Jos replies to Len:

>>I thought the "riot" (Rite of Spring)was less about the music and more
>>about the costumes and choreography of the ballet?
>
>Great point that can't be made too often. Be it that Stravinsky took some
>points to the limit, it would be well worth noting that Vic Maes in his
>recent study on Russian Music clearly shows how Stravinsky's Rite is FIRMLY
>ROOTED in the Russian tradition.

That's because creatio ex nihilo doesn't exist.  Everything comes from
somewhere.  Taruskin makes Maes's point in even more detail, showing that
the Russian tradition Stravinsky came out of owes just about everything to
Liszt.

>Although Stravinsky and his disciples never tired of boring us with their
>stories how he "served as the medium through which music of some unknown
>realm came to life", in fact most of the tunes can be traced back as
>(agreed: distorted) versions of Russian folk song.

Folk song is a common resource.  It's what composers do with folk song
that matters.  Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Bartok, Hindemith, Thomson, Cowell,
Ives, Vaughan Williams, and Copland all make use (in some cases, extensive
use) of folk song or folk-music principles, yet their music doesn't sound
anything like one another's.  Neither do they sound anything like Haydn or
Grieg.

Furthermore, if we're talking about influence, then the folk elements of Le
Sacre probably didn't have much influence at all, particularly since the
Taruskin and the Maes critiques came along as something on the order of
revelations.  Composers tended to extract other compositional principles:
octatonic scales (divorced from folk implications), chord constructions,
rhythms, new methods of development.

Steve Schwartz