The Rite Signs: Semiotic Readings One Hundred Years On
The Rite Signs: Semiotic Readings One Hundred Years On

Summary/Abstract: One hundred years on from the infamous premiere of The Rite of Spring, Stravinsky’s epoch-defining ballet continues to evoke controversy and contention in both musicological and performance circles. Even to call it a ballet is to overlook, or compound, its problematic identity. Throughout its life span, most audiences will have encountered, valorised andidentified the work as a landmark of orchestral musical modernism heard primarily, perhaps even exclusively, in concert halls and on audio recordings with not a dancer, theatre stage or set in sight. Still to this day it thus remains one of music’s more remarkable split personalities: bifurcated along formalist and contextualist lines by Stravinsky’s ret⁠rospective and opportunistic assertion that he had written “un oeuvre architectonique et non anecdotique.”

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