Rhythm Contradicts Contempt: Aesthetic Realism and The Rite of Spring
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Abstract
This essay, which studies the rhythms of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, does so from a new perspective: the philosophy of Aesthetic Realism, which was founded in 1941 by the great American scholar and poet Eli Siegel (1902–1978). The central principle of Aesthetic Realism – the key to understanding the relation of Art and Life – is his statement: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” In his many lectures and writings, Eli Siegel commented often about the technical necessity in successful rhythms (whether in music, poetry, any of the arts, and life itself) for opposites to be made one. Among these are Slowness and Speed; Change and Sameness; Obstruction and Flow; the Expected and the Unexpected; Foreground and Background (in the sense, musically, of accented sound and unaccented sound). Stravinsky’s great composition illustrates all this; it illustrates the primal meaning of rhythm as a making one of opposites. A second core idea of Aesthetic Realism, likewise explored in this essay, is that the greatest enemy of art, and of happiness in life, is the tendency in people to build a personality for themselves by having contempt for reality rather than respect for it, and for other people. Contempt, Eli Siegel explained, is the “disposition in every person to think we will be for ourselves by making less of the outside world.” It is the viewpoint of Aesthetic Realism – which the author of this essay fervently agrees with – that every successful instance of rhythm is a powerful refutation of the contempt state of mind. How this is true of the rhythms of The Rite of Spring is pointed to in this essay.
Keywords: Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring, Rhythm Aesthetic Realism, Eli Siegel.
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