Do the Rite thing: how Stravinsky's Rite of Spring changed music for ever
There is a story that Igor Stravinsky went to the New York jazz club Birdland one evening in 1951. Whispers went round that the great composer was in the house. When Charlie Parker came on with his quintet, he didn’t acknowledge Stravinsky in person, but seamlessly quoted The Firebird in his first number, the furiously fast Ko-Ko. Stravinsky was so delighted that he banged his glass on the table, spilling its contents on the people at the table behind. Parker’s musical quote could just as easily have been The Rite of Spring; two years earlier, in Paris, he’d quoted the opening bassoon melody in his solo on Salt Peanuts, acknowledging that he was in the city that gave birth to The Rite at its scandalous premiere in 1913.
Stravinsky’s friend Robert Craft said that The Rite of Spring was the prize bull that inseminated modernism in music and, indeed, its resonances are still being felt by composers over a century after its premiere. A new work by Anna Clyne was performed at the Davos World Economic Forum last month, and it was hard not to hear a homage to the Rite in its taut violence. But the aftershocks of the work are felt beyond the world of classical music, making connections across musical genres and into cinema.
Although Stravinsky dismissed jazz as “masturbation which doesn’t really go anywhere”, it is undeniable that he and jazz musicians spoke a version of the same language. The Parker anecdote testifies to this, as does the fact that chunks of The Rite of Spring turn up in tracks by Ornette Coleman, Alice Coltrane, Joni Mitchell, Weather Report – and the Bad Plus arranged the entire work for jazz trio. Beyond jazz, the powerful riffs, extended harmonies and atavistic violence of The Rite have been a trace element in the more adventurous corners of rock music, consciously or not, since the 1960s, from Frank Zappa – who claimed to have listened to The Rite of Spring “more than any man in the world” – to King Crimson and Metallica and even 1990s pop. When Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys sang, in their 1993 single I Wouldn’t Normally Do this Kind of Thing: “I feel like taking all my clothes off, dancing to The Rite of Spring,” it’s more than just a cute rhyme: the single’s cover art shows a circle of young men in pink tops holding hands and dancing around a male Chosen One in a late-20th-century gay reinterpretation of the sacrifice of the chosen girl in the original ballet.
My feelings of creeping feminist unease in writing a book on a ballet about the sacrifice of a young woman created by three men - Stravinsky, Nijinsky (the choreographer) and Roerich (the designer and dramaturg) - were at least partly relieved when I came across the Russian folk metal band Arkona and their frontwoman Masha Scream, so named for her “death growl” vocal technique. In the song Yarilo, Arkona riffs on the same ancient Russian myth as Stravinsky did in The Rite of Spring. As Masha whirls around the stage draped in the bearskins in which Roerich clothed the old men who watched a girl dance herself to death, she’s about as potent a symbol of female power as can be imagined. I have no idea if Masha knows The Rite of Spring or not, but I like to fancy that she’s taking revenge.
If it makes perfect sense for musical iconoclasts to embrace The Rite,Walt Disney is perhaps a less obvious creative bedfellow. Yet it’s because of Disney that for many of us, The Rite of Spring means dinosaurs. Generations of people first experienced the music in tandem with Walt Disney’s prehistoric images from his 1940 animation Fantasia. In 1939, Stravinsky was newly arrived in the US, uprooted by war in Europe. He signed a contract with Disney which paid him the huge sum of US$6,000, money Stravinsky badly needed. Disney’s terms demanded complete freedom to chop up and edit the music of The Rite as he wished, and to associate it with any images that he chose. He made free with the structure of Stravinsky’s work for his dinosaur ballet, cut over a third of the music completely including the final Sacrificial Dance, and reshuffled what was left. Stravinsky claimed to be horrified, but Fantasia brought his music to a whole new audience and kick-started an era in which his music, and The Rite of Spring in particular, became a kind of source book for movie scores.
While so much film music is infused with the essence of The Rite of Spring, some film composers were more explicit in their homages; indeed Stravinsky was known to complain that reaching for his work had become a shortcut solution for those needing to invoke horror and tension. The orchestral slashes from the shower scene in Bernard Herrmann’s score for Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) wouldn’t exist without the repetitive violence of The Rite. Elmer Bernstein’s score for To Kill a Mockingbird is suffused with Rite references, and who can forget the central scene in Planet of the Apes, with primates on horseback hunting primitive humans in the long grass, Jerry Goldsmith’s score revealing distinct echoes of the whoops and hunting calls of Stravinsky’s chase and fight sections. And then there’s Jaws.
Composer John Williams wears his love and knowledge of 20th century orchestral music on his sleeve, and The Rite of Spring has remained a fixed point to which he has constantly returned to pay homage. The growling double-bass leitmotif that signals the approaching shark in Spielberg’s 1975 film, arguably the most famous few seconds of music in cinema history, is a close cousin of the first dance in The Rite of Spring. And, throughout his Star Wars scores, Williams has returned to the home territory of The Rite. Just listen to The Dune Sea of Tatooine sequence from the original 1977 Star Wars – and it is still apparent in the 2015 Star Wars: The Force Awakens, where the Rathtar attack is scored by music that clearly echoes the final “Sacrificial Dance”. And the frantic orchestral gestures of the section of The Rite where the chosen one is glorified just before her sacrifice are reproduced in the climactic scene of Jurassic Park (1993). John Williams has returned The Rite to the dinosaurs.
• Phoenix Dance Theatre and the Orchestra of Opera North perform Jeanguy Saintus’s Rite of Spring at Leeds Grand Theatre and tour until 22 March.
• Gillian Moore is director of music at Southbank Centre. Her book, The Rite of Spring, is published by Head of Zeus.