Primitivism
It was a reaction of the over refinement of composers like Debussy and Ravel. Composers of this era started using folk tunes from Africa, dances from borderlands Western culture, southeastern Europe, and Asiatic Russia.
Stravinsky; (1882-1971).
He is considered one of the most influential music figures in 20th century. His Ballet “Rite of Spring” change the way composers think about rhythm and Musical structure.
In this study we will take Stravinskys most famous work “rite of spring” and look into it in terms
_formal structure
_melodic/rhythmic structure
_harmonic/tonal structure
Formal Structure; the work is a ballet its has two large sections;
1. Part I: L'Adoration de la Terre (Adoration of the Earth) Which contains 7 different episodes (Introduction, Augurs of Spring, Ritual of Abduction, Spring Rounds, Ritual of the Rival Tribes, Procession of the Sage: The Sage, Dance of the Earth)
2. Part II: Le Sacrifice (The Sacrifice) which contains 7 episodes.
(Introduction, Mystic Circles of the Young Girls, Glorification of the Chosen One, Evocation of the Ancestors, Ritual Action of the Ancestors, Sacrificial Dance)
Ballets are most concerned with musical episodes. Some may be held together with bits of thematic material, others not.
This ballet's music is really built up of accumulated bits of repeated motives, Rhythm being the almost first consideration, once a 'bundle' of these has gone on a while, a new idea is presented and something similar is done with that
This ballet's music is really built up of accumulated bits of repeated motives, Rhythm being the almost first consideration, once a 'bundle' of these has gone on a while, a new idea is presented and something similar is done with that
Melodic/rhythmic structure; Stravinsky uses a lot of short little Russian folk tunes through out the ballet. There also a lot of short motives in the pieces which you hear one time and they don’t get repeated again.
Rhythm is one of the most important weapons of Stravinsky. He himself confesses that his music is nothing more than (rhythm and interval). In the Rite of spring there many compound rhythms and polyrhythm. In a lot of instances in the piece it’s not obvious where the central pulse is. Different rhythm in different section of the score correspond together for example in the “, Spring Rounds” episode the double bass and the bass clarinet has the same rhythm, and the cellos and the violins have another rhythm together, and the different wind section have different rhythmic patterns.
harmonic/tonal structure;
Two distinct categories of harmonic behavior can be discerned in The Rite of Spring. One operates on the principle of pedal point or sustained core harmony combined with ostinato. Virtually all the internal sections—that is, those enclosed by the Introduction of Part I and Danse sacrale of Part II—use this approach of asserting tonality by simply stressing a keynote. The other principle, employed in these two outer sections and ultimately used to determine the global succession of pedal tone centers during the course of the work, involves various and sophisticated manipulations of traditional functional progression grounded in circle-of-fifths and major-minor related key hierarchies.
Stravinsky's tonal practice in the Rite draws upon four techniques easily classifiable: (1) the use of a standard tonic-subdominant-dominant (or "functional") chord progression, which includes also the exploration of chord prolongation and chord substitution, especially at the tritone; (2) bifocal statement of material first in the minor and then in the relative major; (3) the fusion or crushing together of principal harmonic functions within a key; (4) and the application of large-scale tonal progression to the relationship between the first and second parts of the work, and to the succession of static pitch centers from section to section throughout.