Description

With this brilliant and uncompromising work — perhaps the most famous musical work of the twentieth century — Stravinsky changed the course of modern music forever. Discarding conventional harmonies for bizarrely dissonant chords, and uniform metrics for harshly jarring beat patterns, he created a sensational theater piece that, at the work s 1931 premier, caused the music world s most talked-about riot.

Every law of musical syntax, every canon of harmony seems to have been violated, every limit of rhythmic perversity and eccentricity of orchestration exceeded in this tumultuous cataclysm of sound, says Grove s; yet with all its deliberate crudity and violence the Rite is a clearly planned and perfectly controlled and coordinated piece of music [that] has long been accepted universally as a masterpiece and is in the repertory of every large symphony orchestra.