Teen Age Riot

"The Rite of Spring" by Jennifer Renshaw

Hey, do you remember when you first heard The Rite of Spring (which, incidentally, turns 100 next year)? If you're like me, you first connected with the work as a teenager. (I did see Fantasia as a small child but the Rite music did not stick.) For me and many of my peers, it's the first piece of classical music we got genuinely excited about.

I'm interested in hearing from the current crop of teenagers about their relationsip to The Rite of Spring. I'm curious whether it continues to carry that same spark of the new, that same adrenal jolt of awesomeness. Maybe it doesn't! Maybe you've been jaded by so many Rite-lite moments in movies and video game scores that the piece is drained of its impact before you even hear it. Or maybe it's just another bit of the cloud, one of an effectively infinite number of cultural artifacts that you can retreive instantly at will. Whatever your relationship to this piece might be, I'd like to hear from you about it. (Even if you've never heard it before, you could seriously go check it out right now and then get back to me. I'll wait.)

Interested teens can reply in comments or email me. (Anonymous responses are okay if that's what you prefer.) Please be sure to let me know how you came to know about the piece, how old you were at the time you first heard it and how old you are now, how you listened (live, recording, YouTube, etc), whether or not you were high at the time, etc. Just do me a favor and give me your genuine first impression of the piece. Not what you think you should say or what you think I want to hear or whatever. Okay?

Attention people who are no longer teenagers — it is not that I do not love you, but this one is about the kids, okay? You can help by spreading the word to teens of your acquaintance who you suspect might be the sort to be at least theoretically open to the idea that listening to a 100-year old piece of orchestral music might be a fun way to kill half an hour.

Comments

[Lauren Nottingham]

1.

I was first told about Stravinsky's Rite of Spring when I was 15, in music class. The story I got from my music teacher was that there was an uproar at the premiere, and the crowd was divided between those that enjoyed it and those that downright hated it. I always remembered my teacher telling me that one reporter at the premiere wrote that he found the rhythms so riveting that he was subconsciously drumming them on a person's head sitting in front of him.

I did not actually listen to The Rite of Spring until nearly a year ago, when I was almost 18. I looked it up on Youtube and watched the 1987 Joffrey reconstruction of Nijinsky's original choreography. I was completely intrigued and could not divert my attention anywhere else for the entire duration of the ballet. From then on I have had a constant fascination with everything about The Rite of Spring; it's inspiration, the social and historical context of it's time, the intellect of the mastermind that is Stravinsky, his musical development and his varying compositional styles.

Although I study Jazz music at university this year, I have done a lot of reading about Stravinsky's life and works as a composer of the avant garde, due to the curiosity I gained from watching and listening to The Rite of Spring. I have found Stravinsky's third ballet to be an inspiration and a strong reason why I continue to study music.

:)

[Christopher Smith]

2.

Hi Darcy,

I ran this by my daughter (19) and son (17) and they both remembered the Rite as music to Fantasia, though neither of them knew the name until they were much older. My daughter didn't think much of it, though my son found it scary (I discovered early on that I could mute suspenseful movies and he could watch them no problem, but turn the sound back on and he would flee the room). I asked if they found that this music had any special meaning for them and they both said no, but when my daughter asked her friends, she discovered a real gender split in the answers. Most of the girls her age didn't think much about it, but the boys all had BIG reactions! I might have some leads on anecdotes for you from some of her pals, if you are still looking.