Subjective
One of the most difficult to play and difficult to conduct piece among the classical repertoires is “The Right of Spring” by Igor Stravinsky. The music opens up in a very intense, earthy, and violent mood and that same mood transcends throughout the piece right until the end. The piece is very thought provoking as it insinuates a panorama of instrumental colors. On a positive note, the piece animates rhythmic drive and power that reflects irresistible excitement and unbelievable complexity, which is a characteristic of musical scores orchestrated by some of the most renowned name in the classical genre. On a downside, the piece sounds like the overused scores employed to stimulate the scare factor in many thriller movies, which gives the piece a generic terror sound label to it despite the technically complex qualities. Nevertheless, the piece still never fails to thrill listeners of every sort transporting them to a height of imagination. This is one of the best qualities of the piece, the rhythm and the feel to it always commands a good story. Listening to the piece plays many scenes in one’s head including a story about a horrified girl running in the middle nowhere with a madman running after her, just like the usual scenes in a Texas Chainsaw Massacre flick or a sequel from a the Scream movie series.
Objective
Rhythm is what defines the piece; there is a prominent emphasis on the use of steady pulse and accenting them in regular units of ¾ time. Stravinsky begins with a series of similar chords in the strings 32 moving together is a steady and strict eight-tone rhythm. In the series, the chords brought six specific accents with the help of what sounds like eight French horns. However, the accent was divided into 32 pulses on a high irregular pattern. What’s most compelling is that the piece uses a syncopation of constant, intense, deep and organic intension to give emphasis on rhythmic energy. Given the encompassing technical elements in the piece, it seems that the music is danceable, but not on a hip-hop kind of level. The piece was intended for ballet performance, but specific to more intensified scenes. It is easy to dance to if the ballet scene tells a pagan-like ritual and abduction, but beyond that, it is difficult to find a steady beat that will make any person to dance to its tunes. The reason behind that are irregular pattern count of 9, 2, 6, 3, 4, 5, and 3 counts, which suggests irregular tempo. The piece also proceeds with wildly oscillating timbres that contours the progression of woodwind that is violently raptured by masses of searing strings and brass. This encompasses the melodic writing of Stravinsky that appears to be influenced by lucid vision of horrific retrospective myth. In terms of density, the piece conveys an illusion of wide dynamic range with less restricted parameters. The key here is to keep the shock value alive. Therefore, the dynamics remained constant throughout the composition. Notice that there was no distinction of soft and slow transitions in the piece, but rather a continuous orchestration of intensified rhythms. This technique gave the piece a much heavier density of tones and higher dynamic range exquisitely delivering grinds and shrieks of snarling chords and thundering thumps of powerful percussion. Overall, the piece was quite an experience, a vivid sound illustration of a typical suspense thriller movie.
