four movements

William Grant Still’s

Though a prolific composer of operas, ballets, symphonies, and other works, he was best known for his Afro-American Symphony (1931). Still was brought up by his mother and grandmother in Little Rock, Arkansas, and studied medicine at Wilberforce University, Ohio, before turning to music.

Why did Still favor the blues over spirituals as source material for his compositions? He felt that the blues did not exhibit Caucasian influence. looked to Harlem Renaissance artists and writers for inspiration. William Grant Still made little contribution to the search for a modern American sound.

Why is “A Black Pierrot” considered through-composed? The music is different in each strophe. He was the first African American composer to have a symphony performed by a major orchestra.

The Blues really started when African people were taken to America to work as slaves on plantation fields. The slaves would sing songs of their despair and suffering to make the time pass more quickly. The Blues music is about the black peoples struggle to survive and their efforts to win back their freedom.

The Rite of Spring (Russian: Весна священная, romanized: Vesna svyashchennaya, lit. ‘sacred spring’; French: Le Sacre du printemps) is a ballet and orchestral concert work by the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky.

When the curtain rose the audience saw a row of ‘knock-kneed and long-braided Lolitas jumping up and down’ as Stravinsky called them, who seemed to jerk rather than dance. Classical dance aspired upwards, in defiance of gravity, whereas Nijinsky’s dancers seemed pulled down to the earth.

Instrumentation: 5 flutes (2 doubling on piccolo), 5 oboes (2 doubling on English horn), 5 clarinets, 5 bassoons; 8 horns, 5trumpets, 3 trombones, 2 tubas; strings; percussion.

The Rite is clearly not atonal – there are passages in B flat minor, though it is often impossible to say what key the music is in. Careful analysis seems to show that it relies on combinations of evolved modes, like Debussy’s whole-tone scale.

Igor Stravinsky wrote The Rite of Spring in 1913. It redefined 20th-century music, much as Beethoven’s Eroica had transformed music a century before. With it, Stravinsky took himself far into the realm of the unconscious. The music seemed designed with no apparent order but driven by pure gut feeling.

Like Stravinsky’s earlier works for the Ballet Russes, The Rite of Spring was inspired by Russian culture, but, unlike them, it challenged the audience with its chaotic percussive momentum. Igor Stravinsky, c. 1920.