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.
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