Igor Stravinsky represented a radical break with the musical past and his work sounds as fresh and modern today as it did a hundred years ago. His revolutionary approach is obvious in such works as Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring), one of a series of ballets written for the Ballets Ruses.
Here is the introduction to Part Two. Although the theme of the ballet is the pagan rituals of planting and harvesting, including the sacrifice of a maiden who dances herself to death, the music - specifically, the first minute of the segment below - has always acted on my imagination to conjure up sensations of a cataclysmic falling away, a vastness of desolation, the crumbling of a civilization, the death of the world.
Yes, I can almost see you all shaking your heads. "C'mon, man!", you seem to be saying. "That's a lot of weight for a minute's worth of music to carry." Well, you're probably right; just my imagination running away with me. Fascinating stuff any way you slice it.
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3 comments:
Part 2 is when the first audience tore up the seats and threw them at the orchestra.
But I hear what you say, interesting. Movie music has made us more aware of the use of all sorts of sounds in music I think.
I'm reminded of a performance of Boris Godunov in Miami, Florida. I wasn't there, but a friend told me that everybody walked out before the epilogue began, figuring that the opera was over.
Better, of course, for the actors than having an audience throwing chairs at you!
Music evokes an emotional response in people, but not always the same one -- that does seem to vary. I can see why your imagination conjures up a dismal world with this piece of music -- it certainly imparts a feeling of foreboding doom. But I don't find it all that moving. YMMV, of course.
Bruce has the right of it, movie soundtracks have made people more aware of how music can affect us, but it's old old knowledge. I forget the name, but one article I read discussed a sequence of several notes that have long used for dark themes, going back into the Dark Ages.
I expect that impacts depend on the context in which you first listened to the music. I've always appreciated Holst's "The Planets", but I did not know of it until I heard one of the movements in "The RIght Stuff".
Which movement, someone might ask? I leave that as an exercise for the class. :D
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