The Rite of Spring is old. Nearly one hundred years old, in fact: centennial celebrations of the infamous premiere are currently in the works. Among the effects of its aging, the riots that accompanied the first performance at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées have become increasingly difficult to imagine in our era of extreme concert-hall decorum. But whatever its age, The Rite will always be associated with youth. Its subject is spring-"Nature renewing herself," as Stravinsky put it-and the ballet ends with the sacrifice of a young girl. Stravinsky was thirty when The Rite premiered in May 1913, his long career only beginning; the choreographer, Vaslav Nijinsky, was a mere twenty-three. And the youthful enthusiasm of Stravinsky's score is unmistakable: the sprung-from-the-head-of-Zeus quality that made the music a sensation in 1913 has rendered it eternally modern for many listeners, myself included.

The novelty of the music and choreography were not designed to represent modern life, as were the everyday sounds promoted by the Futurist Luigi Russolo in his 1913 musical manifesto The Art of Noises. On the contrary, Stravinsky and his principal collaborators, Nijinsky and Nicholas Roerich (who designed the costumes and sets and contributed to the scenario), crafted The Rite to evoke the ancient rituals of pagan Russia.

Roerich, "Kiss of the Earth" (sketch for set)

Valentine Gross, sketches

This desire to present a mythologized Russian past in balletic form had been the impetus behind The Firebird, premiered by the Ballets Russes three years earlier (1910), and the Shrovetide fair scene in Petrushka the following year (1911). But unlike in these earlier ballets, the particular focus on the life of "savages" in The Rite reflected the contemporary impulse toward primitivism in the arts. In Paris, the movement was associated primarily with the visual arts, most notably Gauguin's Polynesian paintings of the 1890s and Picasso's work near the end of following decade (Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is the most famous example). Stravinsky's score for The Rite followed as an early and extremely influential instance of musical primitivism, music whose aggressively dissonant harmonies, angular rhythms, and directness of expression seemed to embody the substance and style of the movement.

Primitivism, as succinctly characterized by the dance scholars Lynn Garafola, Joan Acocella, and Jonnie Greene, was founded on "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 civilized-children, peasants, 'savages,' raw emotion, plain speech-that are closest to the truth." But how could a composer as cultured as Stravinsky hope to bypass culture? One of his primary strategies was to attempt to exclude his own musical imagination, steeped as it was in the classical tradition, from specific stages of the compositional process. For instance, although he went to great lengths to conceal it, Stravinsky derived many of The Rite's most prominent melodies from Russian and Lithuanian folk tunes. This compositional practice was not new for Stravinsky-The Firebird and Petrushka featured prominently Russian folk tunes as well. But Stravinsky drew upon and reshaped folk melodies to a far greater extent in The Rite than he had in these earlier ballets. Right at the opening of The Rite's introduction, the famous bassoon solo is a modified treatment of Song No. 157 from Anton Juszkiewicz's anthology of 1,785 Lithuanian folk songs.

Stravinsky's bassoon solo (marked "ad lib" in the score), embellishes the tune slightly, alters its key and the precise succession of pitches, and, most notably, creates a quasi-improvisational rhythmic feel:

Listen to the audio clip >

In his rhythmic treatment of the melody, Stravinsky might have sought to enhance the authenticity of the original tune by evoking the spontaneity associated with folk music, a quality relatively absent from Western art music. But there is another, very different impulse behind this solo: it seems to point to the future of music while evoking its ancient past. Stravinsky's opening breaks with nineteenth-century orchestral traditions in several distinctly modern ways. The initial prominence of the bassoon is unusual, and the bassoonist must play in an uncomfortably high register, generating an unfamiliar instrumental timbre. The changing rhythms and the "ad lib" performance indication assure the absence of a stable rhythmic pulse, which no doubt disoriented and disconcerted the first audiences. And the horns, when they join the bassoon, immediately create a jarring tonal clash, the equivalent of a simple white-key melody on the piano being corrupted by the intrusion of a black key.

In this manner, Stravinsky, like other primitivists, contrived to have it both ways, composing music at once primitive and modern. The dominance of modern elements in The Rite, combined with the ballet's scenario and choreography, set The Rite apart from Stravinsky's previous orchestral music, which had been more closely tied to nineteenth-century traditions. But it would be an exaggeration to say that The Rite's musical features were entirely without precedent. The opening section of the second Tableau of Petrushka ("Petrushka's Room"), for example, resembles the opening of The Rite in the way it superimposes instruments that seem to inhabit completely different tonal environments. In this case, it is the bassoons taking on the role of the horns at the beginning of The Rite, entering below an independent musical idea and then oscillating between two seemingly incongruous pitches.

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In this passage, the clarinets combine to outline a six-note harmony that has become known simply as the "Petrushka chord." This extremely dissonant collection of pitches is generated by an unusual combination of two familiar tonal chords, both major triads. A similar explanation accounts the most famous harmony in The Rite, the brutally dissonant chord found at the beginning of the ballet proper, the "Augurs of Spring" (also the product of two major triads, one with an added seventh). Once again, Stravinsky used the distinctively modern to evoke the primitive: the "Augurs" chord is bluntly repeated thirty-two times in the strings with jarringly erratic accents provided by the horns, creating an irregular and unpredictable rhythmic pattern. Count along with these accents and you will hear that they group thirty-two rigid eighth-note beats into the pattern 9 + 2 + 6 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 3.

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The German philosopher and musicologist Theodor Adorno, in his essay "Stravinsky and Reaction," referred to such rhythms as "arbitrary," the apparent product of a "throw of the dice." For this reason, he saw The Rite as dehumanized and dehumanizing, the basis of a highly charged and controversial ideological critique of Stravinsky's music. It is unlikely that Adorno intended for the image of "throwing dice" to be taken literally-one would assume that a composer such as Stravinsky was guided by his musical training and imagination, not by chance. But Adorno's metaphor may have been closer to the truth than he realized. As I have recently suggested in a longer essay, drawing upon my analysis of Stravinsky's score and sketches, Stravinsky seems to have employed a fundamentally mechanical procedure for generating the most striking rhythmic patterns in The Rite. The procedure is straightforward. First, he would take a prominent chord or melody and measure the distances (intervals) between adjacent pitches, generating a numerical series. Second, he would convert this series into a rhythmic pattern by reinterpreting the numbers as durations, measured in beats. In other words, Stravinsky seems to have transformed tonal relationships into rhythmic ones, creating hidden relationships that can only be perceived intellectually, not aurally.

This "arbitrary" procedure served a similar purpose as the use of folk melodies: each provided Stravinsky with a compositional starting point outside of the Western classical tradition from which he could create music with no apparent historical precedent, music that could sound modern while plausibly evoking an imagined ancient culture. Nijinsky sought similar ends, perhaps through similar means. According to his collaborator Marie Rambert, Nijinsky's choreography was formulated directly against tradition, founded on a "basic position: feet very turned in, knees slightly bent, arms held in reverse of the classical position, a primitive, prehistoric posture." (According to Rambert, such a pose led one audience member to call out for a doctor during the premiere.) The critic Jacques Rivière described how each of Nijinsky's movements would outline a pattern "wrenched in one block and by force from the formless mass of possibilities. [. . .] I felt reassured and content, like a man who takes in at one glance a system of mathematical propositions from which all possibilities of error have been scrupulously eliminated."

Stravinsky may have believed that his numerical games of chance helped him to achieve mystical connection with the real pagan culture he wished to evoke. In his later years, the composer characterized himself as a cultural-historical conduit, declaring: "I am the vessel through which The Rite passed." Stravinsky's most recent biographer, Stephen Walsh, observed that Stravinsky's sketches for The Rite reinforce this myth of the music's "virgin birth," as the musicologist Richard Taruskin has dubbed it. Written in a sketchbook purchased while in the company of Maurice Ravel in Italy, these sketches illuminate very little about Stravinsky's early work on the score, which consisted primarily of improvisation at the piano. But they reveal much about the later compositional stages. See, for instance, pages 96-97, where Stravinsky declared in blue and red pencil: "Today 4/17 November 1912 Sunday with an unbearable toothache I finished the music of the Sacre." These climactic pages feature Stravinsky's sketches for the end of The Rite (the "Sacrificial Dance"), notated amidst various symbols, doodles, and unexplained calculations (for the latter, see the left margin of each page).

The conductor Robert Craft, Stravinsky's close friend and confidant from around 1950 onwards, speculated that the meaning of the calculations is indeterminate: "whether the arcane calculations are concerned with overdue rent at the Châtelard, railroad timetables, musical minutage, or numbers of instruments, I have no idea." My research has suggested, however, that these numbers, as well as others in the sketchbook, correspond to large groups of beats that Stravinsky was counting and comparing as a means of creating unusual musical proportions. Stravinsky contributed ideas to Nijinsky's choreography of The Rite, and his beat-counting was part of a more comprehensive plan in which the durations of the dancers' phrases would be at odds with the durations of musical units ("the mastering of that rhythm [was] almost impossible," recalled Rambert). This calculated dissonance between the music and the choreography added another layer of irregularity to the ballet's organization that contributed to its disorienting effects on the audience.

The fundamental objective of these techniques was to create unprecedented sounds and visuals capable of evoking obscure ancient traditions while boldly initiating new artistic ones. The unknown tends to be accompanied by fear, an emotion Stravinsky clearly wanted to exploit. As he wrote in the illuminating essay "What I Wished to Express in the Consecration of Spring," whose English translation was first published in the Boston Evening Transcript:

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.

I had not read this short essay when I first listened to The Rite as a teenager, but my lasting impression of hearing it for the first time, through headphones, lying alone on my bed in the dark, was the sensation of shrinking while the music expanded, of being engulfed by the seemingly physical presence of the music's "imposing whole." This sensation was greatest during passages in which a musical idea is first heard softly and then becomes terrifyingly loud. One such moment occurs in Part I of the ballet, during the "Spring Rounds," another in Part II, during the "Ritual Action of the Ancestors." In the "Spring Rounds," a solemn processional featuring low strings and woodwinds is reprised, without warning, by the full orchestra playing at its loudest, replete with timpani crashes and deranged slides from the brass. In the "Ritual Action of the Ancestors," a march-like melody played by muted trumpets and accompanied by a quiet vamp is later taken over by the horns and oboes, blaring away with the full orchestra, as though we have been instantaneously transported from a distant and safe vantage-point to the epicenter of the ritual proceedings.

Listen to the audio clip ("Spring Rounds") >

Listen to the audio clip ("Ritual Action of the Anestors") >

Encountering this music was a formative musical experience of my youth. I remember those initial thrills vividly and relive them any time I immerse myself in this music, despite how familiar it has become, despite my deeper understanding of how it was composed, and despite the influence on my thinking of the critiques of Adorno and others. And so, for me, The Rite will always be music of youth, as it was for Stravinsky. But when listening to Stravinsky's soon-to-be centenarian score, remember that in its actual youth, the music was not composed for the concert hall, but for the ballet stage, and that its premiere was notable for much more than the audience's reaction. The original choreography, costumes, and sets were reconstructed in 1987 by the Joffrey Ballet company. Their performance can now be viewed on youtube, where, when last I checked, it had received a mere 21,000 hits since being posted nearly two years ago. My advice? Watch the Joffrey's reconstruction and accept its invitation to imagine the original production. By confronting the old, you'll hear the music anew.

Matthew McDonald is an assistant professor of music at Northeastern University. His essay "Jeux de Nombres: Automated Rhythm in The Rite of Spring" was published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society.