Stravinsky

11 Pages 2825 Words

gether without disguising the joins. The binding energy is much more rhythmic than harmonic, and the driving pulsations of The Rite of Spring marked a crucial change in the nature of Western music. Stravinsky, however, left it to others to use that change in the most obvious manner. He himself, after completing his Chinese opera The Nightingale, turned aside from large resources to concentrate on chamber forces and the piano.
Partly this was a result of World War I, which disrupted the activities of the Ballets Russes and caused Stravinsky to seek refuge in Switzerland. He was not to return to Russia until 1962, though his works of 1914-1918 are almost exclusively concerned with Russian folk tales and songs: they include the choral ballet Les Noces, the smaller sung and danced fable Renard, a short play doubly formalized with spoken narration and instrumental music and several groups of songs. In The Wedding, where block form is geared to highly mechanical rhythm to give an objective ceremonial effect, it took him some while to find an approp...