Jeux de Nombres:: Automated Rhythm in The Rite of Spring

I would like to thank Jessica Berson, Rick Cohn, Sumanth Gopinath, Lynne Rogers, David
Rothenberg, H. Colin Slim, Pieter van den Toorn, and the anonymous reviewers for this Journal
for their comments on earlier versions of this essay. Parts of the essay are derived from papers pre-
sented at the Seventy-Third Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society in Quebec
City, November 2007, and the Thirtieth Annual Meeting of the Society for Music Theory in
Baltimore, November 2007. Archival research was supported by a British Academy Small
Research Grant. Materials from the facsimile of the sketchbook for The Rite of Spring are repro-
duced by the kind permission of Boosey & Hawkes.
1. The original French reads: [M]a libert sera dautant plus grande et plus profonde que je
limiterai plus troitement mon champ daction et que je mentourerai de plus dobstacles . . . et
larbitraire de la contrainte nest l que pour obtenir la rigueur de lexcution (86).
2. Pasler, Music and Spectacle in Petrushka and The Rite of Spring, 67.
3. Rehearsal numbers in Stravinskys score are indicated by R followed by the number. For
example, R13 refers to the bar designated by the rehearsal number (i.e., the rst bar of the ac-
cent pattern here), R13+1 to the following bar, and so on. The rehearsal numbers are continu-
ous throughout the score.
Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 63, Number 3, pp. 499552 ISSN 0003-0139, electronic ISSN
1547-3848. 2010 by the American Musicological Society. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission
to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Presss Rights and Permissions website,
www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/jams.2010.63.3.499.
Jeux de Nombres : Automated Rhythm
in The Rite of Spring
MATTHEW McDONALD
My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more nar-
rowly I limit my eld of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles
. . . and the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of
execution.
I. Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons, 87
1
The idea of games points to the real subject matter of the balletthe creative
act itself.
2
I
gor Stravinskys The Rite of Spring long ago secured its status as a corner-
stone of musical modernity. Among the many musical features to which
this enduring distinction can be traced, perhaps most important are the
aggressively dissonant chord and irregular accent pattern that constitute the
opening bars of the ballet proper, the Augurs of Spring, an icon of what
scandalized audiences at the works premiere in 1913. Accordingly, both the
harmony and the rhythm of these bars have attracted various analyses. In re-
gard to the rhythm, some analysts have focused on the interaction between
the irregularly spaced accents and the regular downbeats of the duple meter, as
established in the bars that precede R13.
3
Pierre Boulez, for instance, divided
4. That is, the metric positions of accents in the third cell are reversed in the fourth: see
Boulez, Stravinsky Remains, 6870.
5. See, for instance, Messiaen, Trait de rythme 2:100101. Messiaen undertook an extensive
rhythmic analysis of the entire score for The Rite: see Trait de rythme 2:93147. Pieter van den
Toorn presented analyses that alternately emphasize and downplay the meter of Augurs, com-
menting on their relative merits and advocating recognition of each perspective: see van den
Toorn, Stravinsky and the Rite of Spring, 6871.
6. This and all subsequent examples condense the score into either one, two, or three staves
and frequently simplify the texture in the process. In all cases where I analyze the intervallic con-
tent of a particular harmony or collection of pitches, however, I have not omitted any pitches
found in the full score. Unless otherwise noted, all score excerpts are based on the 1921 edition of
the score (actually published in 1922), the earliest printed edition of the full orchestral score. My
analyses, however, are based upon a full consideration of the sketchbook, the autograph full and
short scores (both housed in Basel at the Paul Sacher Foundation), and the four-hand score (pub-
lished in 1913 and now available in a Dover edition), all crucial sources for addressing the compo-
sitional process considered in this essay. I refer to these earlier versions of the score in all cases in
which discrepancies between the 1921 edition and the earlier versions are relevant to my analyses.
Stravinskys post-1921 revisions do not come into play: it is difcult to establish what any of these
revisions might have to tell us about Stravinskys original compositional thought-processes, and
they rarely differ from earlier versions in ways that would affect my analyses. For the most thor-
ough consideration of the various sources for The Rite, see Cyr, Le sacre du printemps: Petite his-
toire dune grande partition, 89148.
7. Here and elsewhere, I refer to specic pitches using the scientic nomenclature that desig-
nates middle C as C4; in this system, C5 denotes the pitch one octave above middle C, and B
3
the pitch one whole step below middle C.
8. A compelling precedent for this way of conceptualizing the relationship between intervals
and durations can be found in the theoretical work of the Russian composer and theorist Sergey
Taneyev, whose music was inuential to the young Stravinsky. Taneyev devised a single numerical
system for the measurement of both intervals and durations. In analyzing a contrapuntal work, for
instance, Taneyev would designate the relationship between a pair of imitative voices with two
the rst eight bars into four two-bar cells, noting a retrograde relationship
between the rhythms of the third and fourth cells.
4
Others have ignored the
meter, focusing exclusively on how the accents delineate an irregular grouping
of eighth notes, an approach encouraged by the rigidity of the eighth-note
pulse that denes this passage.
5
The latter perspective is illustrated in Example 1a, which reproduces the
opening bars of the Augurs of Spring.
6
Example 1b reproduces the begin-
ning of the ostinato that commences immediately after the famous accent pat-
tern at R14. The overall pitch content is a close variant of the repeated chord
that begins the Augurs of Spring: rather than an E-at dominant seventh
superimposed over an F-at-major triad, here the E-at dominant is superim-
posed over a C-major triad. (I will refer to these two collections of pitches as
the Augurs chord and its C-major variant.) The resulting pitch collection is
octatonic, unlike the chord with which Augurs begins. The intervals formed
by this collection of pitches (with the addition of C5
7
and omission of B
3,
both of which will be addressed below), measured in semitones from top to
bottom, produce the same numerical series as the durations produced by the
accent pattern.
8
500 Journal of the American Musicological Society
Jeux de Nombres : Automated Rhythm in The Rite of Spring 501
This correspondence, striking as it is, has not been noted in the vast litera-
ture on The Rite, nor has such a correspondence been noted in much music at
all composed before World War II; the earliest examples are generally found in
serial music of the late 1940s.
9
It is unlikely to be coincidental, judged simply
numbers, one representing what he called vertical distance in pitch space, the other represent-
ing horizontal distance measured in beats. See Carpenter, Contributions of Taneev, Catoire,
Conus, Garbuzov, Mazel, and Tiulin.
9. One exception is Richard Cohns recent study of Bla Bartks Sonata for Two Pianos and
Percussion (1937), in which Cohn explored what he called pitch-time analogies, albeit using a
more complex theoretical apparatus than is necessary here. In the same essay, Cohn also cited in
passing a four-note ostinato found at the beginning of Maurice Ravels Une barque sur locan
from Miroirs (19045), which features a correspondence between intervals and durations ex-
tremely similar to that found in Augurs. This example would need to be bolstered by additional
evidence to be signicant here, but given the relationship between Stravinsky and Ravel, and in
.
0
.
0

!
!
!
13
14
( )
9 2 6
3 4 5 3
* rst pitch of The Rite
*
9 2 6 3 4 5 3
(a)
(b)
Example 1 Augurs of Spring, bars 18: (a) durational measurements; (b) intervallic measure-
ments at R14 (C-major variant of the Augurs chord)
in terms of mathematical probability. Given that the accent pattern as well as
the Augurs chord and its octatonic, C-major variant were likely among Stra -
vinskys very rst musical ideas for The Rite, as recorded on the rst page of his
sketchbook and as Stravinsky himself conrmed,
10
and given that Stravinsky
later singled out the accent pattern as the foundation of the whole [work],
11
this connection between pitch and rhythm was perhaps even a fundamental as-
pect of his conception of the music for the ballet. In discussions of the open-
ing rhythm of Augursas in discussions of Stravinskys compositional
practice generallythe implicit assumption is almost always that Stravinsky de-
liberately crafted every musical detail to achieve a specic effect. But my analy-
sis suggests that, at an initial compositional stage, Stravinsky may have used a
mechanical procedure to derive the accent pattern, in nearly its ultimate form,
from an independently generated succession of intervals. In what follows, I
will present extensive evidence suggesting that this type of strategy was essen-
tial to Stravinskys composition of The Rite, a conclusion that has important
consequences for how we think about the ballet and its composer.
I proceed, however, aware that such an endeavor is likely to be met with some
resistance. Nearly a half century ago, Robert Craft offered discouraging words
for anyone proposing revelations about Stravinskys score: There is no longer
any novelty in The Rite of Spring. . . . Its musical mysteries are now profane
knowledge (the desacralization complete), I have no new theory to pro-
pound, and in any case the music is neither neglected nor in need of re-
evaluation.
12
But this statement was so wildly and predictably off-the-mark
that we might wonder whether or not Craft actually believed it. More likely it
was a smokescreen, perhaps a reection of Stravinskys own worries about
what secrets his sketches (long held under lock and key, as Craft explained)
might reveal. To anyone interested in musical embryology, these facsimile
particular the fact that Ravel accompanied Stravinsky when the latter purchased his sketchbook for
The Rite in Varese, Italy, the example from Miroirs is nonetheless suggestive in the present con-
text. See Cohn, Pitch-Time Analogies and Transformations in Bartks Sonata for Two Pianos
and Percussion. Justin London has provided an overview of twentieth-century composers and
theorists interested in creating isomorphisms between pitch and time; his earliest example is from
1944 (Oliver Messiaens written commentary on his compositional methods). See Some Non-
Isomorphisms between Pitch and Time.
10. See Craft, Commentary to the Sketches, 4. Some sketches for the Introduction to
Part I of the ballet may predate Stravinskys sketches for the Augurs; see Taruskin, Stravinsky
and the Russian Traditions 1:89091. Because Stravinsky undertook so much of the composi-
tional process at the piano rather than on paper, however, it is difcult to establish with absolute
certainty the chronology by which the score evolved; see ibid. 1:894.
11. See the documentary lm Portrait of Stravinsky (1966), cited by Chua, Rioting with
Stravinsky, 100n28.
12. Craft, Rite of Spring, xv. This essay was adapted from a 1966 lecture.
13. Ibid., xv.
14. Forte, Letter to the Editor in Reply to Richard Taruskin, 326.
15. Forte, The Harmonic Organization of The Rite of Spring.
16. Richard Taruskin, Myth of the Twentieth Century, 7.
17. See Chua, Rioting with Stravinsky; and Code, Synthesis of Rhythms. The Rite was
also recently featured prominently in a popular non-academic book, Lehrers Proust Was a
Neuroscientist.
18. See V. Stravinsky and Craft, Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents (hereinafter referred to
as Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents), 52426, which reproduces Edward B. Hills English
translation of 1916. Taruskin provided his own translation in Russian Traditions 1:87778. The
original essay in French, Ce que jai voulu exprimer dans Le sacre du printemps, was published in
the magazine Montjoie! (29 May 1913) and is reprinted in Lesure, Le sacre du printemps: Dossier
de presse, 1315. Stravinsky denied authorship of the essay, but it seems for the most part to have
represented his ideas accurately. See Taruskin, Russian Traditions 2:9951006, for a thorough
discussion of the matter.
pages are a major document,
13
Craft wrote, but a different message was
clearly discernible: look away, musicologists, theres nothing to see here.
In more recent years, still other scholars have attempted to stamp out
analyses of The Rite, if not in such an absolute fashion. Surely Allen Forte was
speaking tongue-in-cheek when, with regard to some well-studied bars from
The Ritual of the Rival Tribes, he announced: subsequent to [my] analysis
there will be no further analyses of this passage, as decreed by the joint ad hoc
Anglo-American Committee on Denitive Analyses, the members of which
were appointed by the present author.
14
Or was he? Forte had authored, af-
ter all, a monograph titled The Harmonic Organization of the Rite of Spring
(emphasis mine).
15
Richard Taruskin called upon Forte to renounce the
viewpoint of this particular book as incorrect, and elsewhere Taruskin has
attempted to demonstrate how much of [the] literature [on The Rite] is so
easily and instructively falsied.
16
One might be forgiven for concluding that
no one wants anyone else to say much about The Rite at all.
But, of course, no one has succeeded in enforcing a moratorium. Countless
essays, chapters, and books have been devoted to The Rite over the past few
decades, including two substantial analytical studies since 2007.
17
The litera-
ture continually expands, despite many of the contributors themselves seem-
ing uncomfortable with the expansion. This dichotomy can perhaps be traced
to Stravinsky himself, beginning with the Montjoie! program attributed to the
composer, What I Wished to Express in The Consecration of Spring.
18
Here,
Stravinsky described the ballets introduction as the Birth of Spring:
In the Prelude, before the curtain rises, I have conded to my orchestra the
great fear which weighs on every sensitive soul confronted with potentialities,
the thing in ones self, which may increase and develop innitely.
And later:
In short, I have tried to express in this Prelude the fear of nature before the
arising of beauty, a sacred terror at the midday sun, a sort of pagan cry. The
musical material itself swells, enlarges, expands. Each instrument is like a bud
which grows on the bark of an aged tree; it becomes part of an imposing
whole.
19
This imposing whole can easily be read as a metaphor for Stravinskys entire
score for The Rite: we are meant to be terried of this primitive musical lan-
guage. Indeed, this fear might help to explain the audiences disquiet at the
premiere. But a more striking metaphor is suggested by the rst part of this
quotation. The great fear Stravinsky described bears a remarkable resem-
blance to his characterization of his own creative angst many years later in The
Poetics of Music:
As for myself, I experience a sort of terror when, at the moment of setting to
work and nding myself before the innitude of possibilities that present them-
selves, I have the feeling that everything is permissible to me. If everything is
permissible to me, the best and the worst; if nothing offers me any resistance,
then any effort is inconceivable, and I cannot use anything as a basis, and con-
sequently every undertaking becomes futile.
20
Taking a cue from this later statement, I would propose that the fear of po-
tentialities Stravinsky referred to in the Montjoie! program may have been
fundamentally his own, an anxiety that he had allowed his musical ideas to de-
velop without proper limitations, and thereby to take on a life of their own.
This anxiety would not have been eased by the critical reception of The
Rite. From the beginning, Stravinskys score for The Rite has often been char-
acterized as rough around the edges, lacking in systematizationqualities that
are easily linked to the primitivist impulse behind the ballet.
21
Not surprisingly,
in the decades after the premiere, Stravinsky increasingly cultivated an oppos-
ing image for the score, insisting that it be divorced from the original ballet
and regarded instead as a concert piece, and gradually revising the score so
that certain relationships would appear more logical and systematic.
22
This revisionism helps to account for the apparent desire among analysts to
stunt the development of analytical research devoted to Stravinskys score.
19. Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents, 525.
20. I. Stravinsky, Poetics of Music, 85.
21. As described in an early review: . . . this is the most dissonant music ever written. I
would say . . . that never has the system and cult of the wrong note been practised with such zeal
and persistence as in this score; that from the rst bar to the last whatever note one expects is
never the one that comes, but the note to one side, the note which ought not to come . . . the
music is rough and violent. . . . These are not pretty, elegant harmonies, combined with patient
subtlety. They are hard, loud, dense, freely invented by a cruel and fertile musical nature. Pierre
Lalo, in Le Temps, 5 August 1913, quoted in Lesure, Dossier de presse, 3334; translation from
Hill, Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring, 93.
22. On Stravinskys evolving attitude toward The Rite, as reected in his writings, interviews,
and his revisions of the score, see Taruskin, Myth of the Twentieth Century; and Fink,
Rigoroso ( = 126). A revised version of Taruskins essay is featured as the rst part of the
chapter Stravinsky and the Subhuman in his book Dening Russia Musically.
Following in the composers footsteps, some analysts have appeared deter-
mined to counter the idea that any details of a work held in such high esteem
might not have been carefully planned out by the composerthat the music
might somehow be arbitrary, as Theodor Adorno famously described it, a
judgment that could be seen to expose the entire analytical endeavor as no
more than a fools errand (a futile undertaking, to borrow Stravinskys
words). In some cases, these analysts have attempted to deliver a swift and per-
manent blow to the notion of arbitrariness, identifying coherent and audible
structures that explain Stravinskys compositional procedures in comprehen-
sive waysFortes set theory, for example, or Boulezs notion of durational
symmetry.
23
Such studies might have been more abundant in an earlier, more
positivist era of music analysis, but more recent examples are easily found as
well.
24
According to Taruskin, this disciplinary tendency can be attributed to an
underlying fear of what he saw as the true nature of The Rite: a rational
complexity, Taruskin argued, is far less disturbing than a mystifying simplic-
ity.
25
Simplicity is a quality rarely attributed to The Rite, but it is crucial in
Taruskins characterization: The Rite is not a complex score, he stated, and
the music is distinguished by a radical simplication of texture.
26
But there
is, I would argue, a more intuitive explanation for the persistent desire to ex-
plain Stravinskys Rite with overarching theoretical systems or analytical narra-
tives: a rational complexity is preferable to an irrational one. The apparent
reckless abandon of Stravinskys scorea musical riot, as Daniel Chua has
recently characterized it
27
has proven difcult to reconcile with the larger
reputation of Stravinskys oeuvre, promoted by the composer himself, as a
paragon of logic and objectivity.
One source of the problem, perhaps, is the faulty assumption that the
highly controlled compositional methods we might associate with Stravinsky
necessarily result in orderly musical surfaces. Whereas Stravinsky clearly
reigned in the innitude of potential compositional strategies to a much
lesser extent in The Rite than in later works, the singular unruliness of the
score should not be taken simplistically as evidence of a lack of systematic com-
positional planning. The analysis above and those that follow shed light on the
relative presence of order and disorder in Stravinskys score, suggesting that
23. See Forte, Harmonic Organization; van den Toorn, Stravinsky and the Rite of Spring
(esp. chaps. 57); and Boulez, Stravinsky Remains.
24. David Code, for instance, in his 2007 study of the Augurs of Spring, concluded:
What seems like a dance of utter visceral and hormonal immediacy is found to be tightly bound
by the fetters of compositional control; Synthesis of Rhythms, 162. Similarly, Code identied
the Augurs as the perfect exemplar of the structural investments Stravinsky attributed to the
whole ballet some years later, when he described it as an architectonic work; ibid., 113.
25. Taruskin, Myth of the Twentieth Century, 19.
26. Ibid.
27. Chua, Rioting with Stravinsky.
one of Stravinskys central compositional strategies was systematic and yet still
yielded somewhat unpredictable musical results; I propose that he employed
an automated procedure to generate musical ideas, in which entities from
one realm of music (pitch) are translated into another realm (rhythm) where
their meaning is altogether different and any desirable musical result is largely
fortuitous.
28
That is to say, Stravinsky sacriced part of his role as an organizer
of musical sound in favor of a more detached engagement with music as a sys-
tem of abstract, quantiable relationships.
Analyses
Augurs of Spring (continued) and Introduction to Part I
The procedure for converting pitch intervals into durations is evident, as we
have seen, at the very outset of the Augurs of Spring. Given its primacy
within the compositional history of The Riteand arguably the canon of
twentieth-century music as wellthe opening of the Augurs merits further
attention here. First, it is instructive to consider why the accent pattern would
relate most closely to the C-major variant rather than to the initial Augurs
chord itself. As already noted, the C-major variant (unlike the initial chord) is
octatonic, and thus characteristic of Stravinskys harmonic language in The
Rite.
29
It is also an important chord beyond its initial appearances in
Augurs: it is featured prominently, for instance, from R16 to R18 and in
the rst several bars of the Ritual of Abduction. But most importantly, it is
the C-major variant, and not the repeated chord with which Augurs begins,
that dominates Stravinskys initial sketches, appearing in three musical frag-
ments at the top of the rst page of the sketchbook, possibly the rst musical
ideas Stravinsky committed to paper (they appear on the upper third of
page 3, which features ve fragments sketched in black ink). Thus the C-major
variant may have had conceptual priority over its more famous sibling in the
early compositional stages of The Rite.
The famous accent pattern, just as we know it today, is laid out on the mid-
dle of the rst page of sketches. Surprisingly, on the next two pages (45),
Stra vinsky wrote out the accent pattern two more times, but with an addi-
tional accent on the downbeat of the fourth bar. On the second system of
28. I should state up front that I have found no compelling evidence of a similar composi-
tional approach in any of Stravinskys other music, although my investigation of this possibility has
not been thorough. My sense is that the approach was closely linked to Stravinskys specic ideas
about The Rite (an idea I will develop in my conclusion below) and therefore may have been
unique to this work. But it remains an open question whether or not he employed this approach
elsewhere.
29. On octatonicism in The Rite, see Berger, Problems of Pitch Organization in Stravinsky;
van den Toorn, Music of Igor Stravinsky, 100137; and idem, Stravinsky and the Rite of Spring,
chaps. 57.
page 4, the accent has apparently been erased from both staves and is barely
legible, but it is easily seen on page 5 (see the rhythmic sketch just above the
horizontal blue lines near the top of the page). Example 2a reproduces the
second of these sketches, in Stravinskys bare rhythmic notation; I have
marked the offending accent with an asterisk. This blasphemous pattern could
be derived from the pitch collection shown in Example 1b with an added
C4 inserted between B
3 and D
4. This new C, together with the surround-

ing E
, D
, and B
, would form an instance of the minor tetrachord (tone

semitonetone) that is crucial to the harmonic and melodic language of The
Rite, a subset of both the diatonic and octatonic collections and a melodic ba-
sis of many of The Rites folk-music sources.
30
The E
CB
tetrachord in
fact features prominently among the musical fragments at the top of the rst
page of the sketchbook. In three of these, it results from the interaction of the
familiar D
ostinato and an arpeggiated C-major triad; one of these

fragments is reproduced in Example 2b. In the score, the tetrachord is fea-
tured prominently seven bars before the Augurs begins, where a premoni-
tion of the ostinato is superimposed over a trilled C. All of this evidence
strengthens the notion that the C-major variant may have been linked to the
accent pattern early on.
Note that in the nal bar of the sketch reproduced in Example 2b, an
arpeggio adds an additional C above the D
ostinato, and an equiv-

alent upper C can be found in the fragment occupying the upper right-hand
corner of the rst page of sketches. These upper Cs correspond to the one I
have added provisionally in the intervallic analysis shown in Example 1b. This
alternative voicing of the C-major triad (preserved at R16+2 of the printed
score) may have inuenced Stravinskys derivation of the accent pattern, as I
have suggested by including the upper C in Example 1b. This C is also the
very rst pitch of The Rite, the opening note held by the bassoon. Just as this
elemental C gives rise to the slowly thickening texture of the introduction (the
Birth of Spring), it can be understood as spawning the intervallic series
shown in Example 1b, which in turn gives birth to the famous accent pattern.
This detail suggests that there may have been a link between Stravinskys com-
positional approaches and his programmatic ideas for The Rite, an idea I will
return to at the end of this essay.
As noted above, the intervallic analysis shown in Example 1b passes over
the B
of the English horns ostinato at R14 (B
3), a note which has no corre-

sponding accent. This sort of imperfection will turn up in several of the analy-
ses below as well, and in general I will not speculate about potential causes. In
30. Taruskin has rightly made much of Stravinskys discovery that two minor tetrachords,
separated by a semitone, comprise a complete octatonic collection, and thus that his folk-music
sources could easily be adapted to an octatonic environment. See Russian Traditions 1:93741.
Van den Toorn emphasized repeatedly the importance of the minor (0235) tetrachord in The
Rite (as a subset of the octatonic collection) in Stravinsky and the Rite of Spring.
this case (as in similar cases below), the correlation between intervals and du-
rations is still extremely strong. We could push further and observe that the B
would generate an accent on the third eighth note of R13+3, resulting in

three consecutive groups of three eighth notes, a regularity that would be at
odds with the irregularity Stravinsky obviously desired. One could imagine
other plausible rationales as well. But here and elsewhere, my assumption is
simply that generating durational patterns from intervallic ones was a compo-
sitional starting point for Stravinsky, that he modied the results of the initial
generation to whatever extent necessary in order to achieve the musical results
he desired, and that he saw no need to deny himself exibility when employ-
ing these generations.
Finally, before proceeding further, my assumption that Stravinsky derived
durational patterns from intervallic ones (as opposed to the reverse process)
requires explanation. In the case of my initial example, it seems extremely im-
probable that Stravinsky conceived of the accent pattern rst and then derived
the succession of intervals from this pattern. Stravinsky described composing
the Augurs chord at the piano, and there is no particular reason to doubt
this story. If this chord and rhythm were among Stravinskys rst musical ideas
for The Rite (as all evidence suggests), then this rst example bears special im-
portance in informing our understanding of all the examples presented below.
Furthermore, the C-major variant of the Augurs chord is both octatonic
and derived from tertian harmonies, and is in this way characteristic of The
Rites harmony in general, whereas the rhythmic pattern has no obvious
precedent or corollary: it is the rhythm, not the chord, that seems to require a
special explanation. Likewise, the collections of pitches analyzed below are in

n n n n n n n

'
'
'
*
etc.
(a)
(b)
Example 2 Augurs of Spring: (a) alternate accent pattern from the sketchbook, p. 5; (b) frag-
ment from the top of the first page of sketches
general easily accounted for vis--vis octatonicism, diatonicism, and extended
tertian harmony, whereas the corresponding rhythmic patterns tend to resist
any comparably straightforward explanations. I would not close off the possi-
bility that in some instances Stravinsky may have worked in both directions
when relating pitch formations and rhythmic patterns, but the evidence points
toward intervallic patterns having generally been the basis for durational ones.
One possible critique of my analysis of Augurs is that the correspondence
between intervals and durations is best perceived intellectually, not aurally.
Taruskin has identied (and vehemently objected to) a tendency among ana-
lysts of The Rite to nd logical, but inaudible, structures underlying the com-
plex musical surfaces.
31
He cited as evidence Elliott Antokoletzs analysis of
the opening bassoon melody, which showed how the notated rhythms of the
rst three bars create a quasi-symmetrical pattern.
32
Taruskin rejected this
analysis as a ction, arguing that Antokoletzs groupings have little to do
with how the music actually sounds, but rather are entirely an artifact of the
bar-placement, a notational convenience: in other words, the phrasing of the
bassoon melody, as indicated by fermatas and slurs, is incompatible with
Antokoletzs groupings.
33
Taruskins complaint relies on the assumption (often implicit in analytical
writing) that analysis should relate to how music is heard: What is revealed
[in Antokoletzs analysis] is a germ-free vivarium, entirely closed off . . .
from the world in which the music was composed and in which it is experi-
enced.
34
But this statement suggests the basis of its own critique: we can gain
access to the world in which the music was composed partly through its
notationa trace of the compositional processsome aspects of which may
bear little or no relation to musical experience. In the case of the opening bas-
soon melody, Stravinskys notation is in many ways counterintuitive. One
could imagine different ways of notating these bars to achieve a similar sound
while reinforcing visually the phrasing of the melodyfor instance, following
Juszkiewiczs transcription of the folk tune from which Stravinsky derived the
melody, by placing the second and third Cs, which instigate repetitions of the
basic melodic idea, on metrical strong beats. The notation Stravinsky chose
begs the question of its meaning or signicance. Consider the rst bar: both
the beaming of notes and the 4/4 meter suggest the rhythmic grouping
1+4+3+3, as shown in Example 3a. It is unlikely that anyone would hear these
groupings without benet of the score, but they are logical in terms of the no-
tation. Example 3 compares this grouping with an intervallic analysis of the
31. Method is inferred from structure and then attributed to the composer, whose work is
thus rationalized and rendered abstract. See Taruskin, Myth of the Twentieth Century, 10.
32. See Antokoletz, Twentieth-Century Music, 95. Boulez arrived at essentially the same
analysis decades earlier; see Stravinsky Remains, 6062.
34. Ibid., 1112.
pitch collection outlined by the opening melody, as anchored by the horns C
on the downbeat of the second bar (see Ex. 3b): once again, the intervals
measured in semitones correspond to the rhythmic groupings.
35
A signicant difference between this analysis of the opening bassoon
melody and my analysis of Augurs is the nature of the isomorphism be-
tween rhythm and pitch: in the Augurs example, it is based on a durational
pattern, whereas with the bassoon melody, it is based on rhythmic groupings.
The rhythmic nature of the two passages, in fact, could hardly be more differ-
ent. One features a metronomic beat, its rhythmic interest based solely on a
pattern of irregular emphases; this circumstance is much more prevalent in
The Rite as a whole. The other sounds improvisational, with little or no audi-
ble metrical grounding; this quasi-rubato effect virtually disappears from the
work when the dancing begins.
The similarities between the two analyses, however, are crucial and charac-
terize the body of analyses below as well:
1. In each analysis, an intervallic pattern derived from an important chord
or pitch collection corresponds to a durational or rhythmic pattern. All
but one of the analyses concerns the beginning of a titled section of The
Rite, where much of the best known and most provocative music of the
ballet resides. In fact, all but one of the fourteen titled sections feature this
sort of correspondence in their opening bars.
36
Due to limitations of space,
I have excluded some of the more complex of these examples,
37
but the
ubiquity of the procedure at the beginnings of movements is an impor-
tant element informing my thesis. Furthermore, the presence of this
35. The main intervallic analysis passes over the bassoons A, which would generate a 2+2
subdivision of the sixteenth notes in bar 1, as indicated on the example. This subdivision is not
suggested by Stravinskys notation, although perhaps it is implied by the time signature as a simple
division of the quarter-note beat.
36. In two cases, the correspondence is found in an early incarnation of a sections opening
bars but not in the ultimate printed version, as a result of Stravinsky either repositioning the
movement title (Procession of the Sage) or inserting new opening material (Introduction to
Part II).
37. These include the Ritual of Abduction (bars 15), the Mystic Circle of the Young
Girls (bars 17), and the Ritual Action of the Ancestors (bars 114).
0
0
q

q

bassoon
1
2
4
2
3 3
horn
1
2 2
4 3 3 3
3
(a) (b)
Example 3 IntroductiontoPart I, bars 12: (a) rhythmic groupings; (b) intervallic measurements
sort of correspondence at the openings of movements suggests that this
particular means of deriving rhythmic material was a compositional
starting point for Stravinsky, a way of setting ideas in motion for each
new section.
2. In each of the examples, intervals are measured from top to bottom(never
bottom to top), and measurements originate from the uppermost pitch
of a chord or collection of pitches (or, in one exception, a semitone be-
low the uppermost pitch).
38
3. In all cases, the unit of durational measurements is the largest possible note
value that allows all measurements to be made in whole numbers. For in-
stance, in Example 1a, the eighth note is the largest such note value: if
durations between accents were measured in quarter notes, this would
yield the numerical succession 4.5, 1, 3, 1.5, etc., and no correspon-
dence with semitonal measurements would be possible. In each of the
passages in which the meter changes from bar to bar, my durational
groupings follow the notated meter.
4. Finally, as I will discuss further below, most of the chords or pitch collec-
tions under consideration share important intervallic characteristics that
have already been noted in the literature, particularly the intervallic
structures 5+6 and 6+5 (that is, the major seventh partitioned into a per-
fect fourth and tritone).
All of these consistencies suggest a coherent set of compositional strategies, al-
though I should emphasize again that Stravinskys approach clearly allowed
for exibility, experimentation, and play. Although this procedure for deriving
rhythms seems to have been mechanical, there can be no doubt that Stra vin -
sky, in every case, evaluated and shaped the derived rhythms so as to arrive at a
musical result that he found satisfactory.
Sacricial Dance
The opening of the Sacricial Dance, like the opening of Augurs, is char-
acterized by an explosive, irregular accent pattern featuring an iconic chord
that becomes a sonic emblem of the movement (it is, in fact, a virtual transpo-
sition of the Augurs chord). Unlike the opening of Augurs, however,
38. The notion of Stravinsky measuring intervals always by counting downwards harmonizes
nicely with Chuas characterization of the primary Augurs chord: the chord is upside down,
requiring some kind of topsy-turvy tonal theory; standing tonal theory on its head in some way
would make more sense of Stravinskys E
key-signature that prefaces the Augurs of Spring; the

root is on the top and the chord hangs upside down from the E
surface. See Chua, Rioting

with Stravinsky, 69. David Lewin conceived of the opening bassoon melody of The Rite in a sim-
ilar way, citing B as the root of the arpeggiated E-minor triad in bar 1; see Formal Theory of
Generalized Tonal Functions, 4143. Van den Toorns method of notating and referring to the
octatonic scale in The Rite similarly assumes a fundamental orientation downwards; see Stravinsky
and the Rite of Spring, 14445.
here Stravinsky reinforced the pattern with changing meter, as opposed to
shifting accents within a stable meter.
39
My durational groupings, shown in
Example 4a, begin after the call to attention of the rst bar, which is set off by
a fermata. (Durations are measured in sixteenth notes.) The repeated material
at R143 was not present in Stravinskys original sketch (see the top systems of
pages 8485 of the sketchbook); therefore my durational analysis passes over
these four bars. The durational analysis corresponds to the notation of the me-
ter from R142 to R144, which reinforces the groupings a listener is likely
to hear: the meter is made audible by various features, most prominently the
pattern of low, accented Ds followed by unaccented, offbeat harmonies.
40
At
R144, a new accented, marcato thematic idea enters, as though on a down-
beat, and thus at odds with the meter as notated (see my durational analysis);
when this idea recurs at R145, its entrance is adjusted to occur on a notated
downbeat. In his original sketch on page 85 of the sketchbook, Stravinsky did
not include the low D found at R144 of the printed score, thereby minimiz-
ing the conict between the notated downbeat of this bar and the entrance of
the new motive. Example 4b analyzes the intervallic construction of the pri-
mary chord of this passage (see the rst two bars of Ex. 4); the intervallic
analysis generates precisely the same numerical series as the durational analysis.
Introduction to Part II and Glorication of the Chosen One
Embedded in each of the pitch collections analyzed thus far is the 5+6 or 6+5
trichordal skeleton fundamental to harmony in The Rite (that is, the perfect
fourth + tritone or vice versa); Taruskin has referred to this trichord as the
Rite chord or the Grundgestalt of The Rite of Spring, and van den Toorn
has likewise called it The Rites basic sonority.
41
In the Augurs chord and
its C-major variant, the trichord is formed by the pitches E
(5+6,
measured from top to bottom); in the related chord of the Sacricial
39. The following analysis incorporates the metrical subdivisions of the 1921 printed edition,
in which the meter of the second and third bars (2/16+3/16) subdivides what had been a single
5/16 bar in earlier versions. This slightly revised metrical scheme simply reinforces the groupings
already asserted strongly by the low Ds.
40. When the Ds are absent, other features reinforce the notated meter. For instance, a
crescendo leads to an accent on the downbeat of the fth bar of the movement, punctuated by the
brass, thereby articulating the downbeat in the absence of a low D. The downbeat of the fourth
bar is a prime example of what Grosvenor Cooper and Leonard Meyer called an accented rest,
where one has been conditioned to hear an emphasis despite the absence of sound. The passage
from the development of the Eroica Symphony that constitutes their primary example of the
phenomenon might in fact be regarded as a progenitor of the beginning of the Sacricial
Dance. See Cooper and Meyer, Rhythmic Structure of Music, 13740.
41. Taruskin, Russian Traditions 1:93940; van den Toorn, Stravinsky and the Rite of
Spring, 14546. Van den Toorns notion of a basic sonority is somewhat more complex, en-
compassing other features, particularly the trichords interaction with the octatonic collection (of
which it is a subset). In van den Toorns view, the basic sonority and related harmonic features
constitute a fairly consistent harmonic language in The Rite.
_
_
s
:s
s
:s
s
:s
-
:s
-
:s
-
:s
s
:s
s
:s
s
:s
,
-
s
-
s
-
s
_
_
-
s
-
s
-
s
,
,
,
.

-
:s
-
:s
-
:s
s
:s
s
:s
s
:s
,
-
s
-
s
-
s
_
_
-
s
-
s
-
s
,
,
,
.

s
:s
s
:s
s
:s
s
:s
s
:s
s
:s
,
.
,

,

_
_
_
_
142
143
144
2 3 3
4 (four repeated bars absent in original sketch)
4 7
2 3 3 4 4 7
8
vb
8
vb
8
vb
marc.
(a)
(b)
Example 4 Sacrificial Dance, bars 112: (a) durational measurements; (b) intervallic structure
of primary chord
Dance, by the pitches DAE
(although here the latter pitch sounds an

octave lower); and in the Introduction to Part I, by the pitches CGC
. At
some points in the score, the coordination of 5+6 or 6+5 intervallic and dura-
tional patterns is quite obvious. Example 5a concerns the beginning of the
Introduction to Part II of the ballet, not as we know it today, but as Stravinsky
originally conceived it: in the full and short versions of the autograph score,
R79R86 of the printed score were not initially present.
42
Thus the original
Introduction began with the juxtaposition of two contrasting ideas at what
would become R86: a legato duet in the trumpets followed by an accompani-
mental pattern in the low strings, the latter comprised of two alternating stac-
cato trichords over a four-note pizzicato bassline (these two ideas are heard
together a few bars later). The changing meter of the trumpet duet and the in-
tervallic content of the string accompaniment both feature 5+6 and 6+5
groupings, as shown in the example. More specically, the symmetry of the
metrical scheme (5/46/45/4) also has a close analogue in the realm of
pitch. Example 5b outlines symmetrical aspects of the relationship between
the second staccato trichord and the pizzicato bassline: the embedded 5+6+5
pattern is highlighted by the shared inner tritone B
and the E
s occupying
the registral extremes. (Note that the upper trichord is presented linearly in
the example and the tritones superimposed for analytic clarity.)
A related passage occurs in the Glorication of the Chosen One.
R112+3 introduces a musical idea (reminiscent of the Danse infernale from
The Firebird) comprised of off-beat trichords over a short ostinato pattern; it
is rst heard for only a bar but soon returns for several bars at R114. This syn-
copated idea alternates between ve-beat and six-beat versions, notated in 5/4
and 6/4, as shown in Example 6a (see R114R115 for the full passage).
Throughout this passage, each of the upper trichords is based on either the
5+6 or 6+5 intervallic pattern, as shown in Example 6b; the 5+6 and 6+5 tri-
chords are also heard in alternation (see Ex. 6a). Thus, quite similarly to what
we have just seen in the Introduction to Part II, the alternation between 5+6
and 6+5 trichords can be related to an alternation between 5/4 and 6/4 bars
that generates various 5+6 and 6+5 durational pairings.
Procession of the Sage, Adoration of the Earth, and Dance
of the Earth
More subtle instances of 5+6 and 6+5 relationships can be found in the last
three movements of Part I, linking these movements together as a larger unit.
42. Stravinsky completed the autograph full score for Part I of the ballet on 29 February
1912, and then began to write out Part II, beginning with what would become R86. About a
year later, on four pages dated 29 March 1913, he wrote out the missing passage (R79R86) and
inserted it in the autograph; see Cyr, Petite histoire, 104. The last page of the autograph is
dated 8 March 1913, and thus it appears that Stravinsky returned to the Introduction to Part II,
adding the opening material after having completed (or believing that he had completed) the
draft in the autograph.
In the early stages of composition, Stravinskys working title for what would
become the Procession of the Sage was Idut-vedut (They Are Coming,
They Are Bringing Him in Taruskins translation
43
), a title that he used at
several points in the sketchbook and preserved in the autograph scores. In the
printed score, however, the Procession of the Sage begins at R67, whereas
in the autograph scores, Idut-vedut begins at the equivalent of R64 in the
printed score; there is no title at R67 in the autographs.
44
The opening of
Idut-vedut is shown in Example 7a. This passage features two seemingly in-
dependent musical layers, an upper melody in thirds (woodwinds and strings
in the full score) and a lower tuba melody centered rmly on G
. Example 7a
43. Taruskin, Russian Traditions 1:873.
44. The sketchbook suggests some early equivocation between these two potential starting
points for the movement: here, Stravinsky places titles at both points on different pages (see
pp. 12, 14, and 16).
1
0

2
0

1
0

!
86
5 6 5
5 6
5 6
6 5
5 6
5
3
3 3
3
3
3
(a)
(b)
Example 5 Introduction to Part II, bars 15 in the autograph scores: (a) durational measure-
ments (bars 13) and intervallic measurements (strings, bars 45); (b) symmetrical aspects of
strings, bars 45
ends at the point where the melody in thirds drops out, resulting in a sudden
thinning of the texture that demarcates the beginning of a new musical sec-
tion. Each layer features an initial musical idea that is repeated several times,
either in its entirety or in abridged forms. The melody in thirds consists of a
two-bar idea that is sometimes repeated in full and other times in one-bar frag-
ments. The tuba melody features a ve-bar idea that is subsequently shortened
to four- and two-bar versions; all three versions end with the identical two-bar
tag. My durational analysis in Example 7a outlines these various statements
and repetitions, treating the whole note as the basic durational unit (the
largest possible note value that allows durations to be measured in whole
numbers). Example 7b analyzes the complete pitch content of this passage,
omitting only the lower neighbors to the tubas G
s, which might be brack-

eted as ornamental given their relatively short duration compared to the sus-
tained G
s and their weak metrical placement. In the full printed score, the
lower voice of the melody in thirds reaches down to a B
(enharmonically
equivalent to the tubas A
); however, this note was a B
in Stravinskys four-
hand arrangement and thus constituted part of the overall pitch content of
the passage at an earlier stage (this B
is in fact retained in the full score in

the four bars before R62, an earlier occurrence of the same melody in thirds).
Including this B
in Examples 6a and 6b, the intervallic pattern generated by

the overall pitch content of this passage replicates the durational measure-
ments, as can be seen by comparing Examples 6a and 6b. The intervallic series
shown above the upper staff in Example 7b is very similar to the series gener-
ated by the upper portion of the C-major variant of the Augurs chord, as
1
0
1
0

2
0
2
0

!
114
see (b)
5 6 6 5 5 6 6 5
(a)
(b)
Example 6 Glorification of the Chosen One, R114: (a) 5- and 6-beat versions of basic musi-
cal idea; (b) intervallic structure of primary trichords
0
0
0
0

!
!
!
64
65
( )
2
5
1 2
*B
in four-hand score; B
in printed score
2
4
1 3
2
2 1
5
2 2 1
4
3
2
Procession of the Sage
2
Augurs of Spring
2
1
1
2
2
2 1
3
3
3
*
woodwinds/
strings
tuba
(a)
(b)
(c)
Example 7 Procession of the Sage, R64 (designated as the beginning of Idut-vedut in the
autograph scores): (a) durational measurements of tuba and woodwindstring melodies; (b) inter-
vallic measurements of overall pitch collection; (c) subset of this collection (see Ex. 6b) compared
with C-major variant of the Augurs chord
shown in Example 7c (I have included parenthetically the C4 found on the
rst page of sketches, as discussed above); both are elaborations of the familiar
5+6 pattern.
More important to the intermovement connections under consideration
here is the 5+4+2 pattern shown between the staves on Example 7b (also a
subdivision of 5+6), common to the intervallic measurements and the dura-
tional analysis of the tuba melody. In the extremely short section that follows,
the Adoration of the Earth, this 5+4+2 durational pattern occurs in reverse
in the only moving part, as shown in my analysis of the contrabassoon melody
in Example 8, which treats the quarter note as the basic durational unit. The
D
motion of the contrabassoon recalls the tubas G
motion
in the Procession of the Sage (see Ex. 7a), thereby reinforcing the connec-
tion between these two melodic gures.
This 2+4+5 durational pattern recurs a few bars later at the beginning of
the Dance of the Earth, now coordinated with a 2+4+5 intervallic pattern
in a more elaborate correspondence, as shown in Example 9. The durational
groupings in Example 9a (measured in eighth notes) follow the irregular itera-
tions of the sforzando chords, as articulated by the vast majority of the instru-
ments: a C-major triad with added F
followed by its neighboring chord.

The excerpt analyzed in the example spans from R72 to R73, including the
rst three bars featuring the C-major chord followed by three bars featuring
its D-major neighbor. In some cases, a glissando directs its energy into a
downbeat rest; I have treated these silences as accented rests, in analogy to
my analysis of the fourth bar of the Sacricial Dance. The rst of these rests
(the downbeat of R72+2) was actually a sforzando chord in Stravinskys origi-
nal sketch of the movement,
45
supporting my treatment of these rests as
comparable to the sforzando chords (Stravinsky similarly equivocated between
low Ds and accented rests in the Sacricial Dance, as is evident from com-
parison of his multiple versions of the movement). The intervallic measure-
ments shown in Example 9b, identical to the durational measurements of
Example 9a, are based on the overall pitch content of this passage, including
both the initial repeated sforzando chord and the whole-tone ostinato under-
neath it. Compromising this analysis to some degree, the intervallic measure-
ments shown in Example 9b (unlike all others presented in this essay) do not
begin with the uppermost pitch, G, but a semitone below (F
); furthermore,
the intervallic analysis omits the G
of the bassline ostinato (reecting its possi-

ble status as a passing tone from F
to A
), as well as some upper and lower

doublings of the primary chord. Although I am hesitant to offer possible ex-
planations for these discrepancies, they might indicate that Stravinsky was
working with a condensed, preliminary version of the sforzando chord and ac-
companying ostinato (as opposed to the fully realized orchestral version)
when he arrived at the rhythm of this passage.
45. See the penultimate system on p. 35 of the sketchbook, Stravinskys rst sketch of the
movement.
0
0
0
0

!
71 +1
2 4 5
Example 8 Adoration of the Earth, bars 13: durational measurements of the contrabassoon
solo
/
0
/
0

^[[
/
0
/
0
/
0

!
!
!
72
73
2 4 5 3 4
2 4
6
2 4
sub.
(etc.)
2 4 5 3 4
2
4 6 2 4
3
3
6
6
6
sub.
sempre
sub.
(a)
(b)
Example 9 Dance of the Earth, bars 18: (a) durational measurements; (b) intervallic struc-
ture of primary chord + bass ostinato
Glorication of the Chosen One
I now turn to the simplest and the most complex of my examples, both of
which feature several more instances of 5+6 and 6+5 intervallic and durational
patterns. Both examples are drawn from the beginning of Glorication of the
Chosen One, extended to include the two bars that immediately precede it
(the Glorication proper begins at R103). During the rst of these two
bars, much of the orchestra participates in a one-bar glissando that leads into
perhaps the most obviously primitive moment in Stravinskys score, an
11/4 bar consisting of eleven repetitions of a single dissonant chord. In most
of the participating instruments, this glissando is written out as a quintuplet
followed by a sextuplet, which Stravinsky emphasized in his original sketch
with a disproportionately large 5 and 6 above the uppermost line (see
page 61 of the sketchbook). This rhythmic treatment partitions the chromatic
glissando into 5+6 semitones. Vertically, each note of the glissando is harmo-
nized with a 5+6 trichord. Example 10a illustrates by reproducing the ute
parts: the linear 5+6 intervallic partition is shown above the uppermost staff,
and the harmonic one is shown on the left side of the example. In the follow-
ing 11/4 bar, the repeated chord consists of two superimposed, inversionally
related versions of the 5+6 and 6+5 trichord, as shown in Example 10b; the
example reproduces Stravinskys notation of the chord in the four-hand score,
which emphasizes its derivation from the 5+6 and 6+5 trichords.
46
Note, of
course, that each trichord spans eleven semitones from top to bottom, and the
chord is repeated eleven times. Thus these two bars feature a pervasive coordi-
nation of units of eleven and 5+6 subdivisions in rhythmic and intervallic
space.
A closer examination of the intervallic patterns embedded within the chord
from the 11/4 bar suggests a close relationship between these patterns and
the wildly irregular metrical scheme of Glorication. In addition to the der -
ivation of the chord from 6+5 and 5+6 trichords, the same pitches, measured
from top to bottom, generate the intervallic pattern shown on the far right of
Example 10b, 6+3+2+3+6. The bottom portion of Example 10b outlines sev-
eral other possible groupings of these intervals: 9+5+6, 14+6, and the inver-
sions of these. Example 10c represents the rst 16 bars of the Glorication,
charting the duration of each bar in eighth notes (5, 9, 5, etc.). The second
bar of the printed score is omitted from the example: this bar is an exact repeat
of the rst and was not part of Stravinskys original sketch of the passage (see
the drafts on pages 61 and 67 of the sketchbook). Underneath these durations
are possible groupings that correspond to the intervallic groupings outlined
46. This chord is extremely similar to a chord featured prominently in what may have been
one of Stravinskys very rst sketches for The Rite. In a sketch that according to Craft predated the
sketchbook, Stravinsky composed a repeating octatonic chord based on symmetrically related 6+5
and 5+6 trichords, one in each hand. See the rst bar of the second system of the sketch, as repro-
duced in Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents, 597.
--
0
--
0

p
p
p
p
p
p
p
p
p
p
p
p
p
p
p
p
p
p
p
p
p
p

!
5
6
5
6
6 5
5 6
6 3 2 3 6
5
5
5
6
6
6
(a)
(b)

Bars:

Durations:

Groupings:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
5 9 5 7 3 4 14 6 14 3 4 14 6 5 9 5
5 + 9 14 + 6 14 + 6 9 + 5
9 + 5
14
6 + 14 6 + 5 + 9
A
5+9+5
B
(7+) 3+4
C
14+6+14
B
3+4 (+14+6)
A
5+9+5
9
A
5+9+5
Primary chord: 6 + 3 + 2 + 3 + 6 6 + 3 + 2 + 3 + 6
Other groupings: 9 + 5 + 6 -or- 6 + 5 + 9
14 + 6 6 + 14
(c)
Example 10 Glorification of the Chosen One, bars 116 (as drafted in Stravinskys sketch-
book, corresponding with R104R110 in published score): (a) intervallic measurements of initia-
tory glissando; (b) intervallic measurements of primary chord; (c) durational measurements and
groupings (durations measured in eighth notes)
Note: The published score begins with a repeated 5/8 bar; this diagram corresponds to the origi-
nal version of the sketchbook, in which the 5/8 bar is not repeated.
above (5+9, 14+6, 6+5+9, etc.). Analyzed in this way, virtually every bar of
this section can be accounted for in relation to the intervallic structure of the
11/4 chord. The bottom of the example outlines a ve-part symmetrical form
based on these durations: the section begins and ends with the durational pat-
tern 5+9+5, and the pattern 14+6+14 occupies the center, anked by two in-
stances of the pattern 3+4.
47
Likewise, the chord from the 11/4 bar has a
ve-part symmetrical intervallic structure (6+3+2+3+6). In sum, the elemental
11/4 bar seems to have served as a progenitor of the following section, with
the harmonic construction of the chord from this bar providing a model for
the overall metrical structure of the rst sixteen bars of the Glorication. It
is noteworthy that this chord returns prominently three times during these
sixteen bars and in fact dominates the center of the symmetrical scheme (see
the two 14-beat bars at R106+1 and R107+1, bars 7 and 9 in Ex. 10c). More
generally, this example suggests that Stravinsky may have used intervallic mea-
surements to derive rhythmic and metric patterns on a large scale, a possibility
I will revisit below in my investigation of Stravinskys sketches, which contain
evidence of Stravinsky having tracked durational patterns (in some cases hun-
dreds of beats at once) in large sections of The Rite.
Spring Rounds and Evocation of the Ancestors
My nal two examples involve largely diatonic environments where subdivi-
sions of the octave are more prominent than the characteristic 5+6 and 6+5
subdivisions of the major seventh we have seen thus far. Example 11a repro-
duces the rst three bars of Spring Rounds as they appear in Stravinskys
sketchbook (see page 9). This early sketch of the opening clarinet melody dif-
fers from the printed version in two details: it contains a grace note in the rst
bar
48
and shorter slurs in the rst two bars (in the printed version, the notes of
each bar are contained under a single slur). The groupings indicated by the
slurs of the sketchbook are maintained in Stravinskys rhythmic notation of the
utes in the printed version, which sustain a trilled E
during the rst two bars,

notated as shown in Example 11c. My durational groupings in Example 11a
are suggested by the placement of Stravinskys original slurs and grace notes,
47. It is worth noting, additionally, that the rst, third, and fth parts of the symmetrical
scheme are each symmetrical in themselves (5+9+5; 14+6+14; 5+9+5), and that all three parts are
symmetrical in their musical content as well (in each case, the rst and third bars contain identical
material). Finally, the 5+9+5 bars at the beginning of the passage are identical in musical content
to those at the end, as is true for the paired 3+4 bars, further enhancing the overall symmetry. The
pervasive presence of quasi-symmetrical durational structures in The Rite was a major conclusion
of Boulezs Stravinsky Remains; although in my view Boulez overestimated the signicance of
such structures, there can be no doubt that symmetry (and quasi symmetry) played a role in
Stravinskys compositional decisions.
48. This omission in the printed score is curious, given that the transposed return of the
melody at R56+2 contains grace notes in exactly the same positions as the sketchbook does.
the notated meter, and by iterations of the pitch center, E
, the primary pitch

center of the entire Spring Rounds (each E
initiates a durational group in

my analysis). The intervallic measurements of the complete pitch collection
outlined by this melody correspond precisely to the durational measurements,
as can be seen by comparing parts (a) and (b) of the example.
The opening fanfare of the Evocation of the Ancestors (beginning at
R121+3) is more ambiguous in terms of its internal phrasing.
49
The dura-
tional analysis shown in Example 12a simply follows the meter of the printed
edition. These durational groupings correspond to intervallic measurements
derived from the primary chord of this passage, as shown in Example 12b.
Note that these measurements are based on a cross section of the chord (simi-
lar to my analysis of the primary chord of Dance of the Earth) but preserve
the uppermost pitch-class, E. Note also the provisional suggestion of a corre-
spondence between the single quarter note that ends the fanfare and the com-
pound semitone formed by the low D
pedal against which the fanfare is

heard. In the intervallic analysis of Example 12b, this semitone complicates
what would otherwise be a straightforward subdivision of the octave,
4+3+2+3. The motivic organization of the fanfare conveys an even more basic
49. This ambiguity is reected by Stravinskys apparent difculty in deciding how to bar the
fanfare: Stravinskys original sketch, the autograph and four-hand scores, and the 1921 edition
each bar the fanfare somewhat differently (although Stravinskys barring of a related passage on
p. 74 of the sketchbook suggests that he had already conceived of the 1921 barring of the fanfare
at an early stage). Van den Toorn has gone to great lengths to demonstrate how the revised bar-
ring of the 1929 score (which maintained the barring of the 1921 score) conveys a degree of sub-
tlety missing in the earlier versions of the fanfare: see Stravinsky and the Rite of Spring, 4951,
8694. For Taruskins take on these different barrings, see Russian Traditions 1:95961.
1
0
1
0

3
0
3
0

2
0
2
0

!
48
2 3 2 2 3
2 3 2 2 3
(a)
(b)
(c)
Example 11 Spring Rounds: (a) durational measurements, melody of bars 13 (slurred as in
sketchbook); (b) intervallic measurements of complete pitch collection, bars 13; (c) Stravinskys
slurring of the trilled E
, bars 12
7+5 subdivision, the reverse of the 5+7 subdivision featured in the Spring
Rounds; we might regard this pair as a domesticated cousin of the 5+6 and
6+5 Grundgestalt.
To summarize the upshot of the preceding analyses: each is a hypothesis
suggesting a relationship between intervallic and durational patterns that may
have provided Stravinsky with a compositional starting point, a means of lim-
iting the eld of action in order to unlock creative impulses, to gloss
Stravinskys famous statement that is cited at the beginning of this article. In
no example would I claim to have presented Stravinskys exact conception of
a musical relationship; instead, each example is an educated guess at what his
conception was, based on the evidence of the sketches, the autographs, and
the earliest printed editions of the score. My argument is located not so much
/
.
/
.

.
.
.
.

/
0
/
0

.
0
.
0

/
0
/
0
n
/
.
/
.

!
!
!
121
4 3 2 3 1
4 3 2 3 (1?)
(a)
(b)
Example 12 Evocation of the Ancestors (bars 18): (a) durational measurements; (b) inter-
vallic structure of primary chord
in the specic details of any one analytical example, but in the totality of these
examples (including those I have been unable to present here due to limita-
tions of space). Taken as a whole, they provide powerful evidence that Stra vin -
sky used intervallic series to generate rhythmic ideas. And thus an unfamiliar
picture of Stravinsky emerges, in which the composer is an almost passive ob-
server at the conception of some of the most famous rhythmic innovations of
the twentieth century.
Sketches
On Sunday, 17 November 1912, Igor Stravinsky, with an unbearable tooth -
ache, nished the music for The Rite of Spring. We know this, of course, be-
cause Stravinsky declared it triumphantly (if a bit prematurely) in blue and red
pencil on pages 9697 of his sketchbook. The size of Stravinskys handwriting
suggests that he was understandably excited to write these words, and indeed,
just as these pages record a decisive moment in the composition of The Rite,
they mark the climax of the sketchbook itself, a work of art in its own right.
Surrounding Stravinskys announcement, and amongst his sketches for the
end of the Sacricial Dance, we nd an explosion of other marginal jottings,
including two unusual symbols in blue (one at the top of each page) that func-
tion as continuity indicators
50
(symbols that indicate connections between
non-consecutive sketches), and numerous unexplained calculations. A
crescendo of activity marks the preceding pages as well, where Stravinsky
drafted earlier portions of the Sacricial Dance: quasi-hieroglyphic symbols
and numerical notations turn up frequently in these sketches. Many of these
markings are cryptic, and most have received no more than casual interpreta-
tions, sometimes being dismissed altogether as trivial.
These sorts of notations are not limited to the sketchbook: the autograph
full and short scores for The Rite and the four-hand reduction on which
Stravinsky recorded choreographic instructions for Nijinsky are marked by
similar scribbles, although they are less pervasive. One nds, for instance, over-
sized metrical indications hovering prominently over groups of bars, addition
tables recording the precise size of instrumental forces at a given point in the
score, and many other unlabeled calculations. These sorts of markings are
sprinkled through numerous other manuscripts of Stravinskys as well, from
various stages of the composers career. An overwhelming impression after
viewing these documents is that of a composer preoccupied with numbers and
arithmetic. This is precisely how Stravinsky described himself late in life, in a
1966 interview with Robert Craft:
All composers eventually become obsessed with numbers, the rapport ex-
pressed between them being so much greater than most expressions of rapport
50. I am grateful to David Grayson for suggesting this term.
in reality . . . certain musical relationships are more clearly expressed as num-
bers. It may well be that my love of combining twos, threes, fours, and sixes is
compulsive and that a composer who works this way is behaving in music like
the man who has to lock his door three times, or step on all of the cracks in the
sidewalk. But if this is true, and musical composition involves nervous disor-
ders, I would not want to be cured.
51
Perusal of the sketches and manuscripts for The Rite suggests that Stravinskys
numerical compulsive disorder was already at an advanced stage by 1913; yet
it remains far from obvious to what extent the numerical notations in these
documents might provide insights into his compositional method. However,
as I will argue, careful study of the numerical and symbolic notations in the
sketchbook reveals what seems to be an elaborate set of durational calculations
that operate on a scale much larger than those considered thus far, in some
cases involving tallies of hundreds of beats at a time. Interpretation of these
notations helps to support the idea outlined above that Stravinsky conceived
of durational patterns in The Rite in terms of abstract numerical relationships,
while suggesting further that these calculations held important symbolic sig-
nicance for Stravinsky: that is to say, Stravinskys numerically based composi-
tional strategies seem to be linked to private meanings.
The sketches for the Sacricial Dance (pages 84102 of the sketchbook) are
particularly rich with marginalia and thus provide a convenient site for explor-
ing the relevance of such annotations.
52
I will begin by examining the sketches
on pages 9095, where Stravinsky drafted continuously what would become
R149R162, music characterized by a staccato-chord vamp overlaid with spo-
radic descending chromatic gures marked marcato in the brass. Pages 9091
are distinguished by the presence of numerous quasi-hieroglyphic characters
with no corollaries elsewhere in the sketchbook. Craft identied the cluster of
doodles in the lower right margin of page 90 as Stravinskys attempt to create
an impresa out of his initials,
53
and on closer inspection, we can see that
Stravinsky was also experimenting with a rendering of his rst initial and entire
last name, perhaps imagining some ancient alphabet (see Figure 1 for one of
51. Craft, Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship, 445. Elsewhere, Stravinsky explained to Craft:
. . . the way composers thinkthe way I thinkis, it seems to me, not very different from math-
ematical thinking. I was aware of the similarity of these two modes while I was still a student; and,
incidentally, mathematics was the subject that most interested me in school; see I. Stravinsky and
Craft, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky, 17.
52. A short melodic fragment can also be found in the lower left corner of page 64. Cyr iden-
tied some possible fragments on pages 66, 81, and 83; see Petite histoire, 103. Given the myr-
iad challenges of deciphering Stravinskys sketches, this section of the my essay often requires the
careful consideration of minutiae; here and elsewhere, the ner points of these discussions are
conned to the footnotes. Some readers will undoubtedly nd it helpful to have the sketchbook
facsimile at hand while reading this discussion.
53. Craft, Commentary to the Sketches, 24.
these doodles). The three characters enclosed in a box appear to constitute a
further abstraction of Stravinskys name. This boxed signature may have been
a seal inspired by Stravinskys recent fascination with Japanese art and
poetry, an interest that led to his composition of the Three Japanese Lyrics at
the same time he was working on The Rite. The larger red symbols on pages
9091perhaps related to the cluster of doodles on page 90appear to de-
lineate a group of beats. The music sketched between the rst symbol and the
last corresponds to R149R151 of the printed score (where Stravinsky subdi-
vided all of the 4/8 and 5/8 bars from the original sketch), a distinct musical
section. This passage spans 29 eighth-note beats, and the ve red symbols in
the sketchbook are arranged in a near-symmetrical pattern over these bars
(the rst two of these, occupying the top of page 90, are shown in Figure 2).
54
The importance of this durational unit is conrmed on the following pages,
where Stravinsky marked the next two units of 29 beats with circled 29s
(see the top of page 92 and the upper right margin of page 93)the only in-
stances of circled numbers in the sketchbook.
55
The remainder of the passage
is unmarked by 29s, but it spans 58 beatsthat is, exactly two more groups
of 29.
56
In sum, the complete section sketched on pages 9095 can be partitioned
into exactly ve groups of 29 beats, following Stravinskys delineation of the
rst three of these groups.
57
The division of the music into groups of 29 beats
54. If these red characters represent a durational analysis, then a potentially signicant prece-
dent can be found in Georgy Konyuss theory of metrotechtonicism, which began to circulate
in the rst decade of the twentieth century and was known to such gures as Sergey Taneyev and
Anton Arensky as early as 1902. Konyus believed that musical works of the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries were essentially symmetrical in their temporal construction: his analyses divided
works into durational segments, measured in beats, which formed symmetrical patterns at various
levels of structure. See in particular his analysis of a passage from Chopins F-minor Ballade, re-
produced in Carpenter, Contributions of Taneev, 29697. This analysis is extremely similar,
conceptually, to my analysis of the Glorication of the Chosen One as represented in Example
10, and the details of its durational analysis are virtually identical to those of Stravinskys analysis
on pp. 9091 of the sketchbook. The latter correlation is likely coincidental, but it points
nonetheless to an intersection between idiosyncratic Russian theoretical ideas and Stravinskys
musical thought.
55. The 29 on p. 93 is not positioned precisely (i.e., after the fourth beat of the second
bar), perhaps due to the lack of space at the top of the page.
56. The rst of these is completed after the rst bar (3/8) of the second system on p. 94. The
second is completed by the 6/8 bar (later eliminated) at the end of the rst system on p. 95, at
which point Stravinsky abandoned the sketch, writing etc. over every staff and adding a dra-
matic symbol in blue, apparently as a continuity indicator. On the following page, this symbol re-
curs in the upper left corner, but here it is unassociated with any musical sketch (the sketches on
this page all pertain to the ostinato section from R174 to R186 in the printed score).
57. This potential for 29-beat groups is maintained in the printed score. Here, Stravinsky
omitted the 6/8 bar (i.e., 6 beats) from the end of the section sketched on pp. 9095, but he
added a new passage (R162R165) which spans 35 beats. In other words, he lengthened the
section by a total of 29 beats, and thus R149165 of the printed score spans precisely 6 groups of
29 beats (174 beats total).
was almost certainly related to Stravinskys choreographic conception of this
passage. As recorded in Stravinskys copy of the four-hand piano score, the
composer often conceived of the choreography in terms of large groups of
beats, which tended not to correspond to logical musical sections: the princi-
Figure 1 Stravinskys rendering of his name (I. Stravinsky) on page 90 of the sketchbook
Figure 2 Two red symbols from the top of page 90 of the sketchbook
pal choreographic accents and phrase units . . . were seldom coterminous with
the accents and phrases of the music, as he explained in his commentary on
the four-hand score.
58
Stravinsky in fact partitioned a group of 29 beats earlier
in the ballet, beginning one bar before R138 (The women continue the
rhythm, 29/4, as he wrote in his later commentary).
59
R149 seems to have
marked a meaningful choreographic division in Stravinskys conception, the
moment at which the Chosen One rst moves from her xed position on the
stage, and thus Stravinsky may have intended to have the commencement of
his groups of 29 mark this event.
60
These groups of 29 beats are not recorded
in the four-hand score, however, nor do Stravinskys annotations in that score
include any unusual symbols such as those found in the sketchbook. Further -
more, the sketchbook does not seem to have been a place where Stravinsky
generally recorded choreographic ideas. We might suspect, then, that the
quasi-hieroglyphs in the sketchbook have meaning beyond the realm of
choreography, and perhaps held personal and symbolic signicance for
Stravinsky.
Pages 9697 correspond to R174R186 of the printed score, the section
dominated by an ostinato pattern in the low strings, low brass, and percussion.
Unlike the circled 29s on pages 9293, however, the calculations in the
margins of pages 9697 are not visibly tied to any musical considerations.
These calculations are grouped in two clusters, one in the left margin of
page 96 and one in the left margin of page 97. For most of the calculations on
page 97, Stravinsky seems to have multiplied a number rst by 3 and then
by 5that is, by 15 (see Fig. 3). This operation yields three products from
top to bottom: 225, 180, and 210, derived from the numbers 15, 12, and 14,
respectively. (Stravinsky seems to have ordered these products, writing a 1
next to 210, a 2 next to 225, and a 3 next to 180.) Were we to
multiply the number 10 by 15, this would yield the product 150, and this
number features prominently in the cluster on page 96, occurring three times
(see Figure 4). Here we also see the numbers 225 and possibly 135 (the latter
is not entirely legible)both multiples of 15the latter written over, or over-
written by, the number 133. A likely scenario is that 133 was a corrective to
135, given that the former is featured in the calculation 133+150 = 283 which
seems to bring together the free-oating 150 and 133 at its left. Perhaps
related to this calculation is the aborted addition of 150 and 130 at the bot-
tom of this cluster. Finally, one other calculation is situated at the top of the
cluster on page 96: 40+13 = 53+1 = 54.
Craft found all of these numbers mystifying: whether the arcane calcula-
tions to the left are concerned with overdue rent at the Chtelard, railroad
timetables, musical minutage, or numbers of instruments, I have no idea.
61
58. See Stravinsky, Stravinsky-Nijinsky Choreography, 35.
59. Ibid., 42.
60. Ibid.
61. Craft, Commentary to the Sketches, 25.
There are examples of Stravinsky both calculating monetary sums and jotting
down train schedules in sketches for other pieces, but the fact that he seems to
have jotted down these numbers at such a critical stage of his composition of
The Rite, soon after tracking the groups of 29 on pages 9095, raises the pos-
sibility that the numbers on pages 9697 might indeed concern minutage
specically, durations measured in beats.
Table 1 shows the duration in beats of seven segments comprising the
complete Sacricial Dance, both as drafted in the sketchbook and as it ap-
pears in the printed score. Most of these segments are derived from the deni-
tive drafts of the sketchbookthose that conform most closely to the
autograph scores and four-hand reduction.
62
The only exceptions are: (1) the
62. Note that some fragmentary sketches on pp. 8485 and 87 are superseded by the
sketches referred to in Table 1, and that Stravinsky eshed out the orchestration for much of the
sketch on p. 97 on pp. 98101.
Figure 3 Left margin of the
sketchbook, page 97
Figure 4 Left margin of the sketchbook, page 96
transposition of R142R149 down a semitone at R167R174, which
Stravinsky indicated in the sketchbook but did not write out (see the refer-
ences to C
major at the bottoms of pages 87 and 95); and (2) R162R165

and R186end, which Stravinsky did not sketch.
63
Note that all seven seg-
ments correspond to logical musical sections in the printed score. In fact,
Table 1 represents the most obvious segmentation of the movement, save for
the division it shows at R165 (which is best viewed as secondary).
Before we examine these beat counts and comparing them with the num-
bers on pages 9697, some preliminary issues must be addressed. To begin, it
is not clear at what stage Stravinsky jotted down the numbers on pages 9697.
Presumably he did not write them before reaching page 96 of the sketchbook;
that is, presumably the earliest he wrote these numbers was immediately after
sketching the music on page 95. But he may also, of course, have written these
numbers while in the midst of sketching the music on pages 9697, or at
some later point. If these numbers do represent durations of the Sacricial
Dance measured in beats, they may represent Stravinskys computations of
beats in segments he had already drafted, or they may represent targets for
music Stravinsky had not yet drafted or planned to revise. And if the latter,
Stravinsky may or may not have later realized these targets. Therefore, in what
follows, I will consider the durations in beats of segments of the Sacricial
Dance not only as drafted in the sketchbook (and here there are revisions to
consider as wellerasures, overwritings, and the like), but also as they would
ultimately appear in the printed score. The numbers on pages 9697 may refer
to one or the other, or to both.
My identication of beats in the Sacricial Dance adheres to the principle
established above, which seems to have been fundamental to Stravinskys
composition of The Rite: the beat in a given segment is the largest possible
63. It appears that Stravinsky intended to sketch a draft of R162165 next to the blue symbol
occupying the upper left corner of page 96 but dispensed with the sketch for some reason.
Table 1 Total Beats of Sacrificial Dance Segments in the Sketchbook and the 1921 Edition
Rehearsal Page nos. Value of Value of beat No. of beats No. of beats
nos. (score) (sketchbook) beat (score) (sketchbook) (score) (sketchbook)
R142R149 pp. 8687 112 111
R149R162 pp. 9095 139 145
R162R165 (no sketch) 35
R165R167 p. 95 21 21 (orig. 23?)
R167R174 (no sketch) 112
R174R180 p. 97 77 72
R180R181 p. 89 23
148 22
128 (orig. 98)

R181R186 pp. 9697 48 34
R186end pp. 8789 265 132
note value that allows all durational measurements to be made in whole num-
bers. In the sketchbook, this principle designates the eighth note as the beat in
most of the segments outlined in Table 1 (see the fourth column). Stravinskys
metric notations in the sketchbook support these beat designations precisely:
that is, the lower numbers of his time signatures always correspond to the note
values shown in the fourth column of Table 1. In the autographs and subse-
quent versions of the score (up until his 1943 revision of the Sacricial
Dance), Stravinsky renotated several of the segments outlined in Table 1
such that all rhythmic values are cut in half. In these sections, a sixteenth note
is equivalent to what had been an eighth-note beat in the sketches, and thus I
treat the sixteenth note as the beat in these sections (see the third column of
Table 1).
It should be noted that this interpretation of the beat is not entirely consis-
tent with the regular pulse that underlies the movement in the printed editions
of the full orchestral score. The tempo indications of the printed score, includ-
ing metric modulations at R174, R180, R181, and R186, indicate that a
basic pulse of 126 beats per minuteassociated with different note values
during different sectionsshould remain constant throughout the entire
Sacricial Dance (fermatas notwithstanding). The beats identied above
correspond to this pulse in some sections but not in others, and thus the
beat as I have dened it is not reliable as a unit upon which to measure ab-
solute durations across sections of the Sacricial Dance in the printed score.
Yet as Robert Fink has argued, the immutable beat of the printed editions
(modernist geometry, in Finks words
64
) is an outgrowth of Stravinskys
later efforts to divorce his score for The Rite from the original ballet, not the
realization of any initial inclination toward a systematic treatment of the beat.
On the contrary, it is unlikely that Stravinsky had a system of beat relationships
or even many specic tempo markings in mind when composing the work. As
Fink explained:
It would be comforting to let the composer convince us that he had an ideal
ontological tempo in mind for every dance before the rst rehearsal of the Rite,
but it is more likely . . . that loose tempo ranges were honed collaboratively
during the dance and orchestral preparations.
65
In other words, as Stravinsky was composing and revising the Sacricial
Dance, there was likely no possibility of his using beats to measure absolute
durations or proportions on a large scale. And there is no particular reason to
think that Stravinsky wished to keep track of absolute durations in the
Sacricial Dance anyway. As I will argue below, Stravinskys beat tallies in
the Sacricial Dance seem to have related to his conception of the choreog-
raphy (in which dancers were required to count large groups of beats) and,
64. Fink, Rite of Spring, 314.
65. Ibid., 325.
in some instances, to have possessed abstract or symbolic signicance.
Further more, if the beat is construed as I have suggested, then a crucial char-
acteristic of the Sacricial Dance emerges: in the printed score, every bar of
this movement (save for the nal three) consists of 2, 3, 4, or 5 beats (all well-
represented durational units in the analyses above); the situation is virtually the
same in the sketchbook as well, where Stravinsky often keeps track of these
metrical types by writing the numbers 2, 3, 4, and 5 over the appropriate bars
(see, for instance, the top of page 88).
66
Each segment of the Sacricial
Dance outlined in Table 1 is characterized by the interaction of all four metri-
cal types. Thus, although one might be tempted, for example, to treat the beat
at R174 of the printed score as the eighth note rather than the quarter (in or-
der to preserve a consistent pulse), to construe the duration of the rst three
bars at R174 as 10+6+10 rather than 5+3+5 would seem to violate Stra -
vinskys basic conception of meter in the Sacricial Dance, and indeed in The
Rite as a whole.
We are now ready to take a closer look at Table 1. The beat counts shown
in the table reect several discrepancies between how the various segments
appear in the sketchbook and in the printed score:
1. The downbeat D of R142 is not present in Stravinskys sketch on page
86; this accounts for the one-beat difference between R142R149 of
the printed score and the equivalent passage in the sketchbook.
67
2. Stravinsky originally included an extra 6/8 bar at the end of what would
become R149R162 in the printed score; this accounts for the six-beat
difference between the two versions (139 versus 145 beats).
3. Also as discussed above, Stravinsky seems originally to have intended to
sketch some version of R162R165 of the printed score on the top of
page 96, but ultimately did not sketch this segment.
4. On the middle system of page 95 of the sketchbook, Stravinsky scrib-
bled out a 2/8 bar; thus it appears that he may have originally conceived
of the passage from R165 to R167 as spanning 23 beats rather than 21,
as indicated in the table.
5. Following the sketchbook, Table 1 subdivides R174R186 into three
segments that correspond to the initial ostinato passage, the interpola-
tion of music from the opening of the movement, and the return of the
66. Taruskin referred to Stravinskys play with the various permutations of these metrical
types in the Sacricial Dance as mosaic-like; Russian Traditions 1:96263. One might char-
acterize in the same way Stravinskys play with permutations of 3, 4, and 5 in intervallic space. For
instance, the three variants of the Augurs chord at R14 are distinguished by the intervallic parti-
tioning of the lower E octave in the bassoons and cellos: 5+3+4 (the primary E-major chord),
4+5+3 (the C-major variant), and 5+4+3 (an E-minor variant).
67. This omission is curious, given the presence of a downbeat D in an earlier sketch on p. 84.
It would seem that the sketch on p. 86 was meant to proceed from the descending chromatic sep-
tuplet on the second system of p. 83, which ends with a low D (compare with the clarinet line that
initiates the Sacricial Dance in the printed score).
ostinato gure; these segments are delineated by metric modulations in
the printed score. In the sketchbook, the rst ostinato segment begins
on page 97 and ends with the penultimate bar in green near the end of
the penultimate system (the equivalent of R180 in the printed score).
68
The interpolation begins with the following bar in green and continues
with the rst four bars on page 89. (Note that this interpolation differs
signicantly from the published version, although it is nearly identical in
duration.) Finally, Stravinskys sketch of the second ostinato segment
begins with the nal system on page 97 (including the initial bar in
green), continues at the bottom of page 96 (as indicated by a circled red
X), and ends with the penultimate bar on that page (that is, just be-
fore the incomplete 5/8 bar, which he sketched in full to the immediate
right of the blue X on page 88, the beginning of a new segment). The
seven 2/4 bars that follow the interpolation in the printed score (R181
R182+2) are absent from Stravinskys sketch; this omission accounts for
the fourteen-beat discrepancy between the two versions of the second
ostinato segment (48 versus 34 beats).
6. Stravinsky seems to have originally sketched the ostinato section on
pages 9697 without an interpolation. The sketch in green at the end of
the penultimate system on page 97 overwrites several bars sketched in
black, which seem to proceed directly to the nal system. It appears that
these original bars were essentially the same as the ve bars that immedi-
ately precede the sketches in green, which Stravinsky enclosed in brack-
ets, indicating a repetition of these bars. I assume that Stravinsky
originally wrote out the repetition at the end of the system (remnants of
the nal bar are still clearly visible, which he would resketch in green
as the rst bar of the nal system), but later wrote over the repetition
with the new bars in green, and was thus forced to indicate the repeti-
tion with brackets around the relevant ve bars. The original version of
the ostinato section would total 98 beats, as indicated in the table.
69
7. The printed score reects substantial revisions and expansions of the
concluding section of The Rite that Stravinsky drafted on pages 8789.
The meter of the second bar on page 89, which features the familiar
68. Note that the second bar on p. 97 is marked bis. In a revision on the following page,
Stravinsky substituted 5/4 and 3/4 bars for the bis bar, a revision he maintained in the printed
score. My beat calculations for the sketches for this passage do not incorporate this revision, as it
more than likely was made after Stravinsky jotted down the calculations on pp. 9697 (although
the exact chronology is not clear, as discussed above).
69. The sketch spans 56 beats from the rst bar of p. 97 up to the sketch in green ink on the
penultimate system of the page; under the sketch in green, Stravinsky presumably wrote out the
ve-bar repetition (10 beats long) that he later indicated with brackets. The original sketch in
black from the bottom system on p. 97 through the bottom of p. 96 (up to the incomplete 5/8
bar) spans 32 beats. Thus, the total duration of the original sketch on pp. 9697 is 98 beats
(56+10+32).
woodwind tremolo and ascending glissando gure from the conclusion
of The Rite, is ambiguous. Two strong clues, however, suggest that the
intended meter here is 3/8. First, 3/8 is the meter of the previous three
bars (see the second system on page 88, the last two bars of which
are resketched with full orchestration on page 89). Second, in the four-
hand piano score (where the rhythmic values are halved), the music in
question spans three sixteenth-note beats, here notated as the last three
beats of a 5/16 bar (see the third-to-last bar of the four-hand score).
70
As shown in Table 2, a simple proportional pattern can be derived from the
beat totals shown in Table 1. In two instances, contiguous segments combine
to form a larger group of 56 beats: R162R167 of the printed score and the
draft of R180R186 in the sketchbook. The number 56 is exactly half of 112,
the duration of R142R149 and R167R174 in the printed score. The draft
of R174R180 in the sketchbook spans 72 beats, almost exactly half the beat
total of the draft of R149R162 (145 beats). Although Stravinsky did not
sketch R162R165 or R167R174, if we assume that he planned these seg-
ments in their published forms (35 and 112 beats, respectively; these numbers
are enclosed in parentheses in Table 2), and if we redistribute a single beat
from the second sketchbook segment (the draft of R149R162) to the rst
(the draft of R142R149), then the proportional pattern outlined in Table 2
can be discerned, a pattern that accounts for the complete original sketch of
the Sacricial Dance save for the nal segment (what would become R186
end). The presence of these proportional relationships in Stravinskys sketches
supports two of my larger claims: (1) that the segmentation of the Sacricial
Dance in the sketchbook (as represented in Table 1) is meaningful; and
(2) that the beat totals outlined in Table 1 are meaningful as well.
71
These two claims underlie Table 3, which suggests numerous connections
between the durations charted in Table 1 and Stravinskys calculations on
pages 9697 of the sketchbook:
1. Stravinskys original sketch of R149R162 (145 beats, partitioned
295 as discussed above) and the 35-beat segment from R162 to
70. Some other aspects of this sketch may require clarication. The nal two bars of the
piece, as Stravinsky indicated in blue on p. 89, are sketched on p. 87, after which he wrote End
of the Sacre; each of these bars is in 3/4 (the printed score similarly ends with two 3/4 bars, al-
though the music of these bars is much different). My calculation of 132 beats assumes that the
bars labeled by letters in the bottom right corner of p. 88 correspond with those sketched to the
right of the blue X on the same page. Note also that the arrow leading from the bottom right
corner of the page to the upper left points toward the second bar of the rst system; the rst bar is
redundant with the bar labeled E in the lower right corner.
71. Code has uncovered numerous simple proportional relationships on many levels in his
exhaustive study of the Augurs of Spring movement; see Synthesis of Rhythms. Jonathan
Kramer has asserted the importance of proportional relationships in Stravinskys music generally;
see in particular Discontinuity and Proportion in the Music of Stravinsky.
R165 (which Stravinsky did not sketch but may have planned) together
span 180 beats; 180 appears as the product of 1215 in the cluster of
calculations on page 97.
2. The printed version of R149R162 spans 139 beats; this segment and
the following two (R162R167) span 195 beats in the printed score, a
multiple of 15 (1315 = 195).
3. In the printed score, R165R174 spans 133 beats. Stravinskys original
sketch of R165167 was two beats longer than in the published version,
and thus R165R174 may have spanned 135 beats (a multiple of 15) in
his original conception (recall that R167R174 is indicated in the
sketchbook but not sketched). The duration of this section, then, may
account for the 135 that seems to have been overwritten by 133
on page 96 of the sketchbook; furthermore, this revision may corre-
spond to Stravinskys deletion of the 2/8 bar on the bottom of page 95.
4. Although in the printed score, the duration of R165R174 is not a
multiple of 15, R165R180 spans 210 beats; 210 appears as the prod-
uct of 1415 in the cluster of calculations on page 97.
5. Assuming that Stravinsky planned R167R174 to span 112 beats (as
suggested above), the passage from R167 to R186 would also have
spanned 210 beats in Stravinskys original sketch in black on pages 96
97.
6. Stravinskys revised sketch of R167R186, incorporating the sketches in
green ink and the fragment at the top of page 89, spans 240 beats
(again, assuming that R167R174 spanned 112 beats in his original
conception); 240 is the product of 1615, and 16 appears as a free-
oating number (perhaps awaiting multiplication by 15) near the bot-
tom of the cluster of calculations on page 97.
7. In the printed score, R167end spans 525 beats; 525 is the product of
3515, and 35 appears underneath 16 on page 97 (also possibly await-
ing multiplication by 15).
A few aspects of the beat totals charted in Table 3 merit special attention.
These totals commence from three different starting points: R149, R165, and
Table 2 Proportional Pattern Derived from Sketchbook Segments
Rehearsal nos. Total beats
R142R149 111 (+ 1) = 56 2
R149R162 145 ( 1) = 72 2
R162R167 (35) + 21 = 56
R167R174 (112) = 56 2
R174R180 72 = 72
R180R186 22 + 34 = 56
Note: Rehearsal numbers are derived from the corresponding passages in the printed score.
R167. Note that the rst of these (R149) marks the beginning of the only
segment in the sketchbook that contains concrete evidence of Stravinsky
counting large groups of beats (the segment partitioned into groups of
29 beats on pages 9095).
72
As mentioned above, in Stravinskys conception
of the ballets choreography, the Chosen One begins to move laterally only at
R149, which perhaps provides a clue as to why Stravinskys beat measure-
ments appear to begin at this point. Also note that all but the rst two beat
totals in Table 3 include the 112-beat segment from R167 to R174, suggest-
ing that this segment, although only implied in the sketchbook, was especially
crucial to Stravinskys beat calculations. Stravinsky associated this segment
with the I. S. impresaat the bottom of page 87, which I discuss further below.
Table 3 provides a potential explanation for every number and calculation
on pages 9697, except for the product 225 on page 97, the three prominent
150s on page 96, and the calculation 40+13 = 53+1 = 54 on the same
page. As for the latter calculations, in the annotated four-hand score,
Stravinsky delineated a 54-beat segment with a slash one beat after the equiva-
lent of R162 and another slash labeled 54 one beat before the equivalent of
R167. As Stravinsky elaborated in his 1967 commentary on the four-hand
score, the true rhythmic phrase (at odds with the notated meter) consists of
two measures of 7/8 . . . followed by one of 6/8.
73
This phrasing suggests
a 20+20+14 subdivision of the 54-beat segment (two 7+7+6 units followed
by an incomplete 7+7 unit), which may help to explain Stravinskys calculation
on page 96; Stravinskys addition of rst 13, then 1, to 40 might suggest addi-
tionally his equivocation between ending with a 7+6 or 7+7 unit.
If the 133 on page 96 of the sketchbook is indeed related to the dura -
tion of R165R174 (as suggested in Table 3), we might assume that the cal-
culation 133+150 = 283 on the same page refers to durations as well. As
72. Although R142R149 does not factor into any of the correspondences outlined in
Table 3, it may be worth noting that in the printed score, R142R143 and R143R144 both
span precisely fteen beats.
73. Stravinsky, Stravinsky-Nijinsky Choreography, 43.
Table 3 Correspondences among Durations Charted in Table 1 and Marginal Calculations
from Stravinsky Sketchbook, pp. 9697
Rehearsal nos. Source Total beats
R149R165 sketchbook + score 145+35 = 180 (12 15)
R149R167 score 139+35+21 = 195 (13 15)
R165R174 sketchbook + score 23+112 = 135 ( 9 15)
R165R174 score 21+112 = 133
R165R180 score 21+112+77 = 210 (14 15)
R167R186 score + sketchbook 112+98 = 210 (14 15)
R167R186 score + sketchbook 112+128 = 240 (16 15)
R167end score 112+148+265 = 525 (35 15)
reckoned in Table 1, the duration of the ostinato section in the printed score
(R174R186) is 148 beats; thus the duration of R165186 would be
133+148 = 281tantalizingly close to Stravinskys calculation. Looking again
at page 96 of the sketchbook, we might consider whether the last bar of
Stravinskys sketch, the incomplete 5/8 bar (equivalent to the rst two beats
at R186 in the printed score), should be included in the total duration of the
ostinato segment rather than the following segment as sketched on page 88
(recall that the incomplete 5/8 bar is sketched in full on page 88, where it be-
gins a new segment). That is to say, the precise ending of the ostinato segment
might best be designated by the arrival of G (completing the upper melody)
on the downbeat of what would become R186. Following this logic in the
printed score would add one eighth-note beat to the duration of the segment
from R174 to R186, bringing the total to 149or perhaps two sixteenth-
note beats (given that the beat shifts to the sixteenth note at R186), bringing
the total to 150.
74
The addition of two sixteenth-note beats to the ostinato
segment would necessitate an accompanying subtraction of two beats from
the following segment; in the sketchbook, this would bring the total duration
of the nal segment of the Sacricial Dance to 130 beats (as opposed to
132, as indicated in Table 1), providing a potential explanation for the appar-
ently aborted calculation 150+130 at the bottom of the cluster of numbers
on page 96.
75
Each of the correspondences between beat counts and Stravinskys numerical
jottings that I have shown is inherently speculative, and none of them makes
a convincing argument about Stravinskys compositional practice on its own.
As with the musical analyses above, it is the totality of these correspondences
that is most compelling. And what, exactly, do these correspondences tell us?
Clearly, Stravinsky was counting and keeping track of large groups of beats:
Stravinskys annotations to the four-hand score established this fact long ago,
and my ndings add an additional layer of evidence. But what is even more
signicant in the context of the compositional strategies outlined earlier in this
essay is that Stravinsky seems to have shaped the durations of large sections to
meet abstract, numerical specications. He seems to have targeted, for in-
stance, multiples of fteen and perhaps made musical adjustments in order to
74. Stravinsky used quarter notes in most voices in his sketch of the incomplete 5/8 bar; the
eighth-note G in the upper melody follows Stravinskys erroneous use of eighth notes two and
four bars earlier. Thus Stravinsky seemed to have planned for the duration of the nal G to span a
quarter note, the equivalent of an eighth note in the printed score, although in the printed score
he adjusted the rhythm to a sixteenth note followed by a sixteenth-note rest. Nonetheless,
R181R186 conditions one to hear the duration of the concluding G at R186 as a full eighth
note: this G is always a quarter note it its previous incarnations (see, for example, R185 and
R185+2).
75. This interpretation would assume that Stravinsky had conceived of the ultimate duration
of R174R186 upon jotting down these numbers.
meet these targets; and these targets seem to have been important both when
Stravinsky was drafting these segments in the sketchbook and later when he
was working on the complete version of the score. Some of these numerical
specications seem to have been tied to Stravinskys choreographic ideas: the
sum of 54 scribbled on page 96; the groups of 29 beats sketched on pages
9095; and, by analogy, perhaps the multiples of 15 targeted on page 97 as
well. If Stravinsky was in fact composing large sections of music with specic
predetermined durations in mind, then it is a small step to imagine him doing
the same thing on a smaller scalethat is, creating rhythmic or metrical pat-
terns based on durations derived from intervallic structures. Indeed, Stravin -
sky seems to have been engaged with counting beats and creating durational
patterns on various musical levels, from surface rhythms to large-scale formal
segments.
This preoccupation with durations and counting seems to have intensied
as Stravinsky approached the nish line, just as his compositional efforts were
growing more intense as well. The spectacular tableau of pages 9697the
vast musical sketch crammed into page 97, the triumphant declaration on
page 96, the proliferation of idiosyncratic symbols, and the calculations, all of
these in black, blue, red, and (for the rst time in these pages) greenpoints
to a composer brimming over with enthusiasm and creative energy, the accu-
mulation of which can be witnessed on the previous pages as well. Amongst
all of this graphic activity, particularly intriguing is the blue monogram I. S.
positioned as a continuity indicator at the top of the rst bar on page 97 (see
Fig. 5). The inspiration for the monogram may have come from Stra vin skys
association with the art scene in Paris: numerous Parisian artists, fascinated by
Japanese art and design, signed their works in this manner (recall
the discussion above of Stravinskys seal on page 90). The sign appears once
earlier on page 87, where Stravinsky reminded himself to proceed from the
section sketched on pages 8687 (what would become R167R174) to
the ostinato section sketched on pages 9697. In his reminder, Stravinsky des-
ignated the ostinato section by sketching the six-note motive upon which the
ostinato is based.
Example 13 reproduces this motive as Stravinsky sketched it on page 87,
next to the blue monogram. The rst three notes (E
, E
, B
) form the famil-

iar 5+6 trichord, the very same pitch classes, in fact, that constitute the shared
skeleton of the Augurs chord and its C-major variant. As an encapsulation
of his rst and most crucial harmonic idea for The Rite, Stravinsky may have
regarded this motive as a musical signature, or as a monogram referring to a
larger set of compositional materials and strategies. And thus the prominence
of the blue I. S. monogram on page 97, perched at the top of the page, may
indicate that Stravinsky, as he committed to paper what he believed to be his
nal sketches for The Rite, regarded the six-note motive that saturates this
page as a personal stamp. The presence of Stravinskys monogram in close
proximity to the various multiplications by 15 in the left margin, at the end of
a movement permeated by various segments spanning multiples of 15 beats,
might even make us wonder whether Stravinsky imagined a symbolic connec-
tion between the letters I S and the numerals 1 5, and whether the com-
posers preoccupation with the number 15 as he was completing The Rite may
have been a way of inscribing himself symbolically into the music at this critical
compositional stage.
76
Should this connection seem far-fetched, consider that
while Stravinsky was composing The Rite, fellow Parisian Lili Boulanger is
known to have xated upon what she conceived as a symbolic connection be-
tween her initials L. B. and the number thirteen, frequently rendering her
76. The signicance of the number fteen may extend to the realm of intervals as well: the C-
major variant of the Augurs chord can be understood in terms of overlapping spans of fteen
semitones, anchored by the critical E
trichord:
Figure 5 Stravinskys monogram from the top of page 97 of the sketchbook

15
15
15

3
Example 13 Ostinato figure from the Sacrificial Dance (as represented in the sketchbook,
p. 87)
monogram in a manner resembling Stravinskys impresa (see Fig. 6), and in
some cases encoding the number thirteen within virtually every quantiable
parameter of her compositions, particularly in Clairires dans le ciel, a cycle of
thirteen songs that she began composing in 1913.
77
Conclusions
My ideas about Stravinskys composition of The Rite rely on the accumulation
of evidence from the score and sketches. But however compelling the weight
of this evidence may be, to my knowledge there is no smoking gun that
provides an explicit, unequivocal indication that Stravinsky was using interval-
lic series to generate rhythms. This absence is hardly surprising. Stravinsky is
notorious for obscuring aspects of his personal history and compositional
method, and this tendency is pronounced in the case of The Rite, whose 1913
premiere Stravinsky followed with various denials. These included his dis-
avowal of the Montjoie! program, and, later, his downplaying of the use of folk
material and dismissal of the choreography and program as impertinent to the
meaning of the work; each of these refutations was extreme and has been
exposed as deceptive.
78
Whence this rage to cover tracks? Taruskin has won-
dered.
79
In the present case, the most obvious answer would be that Stra vin -
sky preferred no one suspect that the novel musical landscape of The Rite
owed anything to mechanical compositional procedures that could be seen to
bypass the composers own musical imagination.
77. See Dopp, Numerology and Cryptography in the Music of Lili Boulanger, an essay de-
voted to the ways in which the number thirteen informed this and other works of Boulanger. I am
grateful to Carlo Caballero for bringing this source to my attention.
78. Of the folk and octatonic elements in The Rite, Taruskin wrote: The deeper they went
the more they thus, as it were, receded from viewthe more pervasive and determinant their in-
uence became; Russian Traditions 1:949.
79. Ibid. 1:948.
Figure 6 Lili Boulangers monogram from the title page of Clairires dans le ciel
Whatever his motivations, Stravinsky seems to have taken pains to lay the
groundwork for the myth of The Rites virgin birth (as Taruskin has dubbed
it
80
) while he was composing the score. As Stephen Walsh has noted in refer-
ence to the sketches for the Sacricial Dance:
As usual with Stravinsky, the music appears on the pagealbeit in draft form
like an object plucked out of the air, exactly as the composer seems to have
wanted to suggest when he described himself sententiously as the vessel
through which Le Sacre passed. But these notations were actually the end
product of a laborious process of sonic experimentation, carried out always
at the keyboard, and involving much trial and error, much sounding and
resounding. . . .
81
Stravinskys habit of composing and experimenting at the piano may in fact
provide an important clue about how he arrived at the idea to relate intervals
and durations in the manner described above. Stravinsky, as is well known,
composed The Rite at a small piano in Clarens, and he may well have hap-
pened upon the specic idea to measure intervals in semitones at the key-
board, where the association of eighty-eight keys with eighty-eight pitches
promotes and facilitates intervallic measurement and numerical conceptions of
musical space. This way of measuring intervals was by no means new in the
early twentieth century: European music theorists such as Heinrich Vincent
and Anatole Loquin had begun to conceive of intervals in terms of their semi-
tonal spans as many as forty to fty years before Stravinsky composed The
Rite.
82
Much later in life, Stravinsky articulated the importance of the piano in his
approach to composition, describing it as particularly conducive to the mi-
crolevel analysis of musical materials: The instrument itself is the centre of my
life and the fulcrum of all my musical discoveries. Each note that I write is
tried on it, and every relationship of notes is taken apart and heard on it again
and again.
83
Here, the relationship of notes might refer specically to in-
tervallic relationships. Indeed, Stravinskys comments about intervals at vari-
ous stages in his life point toward the conclusion that he conceived of the
interval, not the individual pitch, as the most basic unit of musical material.
He described his compositional process, for instance, as composing with in-
tervals
84
and relating intervals rhythmically,
85
and he spoke of remember-
ing compositional ideas by repeating to myself their intervals and rhythm.
86
And consider the following anecdote that Stravinsky related to Craft, certainly
81. Walsh, Stravinsky: A Creative Spring, 187.
82. See Nolan, Music Theory and Mathematics, 28687.
83. I. Stravinsky and Craft, Expositions and Developments, 5152.
84. See Babbitt, Remarks on the Recent Stravinsky,167; and idem, Words About Music, 20.
85. I. Stravinsky and Craft, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky, 11.
86. Ibid., 13.
one of the more bizarre quotations ever attributed to Stravinsky or any other
major composer:
After working late one night I retired to bed still troubled by an interval. I
dreamed about this interval. It had become an elastic substance stretching ex-
actly between the two notes I had composed, but underneath these notes at ei-
ther end was an egg, a large testicular egg. The eggs were gelatinous to the
touch (I touched them) and warm, and they were protected by nests. I woke
up knowing that my interval was right. (For those who want more of the
dream, it was pinkI often dream in color. . . .)
87
I hesitate to comment on this story at all, let alone attach any signicance to it.
Yet, an egg serves as an apt metaphor for the interval and its generative role in
Stravinskys conception of his music.
88
If, as Stravinskys dream suggests, the
interval was signicant to him not only as a basic unit of music but as a sym-
bolic object as well, then perhaps Stravinskys treatment of intervals in The
Rite might also serve a symbolic function. That is to say, Stravinskys numeri-
cal procedures may have been not merely a means of generating musical mate-
rial but an expressive device as well.
Regardless of Stravinskys revisionist commentary on the matter, the ex-
pressive underpinnings of his score for The Rite are inseparable from the
shared artistic vision of Stravinsky and his principal collaborators, Nicholas
Roerich and Vaslav Nijinsky.
89
As Jann Pasler has documented, this vision was
founded in part on the desire for correspondences among the music, set de-
sign, costumes, and choreography. Of particular interest here is what might be
described (echoing Viktor Shklovsky
90
) as the stoniness of these elements as
conceived by the principal artists, a feature of the ballet that emerges forcefully
in Paslers essay: Roerichs set design featured large boulders; Nijinksy
87. Ibid., 14. Here, it is worth remembering Taruskins warning that Stravinskys comments
in the series of conversation books he coauthored with Craft often tell us more about Stravinsky
at the time the conversations were held than about Stravinsky at the times he was reminiscing
about. See Taruskin, Russian Traditions 1:1112. Taruskin concluded, however, that at least the
rst four books . . . quite faithfully reect the composers thinking (1:12n42).
88. The biological metaphor for Stravinskys composition of The Rite seems particularly apt
when considered in tandem with contemporaneous developments in genetic research. In 1913,
Alfred Sturtevant, a student of Thomas Hunt Morgan, revealed for the rst time a genetic map:
the linear arrangement of genes on a chromosome, with xed distances between contiguous
genes. The intervallic structure of Stravinskys chords, whose precise arrangement of pitches pre-
gure durational patternsthe rhythmic life of The Riteoffer a striking analogue to these ge-
netic maps. See Sturtevant, The Linear Arrangement of Six Sex-Linked Factors in Drosophila.
89. Taruskin has written extensively on the contributions of Stravinsky, Roerich, and others
to the ideas behind the ballet; see Russian Traditions 1:84991. For an account that focuses on
Nijinskys role, see Garafola, Diaghilevs Ballets Russes, 6373.
90. Shklovskys notion of defamiliarization in fact provides a useful means of conceptualiz-
ing various aspects of The Rite, particularly the ways in which Stravinsky used traditional tonal ele-
ments (triads and seventh chords, diatonic melodies) to create his novel musical sounds. See
Shklovsky, Art as Technique.
described The Rite as the life of the stones and the trees and a thing of con-
crete masses, and cited the dead weight of the body as a crucial feature of
his choreography; and Stravinsky characterized his rhythms as lapidary and
described The Rite as a stone sculpture.
91
Pasler drew many specic associa-
tions among these various elements of the ballet production. For example, in a
comparison of the set design and the musical score, she wrote:
In order that his art form corroborate the visual effect of the ballet, Stravinsky
attempted to create musical equivalents for the instantaneity and simultaneity
projected by the set design. For example, thirty-two percussive repetitions of
one chord (a combination of the dominant seventh on E
major over an F
major chord in the bass) accompany the rst visual moment, the rising of the
curtain in part 1. This passage affects the public with the same immediacy and
stasis as the backdrop being revealed for the rst time. The sound forms a block
with the massive power of the boulders in the set design.
Taking this idea further, correspondences within the musical realm (that is, be-
tween intervals and durations) can be understood to operate toward the same
aesthetic endstoninessas correspondences among the different artistic
mediums that constituted the original ballet. Stravinskys derivation of the
opening rhythm of the Augurs, for instance, may be viewed as an attempt to
create rhythmic life out of a static objectnamely, the C-major variant of the
Augurs chord from which the opening accent pattern seems to have been
derived, a harmonic fossil whose intervallic imprint is linearized in the rst
eight bars of the movement. Indeed, the derivation of durational patterns
from intervallic ones was a viable compositional strategy in large part because
Stravinskys intervallic structures were xed, lacking the exible voicings of
tonal harmonies. As Taruskin has observed, To an extent previously unthink-
able in cultured music, chord and motif [in The Rite] were hypostatized,
turned into stone, timbrally and registrally so xed that even transposition
let alone transformation or transitionwere inconceivable.
92
The notion of The Rites rhythms emerging from sources in Nature is a re-
curring feature of the Montjoie! program, the most detailed account of the
ballets scenario. Rhythm is a primary element of ritual in the ballet, and at
several points in the program, this element is characterized as a direct expres-
sion of Nature. Early in the ballet, an old woman . . . who knows the secrets
of nature . . . teaches her sons Prediction, and they go on to mark in their
steps the rhythm of Spring; later in Part I, a Sage gives a benediction to the
Earth, . . . becoming one with the soil, and this benediction is as a signal for
an eruption of rhythm, leading the surrounding adolescents to [pour] forth
in numbers, like the new energies of nature.
93
In each case, a wise elder
91. Pasler, Music and Spectacle, 6970, 71, 74.
92. Taruskin, Russian Traditions 1:957.
serves as a medium through which the secrets of Nature can be passed on to
others, and these secrets take on the form of rhythm and dance. These two
scenes refer specically to the Augurs of Spring and the Dance of the
Earth, both of which begin with a repeated chord whose intervallic structure
seems to generate the opening rhythm of the passage. In Stravinskys imagina-
tion, then, these intervallic series may have represented secrets of Nature
that engendered the rhythm of each dance. Or, to borrow Stravinskys
metaphor, the intervallic eggs of each chord give birth to the rhythms. Or,
to suggest another metaphor, the dissonant chord that begins each section
primitive and elementalis the augur of the rhythm expressed via repeti-
tions of that chord. We could interpret the openings of several of the
movements in much the same way, with the 5+6 intervallic construction link-
ing most of these together as variations on a single secret of Nature. In
many of the movements, the disclosure of the secret is preceded by a pause or
moment of hesitancy, as though the force of Nature is being gathered, before
erupting into rhythm or pouring forth in numbers, to cite the program
(see R12, R71, R102, and R139, which precede the Augurs, Dance of
the Earth, Glorication, and Sacricial Dance, respectively).
Thus, in The Rite, numbers would seem to be a crucial feature underlying
Stravinskys conceptions of nature, ritual, and musical relationships, as well as
a means of signifying primitive knowledge: the numerical codes of Nature
pass through human conduits and emerge as pure rhythm.
94
For ancient
Greek philosophers and many others since, asserting a numerical basis for
Nature has been a means of establishing a masculine order behind the inher-
ently feminine, thereby reducing Nature to the knowable and transcending
her.
95
We might detect a related impulse behind Stravinskys numerical proce-
dures. They are not entirely formed beings; their sex is single and double like
that of the tree, Stravinsky said of the Adolescents in the Augurs of Spring,
but it would be a mistake to assign any gender-neutrality to The Rite. The hi-
erarchy of the ballets scenario is obvious, most evident in the treatment of the
Chosen One, sacriced at the hands of the Ancestors (rapacious monsters,
as they are described in the Montjoie! program
96
) and driven to death by the
94. In this way, the basic compositional procedure under consideration here is a prime exam-
ple of what Robert Morgan has termed the secret languages of modernism, alternatives to the
shared language of tonality developed by n-de-sicle composers; see Morgan, Secret Languages:
The Roots of Musical Modernism. Morgans comments about Schoenbergs music are surpris-
ingly relevant here: [Schoenberg] attempted to transform musical language from an essentially
public vehicle, susceptible to comprehension by ordinary people (but thereby also limited to
more or less ordinary statement), to an essentially private one capable of speaking the unspeak-
able. Music became an incantation, a language of ritual that, just because of its inscrutability,
revealed secrets hidden from normal understanding (458).
95. See Wertheim, Pythagoras Trousers: God, Physics, and the Gender Wars (esp. 2730), an
acclaimed study of the historical roots of gender bias in the eld of physics.
rhythms of the Sacricial Dance. This subject matter may threaten to impli-
cate The Rites creators as complicit in a misogynist program,
97
but such
an analysis would be much too simplistic: surely one can depict misogyny
without participating in it. Extended to a metaphorical level, however, the
containing and controlling of the feminine depicted in The Rite is less easily
separated from the views and objectives of the artists who portrayed it. The
male-female opposition was fundamental to modernist conceptions of primi-
tive cultures in relation to modern ones,
98
just as Romanticism was often
viewed as a feminine counterpart to Modernism itself; thus, the treatment of
the Chosen One can be read as a symptom of larger desires to harness the
primitive (an impulse hardly unique to The Rite) and to stamp out Roman -
ticism as well.
99
Stravinskys numerical procedures are tied up with all of these
ideas: they lie behind the rhythms of the Sacricial Dance to which the
young virgin falls victim, the representation of Nature and her secrets, the
conception of primitive ritual, and the triumph of Modernist objectivity over
Romantic subjectivity.
For some critics, the putative objective detachment that pervades The Rite
has implicated Stravinsky and his collaborators precisely because this detach-
ment can be seen to distance the creators from these themes of control, con-
cealing the will to dominate by suppressing any suggestion of human agency.
Lynn Garafola, for instance, focusing on Nijinskys choreography, has written
of how fatepowerful, atavistic, aleatory[is] the ruler of a godless uni-
verse in The Rite: implacable and omnipresent, [fate] has been wrested from
an absent god . . . above all, it holds power over the individual.
100
Garafolas
critique assimilates the basic position of Adorno as outlined in Philosophy of
New Music, a work whose inuence is strongly felt in Taruskins writing as
well. Adornos arguments are familiar enough to require only a brief summary
here. Recall that for Adorno, Stravinskys score, particularly its rhythms, was
fundamentally arbitrary in nature, a quality he attributed to a pernicious
agenda: the simulation of objectivity, a manufactured illusion that ultimately
implied the lack of an organizing psychology behind the music. He drove
home this idea with a litany of negative assessments of Stravinskys composi-
tional method and of musical effects in The Rite. For example, with regard to
97. Garafola, in her polemical commentary on The Rite from a choreographic perspective, in-
terpreted the Chosen One as a symptom of twentieth-century male sexual anxiety, the
Symbolist femme fatale submitted to male domination. See Diaghilevs Ballets Russes, 72.
98. As Marianna Torgovnick has written, Sooner or later those familiar tropes for primitives
become the tropes conventionally used for women. See Gone Primitive, 17.
99. On modernist notions of the feminine, see Nicholls, Modernisms, particularly the intro-
duction and chaps. 12, which provide a useful framework for conceiving of The Rite within the
larger context of European modernism. As Nicholls wrote, the elimination of the feminine
emblematic of much modernist literature was the very mark of that triumph of form over
bodily content on which one major strand of modernism . . . depend[ed]; Modernisms, 4.
100. Garafola, Diaghilevs Ballets Russes, 68, 71.
Stravinskys practice of repeating a melodic idea numerous times in close suc-
cession with a variable pattern of accents, Adorno wrote that such passages
give the effect of resulting from a throw of the dice and that the melodic
cells stand under a spell.
101
In this way, Adorno characterized rhythm in The
Rite as dehumanized and dehumanizing, and this formed the basis of a highly
charged ideological critique of Stravinskys musica critique that, in its
gravest moments, linked the music to fascism.
Pieter van den Toorn, in his 1987 monograph on The Rite and especially in
a more recent essay, has objected strenuously to Adornos claims and sought
to discount them based on their lack of grounding in detailed musical analy-
sis.
102
In several analyses, van den Toorn has attempted to show how shifting
melodic accents and groupings in The Rite should be heard in relation to an
underlying expectation of regularity. As he put it, disruptions in rhythmic and
metric regularity are dependent on preestablished or readily inferrable impli-
cations of pulse, periodicity, and xed metric identity.
103
That is to say, the
rhythm plays with our expectations, engaging us on a psychological level.
What Adorno heard as arbitrary, van den Toorn heard as purposeful.
A decision about who is correct here is neither desirable nor possible. But if
we accept the notion that Stravinsky generated rhythmic and metric patterns
through a mechanical process that severely limited the composers ability to
shape the psychological experience of listeners in specic ways, then Adornos
argument has the advantage of bringing to the fore an important element of
Stravinskys compositional process. Indeed, an understanding of rhythm in
The Rite informed by the mechanical procedure I have described coexists un-
easily with van den Toorns conception. Yet it is strikingly compatible with
Adornos, and even suggests a concrete explanation for the musical qualities
(primarily rhythmic) that he identied. Adorno cited, for instance, a ruling
contradiction between the moderation of the horizontal dimension and the
audacity of the vertical dimensions, and he argued that Stravinsky employed
a trick in which complexes of time are presented as if they were
spatial
104
strangely appropriate phrases in the context of the present analy-
ses. Or we might say, borrowing Adornos words, that Stravinskys rhythms
are under the spell of intervallic structures, derived from a game of
chance in which pitch measurements dictate rhythmic patterns.
And yes, following Adorno, this manner of composing might accurately be
described as dehumanized. But this assessment need not be pejorative.
When it came to generating rhythmic ideas for The Rite, to dehumanize the
compositional process seems to have been precisely Stravinskys point. To at-
tempt to convey specic musical ideas in such a way that they can be grasped
101. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 114.
102. Van den Toorn, Stravinsky, Adorno, and the Art of Displacement.
103. Van den Toorn, Stravinsky and the Rite of Spring, 113.
104. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 114, 143.
by listeners is necessarily to interact with culturally determined musical codes;
but in Stravinskys idealized vision of The Rite, he would bypass these codes in
an effort to engage listeners on a more fundamental, primitive level. Indeed,
the primitivist ideal provides one of the strongest explanations for Stravinskys
number games in The Rite. Garafola, Joan Acocella, and Jonnie Greene pro-
vided a succinct denition of this ideal:
Of these ideas [contained in The Rite], the most important is primitivism, the
belief that society does not elevate or improve the human soul but, on the
contrary, corrupts it and that it is those things that are least socialized, least
civilizedchildren, peasants, savages, raw emotion, plain speechthat are
closest to the truth.
105
And how does a composer as cultured as Stravinsky bypass culture? By at-
tempting to exclude his own musical imagination, steeped as it was in the clas-
sical tradition, from the compositional process at certain critical stages.
Stravinskys generation of rhythmic ideas might therefore be understood as a
sort of automatic writing (a practice obliquely referenced in the title of this
essay) designed to transfer control from the composer to his elemental har-
monies, those mysterious objects found by Stravinskys own hands in his
archeological expeditions at the keyboard in Clarens. When composing his
rhythms, Stravinsky may have imagined his role as that of a transcriber rather
than a composer, a recorder of patterns dictated by some entity outside of
himself. Or, as the composer himself would famously declare: I heard and I
wrote what I heard. I am the vessel through which Le Sacre passed.
106
Works Cited
The Rite of Spring: Primary Sources
Annotated four-hand piano score, 1913. Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel.
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The Rite of Spring: Sketches 19111913; Facsimile Reproductions from the Autographs.
London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1969.
Le sacre du printemps: Tableaux de la Russie painne en deux parties dI. Stra -
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Le sacre du printemps: Tableaux de la Russie paenne en deux parties dIgor Strawinsky et
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Abstract
The novel rhythms of The Rite of Spring, according to Theodor Adorno, seem
to have arisen from the throw of the dice. Many scholars have argued other-
wise, characterizing Stravinskys rhythms as logically patterned and deliber-
ately crafted. This essay, however, suggests that Stravinsky did in fact employ a
fundamentally mechanical, automated procedure for generating his irregu-
lar rhythms and metrical schemes. Specically, Stravinsky seems to have con-
verted intervallic series, derived from prominent chords or melodies, into
durational ones, equating intervals measured in semitones with durations
measured in beatsa relationship that is best perceived intellectually, not
aurally.
This claim is supported by a wealth of evidence drawn from the sketches,
autographs, and earliest printed editions of the score, and it applies to the
opening of virtually every titled section of The Rite, where much of its best-
known music resides. Close analysis of these sources, considered in conjunc-
tion with the copious symbolic and numerical notations in the margins of
Stravinskys sketchbook, Stravinskys programmatic commentary on The Rite
and his idiosyncratic ideas about intervals, and the critical commentary of
Adorno and others, sheds new light on Stravinskys conception of The Rite
and its symbolic meanings.
Keywords: Igor Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring, rhythm, sketch study,
modernism.

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I would like to thank Jessica Berson, Rick Cohn, Sumanth Gopinath, Lynne Rogers, David

4. This new C, together with the surround-

, would form an instance of the minor tetrachord (tone

ostinato and an arpeggiated C-major triad; one of these

ostinato, and an equiv-

of the English horns ostinato at R14 (B

3), a note which has no corre-

would generate an accent on the third eighth note of R13+3, resulting in

key-signature that prefaces the Augurs of Spring; the

surface. See Chua, Rioting

(although here the latter pitch sounds an

s, which might be brack-

); however, this note was a B

is in fact retained in the full score in

in Examples 6a and 6b, the intervallic pattern generated by

motion of the contrabassoon recalls the tubas G

followed by its neighboring chord.

of the bassline ostinato (reecting its possi-

), as well as some upper and lower

during the rst two bars,

, the primary pitch

initiates a durational group in

pedal against which the fanfare is

major at the bottoms of pages 87 and 95); and (2) R162R165

128 (orig. 98)

) form the famil-

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