{"id":923,"date":"2020-04-03T01:05:01","date_gmt":"2020-04-03T01:05:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/?p=923"},"modified":"2020-04-03T03:54:02","modified_gmt":"2020-04-03T03:54:02","slug":"exploring-themes-of-destruction-and-life-in-the-rite-of-spring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/ewallace\/exploring-themes-of-destruction-and-life-in-the-rite-of-spring\/","title":{"rendered":"Exploring Themes of Destruction and Life in &#8220;The Rite of Spring&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Upon initial musical and visual analysis of \u201cThe Rite of Spring\u201d from the 1940 film <em>Fantasia<\/em>, the score, composed by Igor Stravinsky, is deeply suspenseful and enhances the intensity of the plot. The crescendos and suspenseful build up interspersed with more peaceful tunes that break up the intensity work to create a sense of tension and conflict. The audio also pairs well with the visuals to convey this intensity with images of bubbling lava, extreme weather (such as pouring rain and lightning), dinosaurs battling, and the crash of a comet. Although the dinosaurs and the landscape are animated cartoons, the landscape is greatly detailed and utilizes colors of dark red and bright orange to illustrate both the volcano at the beginning and the comet at the end, and colors of dark blue, purple, and grey during the storm while the dinosaurs are fighting in the middle of the scene. The change in color schemes manages to seamlessly convey the transition from the creation of life to the destruction as the comet destroys the dinosaurs. Finally I think it is interesting to examine the historical context of \u201cThe Rite of Spring\u201d . Upon background research, Stravinsky originally composed \u201cThe Rite of Spring\u201d\u00a0 as a ballet and orchestral work and was regarded as radical and avante-garde when first introduced to the Parisian ballet scene. Given the sophistication and radical meaning of \u201cThe Rite of Spring\u201d , which was conceived as a spring ritual in which a girl is sacrificed by dancing herself to death, it is surprising that this piece is used in a Disney animated film. Stravinsky himself claimed to have distaste for this adaptation of the music. Yet the intensity of \u201cThe Rite of Spring\u201d and themes of life and destruction in <em>Fantasia<\/em> complement each other well, even in the light of the piece\u2019s history <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Upon initial musical and visual analysis of \u201cThe Rite of Spring\u201d from the 1940 film Fantasia, the score, composed by Igor Stravinsky, is deeply suspenseful and enhances the intensity of the plot. The crescendos and suspenseful build up interspersed with more peaceful tunes that break up the intensity work to create a sense of tension [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1026,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-unit-9-the-silver-age-and-revolution"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/923","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1026"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=923"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/923\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}