:

It is not, after all, a complex score. Its textures are simple, though very artfully and colorfully elaborated. What there is in it of counterpoint (beyond the prelude preceding the action) is uncomplicated. Its ostinato-driven forms are downright rudimentary, as is only right, given the subject and setting. Its dissonances are indeed harsh and grating but never mystifying (except to analysts), and neither are the irregular percussive rhythms.

(p. 431)

Yet he continues a sentence later, "The sounds of the music make a direct and compelling appeal to the listener's imagination, and the listener's body." Highlighting Stravinsky's "peerless handling of the immense orchestra," Taruskin says, these sounds "have a visceral, cathartic impact. They leave—and to judge from the history of the score's reception, have always left—most listeners feeling exhilarated." He concludes, "It is only the mythology of The Rite that would suggest anything else" (p. 431). And as his many influential publications on Stravinsky indicate, Taruskin's goal is to resist that mythology. One might, in turn, resist his counterintuitive, revisionist evaluation of this fiery score, as I at first did, but the criticism has merit. It rings true. Rather than being dismissive, Taruskin's critique clears away the clutter and amplifies what makes the score special.

Whether the overall collection follows Taruskin's injunction to challenge The Rite is less clear. This book is a complex endeavor, to say the least, with three esteemed editors—Severine Neff, Maureen Carr, and Gretchen Horlacher, helped by John Reed—and a huge number of essays (twenty-seven in all, including one each by Neff, Carr, and Horlacher). The contributors include leading lights of musicology, theory, dance, and history. To list everyone involved and their work would take up this entire review and then some. Because of its breadth, the book serves several overlapping constituencies. It will both please and provoke many.

"The Rite of Spring" at 100 originated as a pair of symposia, one held at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in October 2012, the other in Moscow, Russia, in May 2013. The Chapel Hill symposium, part of a yearlong festival held on the UNC campus and sponsored by Carolina Performing Arts, sounds like it was quite a party. It was much touted at the time, covered even by Alex Ross in the New Yorker ("Primal Scream," 19 November 2012, 92–93). Taruskin describes the festival as a "bacchanalia" and an "orgy of commemoration" that, he says, owes its existence to the unique status of The Rite, belonging as it does to both the popular classical repertoire and the academic canon (p. 422).

The resulting essay collection is a more sober affair. Carefully compiled and edited, with abundant illustrations and music examples, it includes an extremely useful bibliography, discography, and videography as well as an accompanying Web site of videos and sound clips for six of the twenty-five chapters. (I was surprised by this low number.) Millicent Hodson's essay explaining and defending her famous reconstruction of the original Rite choreography uses by far the most video and audio examples; the remainder is in the theory section.

The section headings give some sense of the book's general contents and its implicit argument, as the topics move from dance to France to Russia and on to the "music itself" (perhaps revealing the priorities of the editors, music theorists all). Part 1 is "Dancing Le sacre across the Century"; part 2, "Le sacre and Stravinsky in France"; part 3, "Observations on Le sacre...