DOI: 10.1111/musa.

12145

Severine Neff, Maureen Carr and Gretchen Horlacher with John Reef (eds),
‘The Rite of Spring’ at 100 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017). xxvii
+ 520 pp. $50. ISBN 9780253024206 (hb).

The centenary of The Rite of Spring’s premiere, given at the Théâtre des Champs-
Élysées in Paris on 29 May 1913, has been marked by an outstanding flourish
of concerts and new stagings, symposia, exhibitions and publications, including
two annotated facsimile editions of Stravinsky’s manuscripts of The Rite.1 The
latest expression of these celebrations is The Rite of Spring at 100 published in
2017, co-edited by Severine Neff, Maureen Carr and Gretchen Horlacher, with
John Reef. The work includes 27 essays based on the revised contributions to
two conferences, the first held at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill in October 2012 and the second at the Moscow State Conservatory in May
2013. The release of this volume raises certain questions: What is so compelling
about The Rite as to arouse so much attention? And what new insights can this
umpteenth tribute to the centenary celebrations provide to our understanding of
this artwork?
The first issue is by no means as obvious as it might seem, given that Richard
Taruskin’s plenary essay, ‘Resisting The Rite’, focuses precisely on the need to
provide an answer to the vital question: ‘So why The Rite?’ (p. 417). His reply is
far-reaching, since it inevitably turns into another question. In order to realise
why The Rite plays a unique role in twentieth-century culture, we should first try
to shed some light on what The Rite really is:
To begin with – and this is something musicologists are apt to forget – The Rite is
not just a piece of music. It originated, very self-consciously, as a Gesamtkunstwerk,
a mixed-media synthesis, and belongs to the histories of dance and stage design,
as well as music. (p. 417)

This statement seems to have been instrumental in the planning of the volume,
since Stephen Walsh begins his foreword by quoting this same sentence and
stressing that ‘all the other papers [have] at least obliquely emanated’ from
Taruskin’s (p. xix).
Beyond taking Taruskin’s influential voice as a point of reference for all the
others, we are not really dealing with a collection that is monophonic, so to
speak. On the contrary, the added value of The Rite of Spring at 100 lies in a
remarkable polyphony of voices, which is amplified by the different provenance
of the authors: not only have musicologists and music theorists been involved
in this project, but also dance, art and cultural historians. The first part of the
book (‘Dancing Le sacre across the Century’) is devoted to the dance scholars’
contributions, while the second and third parts focus on two cultural and

432 Music Analysis, 38/iii (2019)

© 2019 The Authors.
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