Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring
For the past couple of weeks, I have been studying Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. A popular piece of many performers and liked by many more. In oder to take a closer look at this extravagant piece, I used the New York Philharmonic Archives to find potential sources. This is a great library to use in order to find many different articles, documents, scores and many more for thousands of pieces across decades. I chose to peek at a business document rather than a program or a score. I believe that viewing different kinds of sources is helpful in order to understand the differences that they have between each other, and the similarities that the sources share. The business document is titled, Stravinsky, Igor: Rite of Spring “Le Sacre de Printemps” (Phil Composer file) with it date being April 1961 to April 1976.
When looking at this document for the very first time, my observation was that it is very old. The pages were yellow which are a clear sign of aging paper and also many other things. I noticed that this document was covered in different colors of ink. It seemed as though that different people wrote different notes over time with different colored pens. Some notes were written in blue ink, others were red, pink and black. The users of the pens were crossing out words and rewriting them somewhere else on the page for a different word or a meaning. Some paragraphs were completely taped and some pages were taped around paragraphs and other words to show maybe importance? I was startled by the changes and large amounts of tape and written notes over more and more words. Why did the person put parentheses around certain words? Why is this document heavily tape? Some pages are completely blocked out along with paragraphs not being visible.