MODERNISM'S OTHER CONSTITUENCY

In his remarkable book Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, Modris Eksteins argues that the inaugural performance of Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring in 1913 in Paris stands as a “landmark of modernism,…one of the supreme symbols of our centrifugal and paradoxical century, when in striving for freedom we have acquired the power of ultimate destruction.” That historical performance remains a “supreme” symbol of unpopular music: the ballet that enacted the clashing and blending of an ancient pagan Russian myth and the rhythms of sounds of modern Paris – “its crash, clash, cling, clang, bing, bang bing” as one reviewer described it (cited in Rites of Spring 9) – with its cars and horns and massive dissonance, at the eve of World War I to an audience that was shocked and dismayed. At that performance in May 1913 in what Eksteins describes as “the newly constructed, ultramodern Théâtre des Champs-Élysées” (16) men in tuxedos and women in evening dresses rioted, ripping chairs out of the concert hall and breaking windows and electric chandeliers while hearing (but barely hearing, since there was so much tumult) Stravinsky's strange rhythms and chords and watching the dancers' curious stiff movements and gestures. Carl Van Vechten describes the furor this way: