In his Music in Cuba, the writer and (ethno)musicologist Alejo Carpentier drew a connection between the paganism evoked by Igor Stravinsky in his The Rite of Spring and Afro-Cuban rituals: ‘Those who already knew the score of The Rite of Spring … began to notice that, in Regla, on the other side of the bay [of Havana], there were rhythms as complex and interesting as those created by Stravinsky to evoke the primitive rituals of pagan Russia.’Footnote 1 Rhythmic complexity can have many sources, but, as will be seen, for Carpentier, the similarities he heard (or imagined) were not accidental but significant. He was not alone: around the world, audiences, including composers, have re-imagined Stravinsky’s paganism in relation to their own time and place. In the scholarship, The Rite of Spring has typically been viewed in the context of Western modernism, which makes sense with regard to the composer’s own biography and the work’s Parisian premiere. Yet, whereas in Europe and North America, the work’s avowed primitivism appeared mostly as a lurid but non-specific signifier of otherness, composers in other parts of the world saw direct parallels between Stravinsky’s Scythians, the mythical inhabitants of the Pontic steppes between the Black Sea and Central Asia, and the indigenous populations of their own countries. This emphasis on indigeneity – however imaginary – legitimated an independent path to modernity that did not solely rely on the adoption of European models and materials and that, instead, seemed rooted in the local soil.
Rachel Campbell has recently drawn attention to the importance of ‘settler primitivism’ for a work that is emblematic of Australian musical modernism, John Antill’s Corroboree (1946). Referring to the work of Nicholas Thomas, she argues that ‘primitivist production characteristic of settler societies has tended to represent and appropriate indigenous references with the aim of creating a sense of identity and belonging for the settler nation’, going on to quote Thomas: ‘The deep association between indigenous people and the land provided strong and condensed reference points for a colonial culture that sought both to define itself as native and to create national emblems.’Footnote 2 Here, too, Stravinsky’s Rite served as a model, by providing the code of ‘primitivism’ that Antill drew on, and Campbell also briefly mentions many of the same compositions discussed in this chapter below. She does not explore to what extent Stravinsky’s Russia can itself be seen as a settler-colonial society in relation to the indigenous Scythians, however.Footnote 3
Meanwhile, Christian Utz has observed a similar reference to the role of pre-Christian ritual in The Rite in the work of Tan Dun:
The superimposition of ostinato figures, the layered instrumentation, massive, cutting tutti chords and ‘primitive’ drum rhythms [in Orchestral Theatre 1: Xun, from 1990] often borrow from the western construction of the musical ritual par excellence: Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps … . A new perspective opens up: through the confrontation of Tan Dun’s own construction of the archaic ritual with the western construction of the same, there arises a specific ‘inter-cultural’ tension that shaped Tan’s music of the 1990s.Footnote 4
There is no apparent connection to settler colonialism here, but what links this example by a composer born in China with those from Latin America and Australia is its emphasis on the non-European and non-Christian elements in Stravinsky’s work (which is why Utz’s description of them as ‘Western’ seems a little hasty).
It is not difficult to see what attracted these listeners. Like few other compositions, The Rite epitomises the specifically modernist conflict between national tradition and universal aspirations, primitivism and modernity. As Richard Taruskin has described it:
The Rite of Spring brought some of the finest fruits of the Russian Silver Age – the World of Art, neonationalism, Scythianism – into the international current of Western Music, and, in so doing, utterly transcended the movements and sources from which it had sprung. The work achieved a cultural universality within the world of postromantic modernism that ultimately rendered its subject [of the ballet] superfluous.Footnote 5
Whether the ballet’s subject had really become ‘superfluous’ is another matter, however. Although it is true that the work has been performed more frequently in its concert than its ballet version, the reference to ‘pagan Russia’ stuck. It may not be a coincidence, in this context, that, as Alexander Morrison has pointed out, the Silver Age and Scythianism coincided with a systematic settlement and colonisation policy across Eurasia sponsored by the Russian state:
It was the establishment of a special ‘Resettlement Administration’ (Pereselencheskoe Upravlenie) within the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 1896 which marked the real turning-point in the politics of colonisation, and the beginning of a systematic, technocratic, state-driven policy of exporting peasants from the crowded Central Agricultural and Black Earth regions of European Russia to Siberia, the Asiatic Steppe and Turkestan.Footnote 6
Particularly in Central Asia, ‘[t]he fundamental underlying principle of all Russian legislation governing resettlement in these regions was that the land rights of incoming European settlers (usually Russian or Ukrainian) trumped those of the indigenous population’.Footnote 7
Whatever the sources behind its primitivism, as Taruskin has pointed out in a later publication, it is important to remember that The Rite was composed specifically for Paris, the most modern metropolis with the (supposedly) most discerning audience in the world: ‘Behind Stravinsky’s primitivism there lay a cognate Russian orientalism that, when presented to the French, cast the ostensibly native in garishly auto-exoticized terms.’Footnote 8 In this way, the work embodies many of the tensions of modernist cultural geography between Eastern and Western Europe, city and countryside, and implicitly, ancient and modern, primitive and refined, and this may explain its appeal around the world. Taken together, the gulf between the mythologised Russian soil – whether the Pontic steppes inhabited by the Scythians or Lithuania, the origin of many of the tunes Stravinsky used (not coincidentally at some of the furthest removes of the Russian Empire) – and Paris is perhaps the widest that could then be encompassed by notions of ‘European civilisation’ (but without venturing beyond that). It seems fitting, therefore, that the work was also composed in a variety of locations, including St Petersburg, the composer’s estate in Ustilug (now Ustyluh, Ukraine), Switzerland and France.
In the following, I will focus on Latin America, specifically Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Cuba. This region has a particularly long and complex history of ‘Indigenism’ (indigenismo), but, as we have seen, Stravinsky’s paganism found admirers in very different places. What this example illustrates is the rhizomatic cultural geography of musical modernism: ideas, techniques and idioms may be taken up in distant places where they are re-contextualised in new, unforeseen ways. In this example, pace Taruskin, it is not a supposedly ‘universal’ quality in Stravinsky’s music that attracted composers elsewhere, but very specific aspects of his national imaginary that resonated in different national, historical and cultural contexts, so that the (Russian) pagan rites can stand in for pre-Columbian Indigenous ceremonies in South America as much as for Taoist or Buddhist rituals in East Asia or an Aboriginal corroboree in Australia.
From Scythianism to Indigenism
It is easy to comprehend the fascination the work held for Latin-American musicians and intellectuals: the combination of folk melodies with new compositional techniques and, more generally, the ancient and the modern is along the lines of the ‘folkloristic nationalism’ that dominated Latin-American composition throughout much of the twentieth century. That term, ‘folkloristic nationalism’, has been coined by Gilbert Chase and has been further popularised by his student Gérard Béhague.Footnote 9 In essence, much like in other forms of musical nationalism, the guiding principle was the belief that a renewal of musical language and culture had to be based on the regional, preferably rural folk music. Folk music collectors, such as the Argentine Carlos Vega, played important roles, again not dissimilar to those played by their counterparts elsewhere, such as Cecil Sharp in Britain, John and Allan Lomax in the USA or Béla Bartók in Hungary. The same is true of writers and critics, such as the Cuban Alejo Carpentier quoted earlier, to whom I shall return. The Brazilian Mário de Andrade combined both roles: conservatoire-trained (his only form of formal tertiary education), he made many important collections of folk songs and dances, although he is mostly known as one of the founders of Brazilian literary modernism. His Ensaio sôbre a música brasileira (1928), which programmatically combines a collection of folk tunes in its second part with an exhortation to composers in its first, proved one of the most influential formulations of the ideology (most of Andrade’s work was quickly translated into Spanish, and so had an impact across the continent): ‘[A] national art is not made with an arbitrary and amateurish choice of elements: a national art is already made in the people’s unconscious. The artist only has to give the already existing elements an artful arrangement [lit. “transposition”] that transforms popular music into art music.’Footnote 10 Given Latin America’s rich traditions of traditional and popular music, to many composers this seemed a viable strategy to emancipate themselves from their erstwhile colonial masters. Although The Rite could be seen as a model, this does not quite explain the particular significance of the work for the region: other works using popular or traditional sources could have been chosen; it is instructive, for instance, that the music of Bartók does not appear to have had a similar resonance as it had in many other parts of the world.Footnote 11 Note also that, in de Andrade’s formulation and similar statements by others, Latin-American folkloristic nationalism is not significantly different in kind to European or North American nationalisms.
There are therefore additional reasons for the specific fascination that The Rite, above other nationalist- or folklorically inspired compositions, held for Latin-American composers and critics. The clue lies in the work’s subtitle, specifically the reference to paganism. For many, Stravinsky’s evocation of a pre-Christian Russia established a parallel to pre-Columbian Latin America, and sometimes to non-European, non-Christian civilisation tout court. This would link the work to the ideas of ‘Indianism’ (indianismo) and ‘Indigenism’ (indigenismo). Vera Wolkowicz has explained the significance of the pre-Columbian heritage for the newly emerging nations of Latin America in their ‘aspiration to create genuinely national and at the same time continental art’:
The cultural resources for such art were sought in the remote past of the continent. There were two reasons for this. First, they reminded the rest of the world (which, in this context, effectively meant Europe) that the young nations of Latin America could claim a collective past as old and grandiose as those of Europe. Second, they established national roots within the regions’ historical indigenous communities, who formed a large part of the populations of these modern nations. In this latter context, there were two different approaches: one that was based on an ideal of an indigenous past that, due to its long temporal distance, did not represent a threat to the current creole (criollo) oligarchies; the other, which began to emerge around the 1920s, was mostly fostered by creole artists and intellectuals, and criticized the neglect of contemporary indigenous people, though it was equally based on an idea of the indigenous past as a form of utopian civilization and a possible model for the future of these new nation-states.Footnote 12
As Wolkowicz explains later, the distinction undertaken here between an earlier and a later form matches that between Indianism, a ‘romanticised vision of the indigenous past’ associated with the nineteenth century, and Indigenism, a more critical approach that gained prominence with the political Indigenist movements of the 1920s.Footnote 13
While these ideas have been influential across Latin America, their significance varied between different places and times. Furthermore, while the Stravinsky reception falls into the second phase of Indigenism according to Wolkowicz’s distinction, this does not mean that composers had overcome the romantic notions associated with Indianism or pursued a critical agenda (as Wolkowicz makes clear elsewhere, the political indigenista movement proper was mostly restricted to Peru). Indigenism probably has most resonance for post-revolutionary Mexico, where it became part of the national ideology. For this reason, it is often associated with the work of Carlos Chávez and his followers.Footnote 14 While it can be regarded as progressive in placing importance on the music and culture of the Indigenous population instead of squarely equating any art with the European settlers, we should not be under any illusions: as Béhague points out, Chávez was primarily interested in the Aztec Renaissance, a largely imaginary reconstruction of a mythical pre-Columbian culture that left little place for actual Indigenous people.Footnote 15 His approach was more the rule than the exception: what indigenismo celebrated was more often the mythical and prehistorical than the real and contemporary; the noble savage and primitive than the culturally complex; and it took the form of cultural appropriation more often than participation in a shared heritage. The parallel to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring or, for that matter, Campbell’s reading of Antill’s Corroboree appears obvious. It is worth recalling Thomas’s suggestion about the role of Indigenism to provide ‘condensed reference points for a colonial culture that sought both to define itself as native and to create national emblems’.Footnote 16
Although the importance of Indigenism for Latin-American music has been widely recognised, it has not previously been related to Stravinsky. For instance, in his Music in Latin America, Béhague points to the importance of The Rite, in particular, arguing that ‘[w]hen composers did … familiarize themselves [with the renovating techniques already developed elsewhere in the twentieth century], they most often employed characteristic Stravinskian techniques as found in Le Sacre du printemps …’.Footnote 17 In that (early) book, there are only fleeting allusions to Indigenism, to which Béhague returned later in his life, but, again, it is interesting that he made no connection between the two.
Argentina: Alberto Ginastera
To establish the connection between The Rite and Indigenism, we need to turn to the location of the first performance of The Rite outside Europe and North America (in 1928), and the second ballet production (1932): Buenos Aires (see Table 1.1 for an overview of performances of The Rite). This is an unlikely locale for any Indigenist leanings since Argentina’s cultural identity is largely defined by European immigration from the late nineteenth century onwards. There are other historical reasons for this Europeanised identity: although the territory had been sparsely populated even before the Conquest, what Indigenous population was there was often violently exterminated or displaced, as in the notorious ‘Conquest of the Desert’ (1878–85), a military campaign headed by General Julio Argentino Roca to establish Argentine sovereignty over Patagonia, during which thousands of Mapuche were killed or expelled. The events, which can be seen as the culmination of a centuries-long process, are now considered genocide, although they have long been and still often are downplayed.Footnote 18 As a result of these historical developments, the large majority of the Argentine population is of European or Mestizo origin, with Italian ancestry being most common (actual figures vary quite widely, depending on methodology).Footnote 19
Table 1.1 Overview of performances and versions of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring.
| Country | City | Venue | Date | Conductor | Comment | Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| France | Paris | Théâtre des Champs-Élysées | 29 May 1913 | Pierre Monteux | Ballet | |
| England | London | Theatre Royal, Drury Lane | 11 June 1913 | Pierre Monteux | Ballet | |
| Russia | Moscow | Assembly Rooms of the Nobility | 18 February 1914 | Serge Koussevitsky | Concert | |
| USA | Philadelphia | 3 March 1922 | Leopold Stokowski | Concert | ||
| Germany | Berlin | 19 November 1922 | Ernest Ansermet | Concert | ||
| Italy | Rome | Augusteo | 5 February 1923 | Bernardo Milinari | Part performance | Concert |
| Switzerland | Geneva | 5 February 1923 | Ernest Ansermet | Part performance | Concert | |
| Belgium | Brussels | 6 May 1923 | Frans Ruhlman | Concert | ||
| Netherlands | Amsterdam | 12 October 1924 | Pierre Monteux | Concert | ||
| Austria | Vienna | 15 February 1925 | Franz Schalk | Concert | ||
| Italy | Milan | Teatro alla Scala | 17 June 1926 | Hermann Scherchen | Concert | |
| Croatia | Zagreb | 1926 | Igor Stravinsky | Concert | ||
| Switzerland | Zurich | 10 February 1928 | Volkmar Andreae | Concert | ||
| Spain | Barcelona | Teatro alla Liceu | March 1928 | Igor Stravinsky | Concert | |
| Argentina | Buenos Aires | Teatro Colón | April 1928 | Eugen Szenkar | Concert | |
| Hungary | Budapest | 10 February 1929 | Ernö Dohnanyi | Concert | ||
| Argentina | Buenos Aires | Teatro Colón | 17 August 1932 | Juan José Castro | Ballet | |
| China | Shanghai | Grand Theatre | 12 November 1933 | Mario Paci | ‘Sacrificial Dance’ with solo dancer | Ballet |
| Mexico | Mexico City | 1935 | Carlos Chávez | Concert | ||
| Australia | Sydney | Sydney Town Hall | 23 August 1946 | Eugene Goosens | Concert | |
| Japan | Tokyo | 21 September 1950 | Kazuo Yamada | Concert | ||
| Israel | 1952 | Igor Markevitch | Concert | |||
| Printed Score | Berlin | Edition russe de la musique | 1922 | |||
| Recording | Paris | 1929 | Pierre Monteux | |||
| Broadcasting | London | BBC | 18 January 1929 |
Given its history of European immigration, it is not surprising that Buenos Aires would have a thriving culture of Western classical, including modernist, music; what is less expected are any Indigenist associations. As Wolkowicz put it, however, Argentina proved ‘keen to appropriate an indigenous past that was not its own’.Footnote 20 There was even a veritable ‘Inca craze’ in the decades preceding the performance. Wolkowicz credits none other than the Ballets russes, who performed at the Teatro Colón in 1913 and 1917, for creating ‘a thirst among Argentine audiences for primitivism and exoticism wrapped up in Modernism’ (although they did not perform The Rite on these occasions).Footnote 21 But the crucial contribution was made by the Misión Peruana de Arte Incaico, a group dedicated to supposedly recreating Inca music and dance performances, in October 1923, again at the Teatro Colón, the country’s and indeed continent’s most prestigious opera house. This created a sensation and was explicitly regarded as a model to follow for Argentine artists to liberate themselves from the European heritage.Footnote 22 This prepared the ground for the Latin-American premiere of The Rite five years later and it illustrates to what extent the work’s reception was affected by Indigenist discourses.
When, another four years later, in 1932, The Rite received the first full staging after the Ballets russes’ 1913 and 1921 productions in Buenos Aires’s Teatro Colón, among the audience there was a sixteen-year-old student of the Conservatorio Williams, one Alberto Ginastera. As he reported later, the experience made a deep impression on him: ‘Le Sacre was like a shock – something new and unexpected. The primitivism of the music, its dynamic impulse and the novelty of its language impressed me as the work of a genius.’Footnote 23
Note the emphasis on ‘primitivism’, which, although admittedly apt for the work, would play a very ambiguous role in its Latin-American reception. Four years later, Ginastera began work on a ballet of his own, called Panambí. After enrolling at the Conservatorio Nacional de Música (1936) and military service he finished the work in 1937, while still a student, and a concert suite from it was performed by Juan José Castro, Argentina’s pre-eminent conductor and one of its leading composers, at the Teatro Colón, when he was only twenty-one. Three years later, Castro conducted the premiere of the complete ballet.
The ballet’s scenario was written by Felix L. Errico and is based on a romanticised version of a myth of the Guaraní, an Indigenous people living across modern-day Paraguay, northern Argentina (Misiones Province), southern Brazil and parts of Uruguay and Bolivia. Panambí, the beautiful daughter of a chieftain, sacrifices herself to rescue her fiancé Guirahú who has been bewitched by the evil sorcerer, until the good god Tupá reunites the lovers and punishes the sorcerer.Footnote 24 This is a more conventional and fully fledged narrative, complete with happy ending, than The Rite, but the parallels are obvious: the emphasis on pagan rites and the actual or attempted sacrifice of a virginal maiden.
Many of Ginastera’s borrowings have been analysed by Kenneth Lovern.Footnote 25 He only considered the concert suite, however, not the full ballet version which contains additional apparent borrowings. The first relevant example is the second number, the riotous ‘Fiesta indígena’ (‘indigenous celebration’, Example 1.1), the fourth movement of the suite. With its cross-cutting between tympani and brass, it is clearly reminiscent of The Rite, notably the ‘Sacrificial Dance’ around rehearsal number 146 (Example 1.2).
Example 1.1 Alberto Ginastera, Panambí Op. 1, No. 2, ‘Fiesta indígena’, rehearsal fig. 12,.
Example 1.2 Igor Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring, ‘Sacrificial Dance’, four bars before rehearsal fig. 146 to three bars after,.
What in Stravinsky are constant changes of metre, with irregularity at every level, becomes a comparatively regular scheme in Ginastera, with, initially, three bars in 6/8 followed by one in 3/4 superimposed on 6/8, until, with the entry of the brass, the scheme changes to an alternation between two bars in 3/4 and two bars in 2/4, again superimposed on a continuing 6/8 – which may be why Ginastera does not change the time signature. These hemiolas suggest that what the Guaraní are dancing is actually a malambo, one of Argentina’s national dances, supposedly associated with the gauchos.Footnote 26
It is predominantly the riotous sections, with their heavy use of percussion and brass, that evoke The Rite. Another instance is ‘Inquietud de la tribu’ (‘Disquiet of the tribe’), the eleventh number of the ballet (not included in the suite) (Example 1.3). The reference point here seems to be ‘The Dancing out of the Earth’ (Example 1.4). Note the grace-note run in the piccolo and flute, followed by zig-zagging downward motion in the winds or horns, respectively, in front of a pulsating background. In the Ginastera, this is the beginning of a build-up that would reach Stravinskian dimensions.
Example 1.3 Alberto Ginastera, Panambí Op. 1, No. 11, ‘Inquietud de la tribu’, rehearsal fig. 74,
Example 1.4 Igor Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring, ‘The Dancing out of the Earth’,
The perhaps most conspicuous example is also noted by Lovern: ‘Danza de los guerreros’ (‘dance of the warriors’), No. 4 in the ballet and final, sixth movement of the suite (Example 1.5). The similarity to ‘The Augurs of Spring’ is striking (Example 1.6). It has to be reiterated, though, that this similarity relates to texture, orchestration and rhythm. The actual pitches are different. Stravinsky, famously, superimposes a dominant-seventh chord on E♭ on an E major (= F♭ major) chord, resulting in 7-32 (0134689) in PCS parlance. Ginastera’s chord is a more heterogeneous and dissonant combination of quartal harmony in the strings and tertial in the horns and bassoons containing all pitches of the chromatic spectrum except B♭ (for no apparent reason). Furthermore, while Stravinsky’s off-beat accents are irregular at virtually every level and thus remain unpredictable, Ginastera’s are invariant and hence quickly become predictable.
Example 1.5 Alberto Ginastera, Panambí Op. 1, No. 4, ‘Danza de los guerreros’, two bars before rehearsal fig. 27 to one bar after,.
Example 1.6 Igor Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring, ‘The Augurs of Spring’, rehearsal fig. 13,
The same is true, to a generally greater extent, of the previous examples: there are similarities in terms of orchestration, texture, rhythm and character, but no direct quotations. The exception here is the grace-note run in the piccolo in ‘Inquietud de la tribu’ and ‘Dancing out of the Earth’, which is almost identical in both examples: this could be either a coincidence or a particularly vivid sonic memory on Ginastera’s part.
All in all, it seems hardly fanciful to assume that Ginastera relied on his memory of the performance of The Rite that he witnessed while composing Panambí, possibly aided by a copy of the score or the first recording that somehow found its way to Buenos Aires.
This possibility gets further support from another account the composer provided of his initial encounter with The Rite, written as part of a homage to Stravinsky on his eighty-fifth birthday:
[W]hen I first heard The Rite I was only 14 [recte: 16] years old. … Four years later I wrote my first orchestral piece, the ballet Panambi, and with all the ingenuousness and innocence of youth I employed in it the same percussive effects, the same changing rhythms, using an immense orchestra with the percussion occupying pride of place – in other words, the same ingredients as Stravinsky had made use of for the first time in … The Rite of Spring. On comparing notes with my Latin-American colleagues I discovered that I was not the only one to succumb to the marvellous spell of the Stravinskian magic.Footnote 27
Equally revealing is the curious relation Ginastera establishes in the same text between Stravinsky and Indigenism:
[Let me confine myself to] one angle or aspect of Stravinsky’s work, and to examine it from the point of view of the influence it has had, and is still having, on Latin-American composers. Let me say, to begin with, that … this part of the American continent – like the rest of America – enjoys a cultural heritage which is predominantly European. The indigenous element … has lost its original vigour, and its influence on some artists is more psychological than cultural or artistic. Although some composers, such as Villa-Lobos and Chavez, sometimes use material derived from primitive native sources, their technique in handling this material is European. I myself, when I was seeking inspiration from these almost legendary civilizations for my Cantata para America Magica did so either because I was attracted by the novelty of these voices from the past, or else in order to break away, if only for an instant, from the ties that bound me to my European tradition and to seek other ties which would act as a link between me and the fundamental roots from which our nations have sprung. Perhaps too, I did it as an act of homage to those ancestors of ours who inhabited our land and our mountains many centuries ago, but who failed to bequeath to us what was living or latent in their customs and culture.Footnote 28
In other words, Stravinsky showed the way to overcome the European tradition. This also enabled a – mostly imaginary – connection to Indigenous traditions. Although he would have been too young to have experienced this, we have seen how the same venue that hosted Stravinsky’s and Ginastera’s works was also a principal site of the ‘Inca craze’ as embodied in the stagings by the Misión Peruana de Arte Incaico, so his individual turn to Stravinsky was part of a wider Indigenist trend.
Brazil: Heitor Villa-Lobos
In neighbouring Brazil, Indigenism generally played a greater role than in Argentina. Perhaps its most prominent cultural expression is the Cannibalist Manifesto by Oswald de Andrade (no relation with the aforementioned Mário), with its line ‘Tupi or not Tupi: that is the question’ (quoted in English).Footnote 29 Among the Tupi, who inhabited much of the Brazilian coastline prior to colonisation, devouring defeated warriors or dead relatives was supposedly regarded as a way of honouring them and receiving their strength. Leslie Bary explains the significance for Andrade:
The M[anifesto] A[ntropófago] challenges the dualities civilization/barbarism, modern/primitive, and original/derivative, which had informed the construction of Brazilian culture since the days of the colony. In the MA, Oswald subversively appropriates the colonizer’s inscription of America as a savage territory which, once civilized, would be a necessarily muddy copy of Europe. The use of the cannibal metaphor permits the Brazilian subject to forge his specular colonial identity into an autonomous and original (as opposed to dependent, derivative) national culture. Oswald’s anthropophagist … neither apes nor rejects European culture, but ‘devours’ it, adapting its strengths and incorporating them into the native self.Footnote 30
While de Andrade thus places significant importance on Indigenous culture, the role it plays in his argument seems primarily symbolic and rhetorical.
The most commonly cited musical examples of Brazilian Indigenism are Heitor Villa-Lobos’s ballets (once again!) Amazonas and Uirapuru, which are based to a large extent on songs of Indigenous people. There is a good deal of confusion about these works: in most standard sources, including Gérard Béhague’s entry in the New Grove Dictionary, their composition is dated to 1917, following Villa-Lobos’s own claims.Footnote 31 This coincides with the visit of the Ballets russes in Rio de Janeiro, leading Hess, for example, to make a connection between that visit and the composition of the ballets, under Stravinsky’s supposed influence.Footnote 32 There are some problems with this assumption. First, it does not appear as if the Ballets russes performed Stravinsky in Rio de Janeiro (although they did perform Firebird and Petrushka¸ but not The Rite, on other dates of their South American tour). Second, there is evidence that Villa-Lobos composed both works after his first trip to Paris in 1923–4 and, due to his hostility to any suggestion of influence, falsified the dates of their composition. The works were not premiered before 1929 (Amazonas, Paris) and 1935 (Uirapuru, Buenos Aires), respectively, nor were they published, and neither does there appear to be any other clear evidence of their existence prior to the mid-1920s.Footnote 33 Villa-Lobos met Stravinsky during his sojourn in Paris and attended a performance of The Rite, presumably the 1923 performance conducted by Koussevitzky,Footnote 34 thus getting to know the work even earlier than Ginastera. Although he generally downplayed the significance of his trip and of any influences he received, he described the performance as ‘the most significant musical experience in [his] life’.Footnote 35 Ferreira, for one, has little doubt that Villa-Lobos’s ballets were deeply influenced by Stravinsky and composed during or after his sojourn in Paris.
While Uirapuru is more often related to Firebird and Petrushka, Amazonas, which is significantly subtitled Bailado Indigena Brasileira (‘Indigenous Brazilian Dance’), is said to bear the imprint of The Rite.Footnote 36 Again, the scenario is focused on an Indigenous maiden, although it lacks the element of ritual that characterises The Rite and Panambí. In terms of the music too, Stravinsky’s influence is more veiled in Villa-Lobos’s case than in Ginastera’s; he was in his thirties, not his teens, when he encountered The Rite and already an accomplished composer (even if his dating of the composition to 1917 were correct, he would have been thirty). Nevertheless, the similarities are striking: the orchestra is frequently split up into distinct, seemingly independent layers; there are frequent changes of metre, with irregular subdivisions and accents; diatonic melodies, actually or supposedly of Indigenous origin, are superimposed on, rather than accompanied by, ostinatos that appear to have a rhythmic and harmonic identity of their own, in the manner of a collage and so on. All these aspects were entirely new to Villa-Lobos’s style prior to 1923 and clearly suggest Stravinsky’s influence, although they lack specificity. One signature moment sticks out, however, and once again the reference point is ‘The Rite of Spring Chord’ from ‘Augurs of Spring’. Villa-Lobos only quotes the irregularly repeated ‘stinger chord’ in the horns, however, without the quaver pulse in the strings. Nor does he quote the chord ‘correctly’, although it is closely related. There are two different versions of the chord; both are hexachords. The first instance (rehearsal number 10) is an incomplete octatonic collection D♭-E-F-G-B♭-B, PCS 6-30 (013679), based on the fifth B♭-F in the bass (Example 1.7a). The second (rehearsal number 11) seems to be transposed up a semitone, since it is based on the fifth B-F♯ (Example 1.7b). In fact, the chord is subtly different, forming 6-z23 (023568) – indeed, the difference is so subtle that a copying error cannot be ruled out. In any case, both chords are tertial, like Stravinsky’s, and the presence of the octatonic collection demonstrates that Villa-Lobos had an understanding of Stravinsky’s harmony too. In contrast to Stravinsky and Ginastera, these are tutti chords, but this is presumably partly due to the fact that, unlike Stravinsky, Villa-Lobos did not have eight French horns at his disposal, and the predominance of low brass has a strikingly similar effect.
Example 1.7a Heitor Villa-Lobos, Amazonas: Bailado indigena brasileira, rehearsal fig. 10,.
Example 1.7b Heitor Villa-Lobos, Amazonas: Bailado indigena brasileira, rehearsal fig. 11,.
The Parisian premiere of Amazonas in 1929 was attended by Alejo Carpentier, who was briefly introduced at the beginning and who will play a greater role in the section on Cuba. He was greatly impressed, speaking of ‘the formidable voice of America, his jungle rhythms, primeval melodies and strident contrasts evoking the infancy of humanity’.Footnote 37 These terms are rather problematic – and characteristic of Carpentier, as will be seen – but they illustrate that the association with primitivism is not a product of recent scholarship.
Amazonas is not the only one of Villa-Lobos’s compositions that have been related to The Rite; a similar association for Choro No. 8 (1925) is almost a critical commonplace. But this connection is usually based on fairly general characteristics, rather than more specific techniques or borrowings. Thus, Tarasti speaks of a work ‘based on dissonances and fauvist effects’ like The Rite, while Hess states that ‘Villa-Lobos played up primitivist associations for all they were worth’.Footnote 38
As is not surprising for a composer who did not readily acknowledge the importance of other people’s work, the evidence for any integral connection between Stravinsky’s Rite and Villa-Lobos’s Indigenism is more circumstantial than in Ginastera’s case. But, as Ferreira, among others, argues, it is only after his stay in Paris that Villa-Lobos starts collecting Indigenous, folk and popular songs and melodies. His methods are also subject to controversy: while he himself has claimed to have collected melodies ‘in the field’, notably the Amazonian rainforest, others have suggested that he found what he needed in archives and recordings.Footnote 39 How exactly he satisfied his interest in Indigenous music is relatively unimportant for our purposes, however; what counts is that he did so only after encountering Stravinsky and his music, which is the only aspect of his Parisian experience he appears to have valued.
Mexico: Carlos Chávez and Silvestre Revueltas
The Mexican connection between musical Indigenism and The Rite is somewhat more complex. As in the Brazilian case, the influence of both is very well documented, but the significance of their combination is only apparent in one instance. The importance of indianismo and indigenismo in Mexico, particularly in the wake of the Revolution (1910–20), has already been alluded to. When José Vasconcelos, the hugely influential culture minister of the first post-Revolutionary government under President Álvaro Obregón from 1921 to 1924, proclaimed mestizaje, the mixing of Indigenous and criollo (Hispanic) elements that would lead to a ‘cosmic race’ (La raza cósmica), as something like a state ideology, indigenismo played an important official role that had a decisive influence notably on the visual arts, specifically muralism.Footnote 40 This ideological support for Indigenism was a double-edged sword, however, since, according to Vasconcelos, Indigenous culture was not so much valued in and of itself but destined to be amalgamated in the process of mestizaje.
As previously mentioned, the composer most frequently associated with Indigenism is Carlos Chávez. Chávez was certainly a life-long admirer of Stravinsky, and, as Saavedra has pointed out, he attended Monteux’s US-American premiere of The Rite in 1924 and eventually conducted its Mexican premiere in 1935.Footnote 41 Yet there seems to be no connection between his Indigenist leanings and his esteem for Stravinsky. The most famous example of Chávez’s early Indigenism, the ballet El fuego nuevo, dates from 1921, when he could not have known The Rite, and the work’s primitivism, although beyond doubt, is of a different sort. Saavedra mentions ‘driving pulse, changes of meter, repetition, and open fifths …, [which,] together with dissonant harmonies and the relentless extension of certain procedures, move the work in the direction of primitivism’. Where Stravinsky’s paganism famously focused on rhythmic-metric complexity, Chávez’s Indigenism, by contrast, emphasised ‘rhythmic simplicity, even monotony’.Footnote 42
Four years later (1925), Chávez composed another Indigenist ballet, Los cuatro soles (1925).Footnote 43 On this occasion, he used a contemporary Mazahua melody among composed tunes; otherwise, his representation of pre-Columbian music and culture is virtually unchanged, save for another stereotypical signifier, namely pentatonicism. Saavedra suggests that ‘certain passages in Los cuatro soles certainly seem to recall Stravinsky’s ballet [The Rite of Spring]’,Footnote 44 but even that seems to go further than is justified: its primitivism sounds so generic, it is more reminiscent of Orff than Stravinsky.
A better candidate is Sensemayá (1937–8) by Chávez’s close associate, Silvestre Revueltas. The work is routinely associated with The Rite: for instance, Robert Stevenson’s entry on Revueltas in the New Grove emphasises that ‘Revueltas’s principal melodies, no matter how encased in dissonant counterpoint, are always tuneful and repetitive in a manner comparable with that of the Rite of Spring’.Footnote 45 Charles K. Hoag, in his perceptive article on Sensemayá, pursues a similar line of argument but establishes a connection with Mexican traditional and popular music (if in language that now seems somewhat outdated and problematic):
The ostinatos in his Sensemayá and Caminos, though related to those heard in Rite, seem to have naturally risen out of the folk musics of the Spanish, Indian, and African ethnic components of the Latin American population. Like the murals of his countryman Diego Rivera, Revueltas’ music celebrates the folkloric essence of Mexican culture but with clear technical ties to the European masters of the early twentieth century.Footnote 46
The background to the work, however, lies not in Mexican and Indigenist but in Afro-Cuban culture. Sensemayá is based on the poem of the same name by the Black Cuban writer Nicolás Guillén, with whom Revueltas shared a common communist worldview and experience in the Spanish Civil War. Guillén’s poem describes or re-enacts a magical snake rite associated with the Yemọja (or Yemanya) cult, a religious practice of West- and Central-African origin, transplanted to the Americas through the slave trade. The precise connection between the orchestral composition and the poem has long been unclear, and it was originally thought that a lost earlier version for smaller forces included a vocal part which was discarded in the version for full orchestra. As Peter Garland and Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon have established, however, Revueltas had written the words underneath the melodies and ostinatos in the instrumental parts.Footnote 47 The details are unimportant for our purposes except that it may be relevant that the work’s rhythmic-metric structure, including the driving 7/8 ostinato with accent on the last quaver pervading the work (see Example 1.8a), is based on the poem’s declamatory rhythm. For his part, Zohn-Muldoon seems intent to ‘naturalise’ the Afro-Cuban element by suggesting that Revueltas may have been referring to the Aztec practice of human sacrifice.Footnote 48 Whether it is necessary to downplay the work’s foreign qualities or to emphasise an often sensationalised aspect of Aztec society is another matter. Yet the reference to ritual is of course significant in relation to The Rite, even though the composition is not a ballet – but, then, Mexico did not have a ballet troupe at the time (most of Chávez’s ballets were intended for performance in the USA).
With its basis in layered ostinatos with cross-accents, heavy use of percussion and brass attacks, the work is certainly strongly reminiscent of The Rite. As Examples 1.8a,b and 1.9a,b show, there are also apparent direct references. Example 1.8 compares the most pervasive ostinatos underlying the two works, respectively. While they are not similar in terms of pitch and interval content, the contour and repetition after four notes of equal duration is notable, although this is curtailed after two notes in the Revueltas. Furthermore, the very persistence of the ostinatos is a common and unusual trait. The ‘brass attacks’ in Example 1.9, which are repeated many times in both compositions, are even more recognisable. In both cases, a series of equal note repetitions descends chromatically, spanning a whole-tone, landing on the downbeat (the Stravinsky example technically starts on a downbeat too, but it seems to be clearly oriented towards the second downbeat). Revueltas shortens Stravinsky’s quintuplets to triplets and adds parallel fourths (another common signifier for the archaic or primitive), but the gesture is clearly identifiable. According to Hoag’s analysis, the influence goes deeper, pointing to the pervasive use of octatonicism and the 3-7 (025) set.Footnote 49 Thus, like in Villa-Lobos’s case, Revueltas not only included references to The Rite but also adopted aspects of Stravinsky’s harmonic organisation. On this occasion, Stravinsky’s Scythians are the descendants of the Yoruba (the largest ethnic group of enslaved Africans in Cuba), rather than an Indigenous group (whether or not Revueltas had the latter in mind), but, as in the other cases discussed here, the emphasis lies on a non-Western, non-Christian ritual.
Example 1.8a Silvestre Revueltas, Sensemayá, rehearsal fig. 3, double bass,.
Example 1.8b Igor Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring, rehearsal fig. 12, b. 4, Vl. 1,.
Example 1.9a Silvestre Revueltas, Sensemayá, rehearsal fig. 23 with upbeat, trumpets,.
Example 1.9b Igor Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring, rehearsal fig. 151, trombone,.
Cuba: Alejo Carpentier and Amadeo Roldán
The final stop on this tour is Cuba, and the primary connection on this occasion is not a composer but a writer, Alejo Carpentier. Carpentier is often regarded as the precursor of the ‘boom’ in Latin-American literature, just as his concept of lo real maravilloso (‘the marvellous real’) is related to but not identical with the more generally recognised ‘magic realism’.Footnote 50 A proficient pianist and composer, Carpentier was influential as an (ethno)musicologist (the distinction was and still is less significant in Latin America) and critic as well as a writer, being remembered not least for his history of Cuban music, Music in Cuba, which was quoted at the outset and which is still widely read.Footnote 51 Born in Lausanne of French and Russian parents, he grew up in Cuba, and although he never lost his marked French accent, he fervently identified as a Cuban. After a short period of study in 1921, he worked mostly as a journalist.Footnote 52 In this role he supported the avant-garde, the Afro-Cuban movement and the radical left, which quickly got him into trouble. After a spell in prison in 1927, he fled to Paris in March 1928, where he lived in exile until 1939, after which he spent periods of time in Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela and, again, Paris. He only finally returned to Cuba after the Revolution of 1959, although he became Ambassador to France in 1966.Footnote 53 The significance of this unusual biography lies in his biculturalism: he was as deeply immersed in European, in particular French, as in Cuban and Latin-American culture. Likewise, he was similarly at home in music as he was in literature, knowing many of the leading composers of the day personally and being a close friend and collaborator of, among others, Darius Milhaud in France (having written the libretto for his cantata Incantations) and Amadeo Roldán and Alejandro García Caturla in Cuba, the country’s leading composers at the time.
Connoisseurs of Carpentier’s work will be reminded of his last novel, La consagración de la primavera (1978), homonymous with the Spanish title of Stravinsky’s work (scandalously, the book has never been translated into English, although there are French and German translations, among others). But the novel is only the culmination of a nearly life-long fascination. Already in the 1920s, when, together with the composer Amadeo Roldán, Carpentier set up the Conciertos de música nueva (‘Concerts of New Music’), Stravinsky had pride of place among the composers they championed. According to Vega Pichaco, Carpentier’s first article on Stravinsky dates from 1924 when he was not yet twenty, and Rae quotes him hailing The Rite of Spring as ‘the ideal model for Cuban musical nationalism’ during this period.Footnote 54 This raises the question how he could have known the work, given that it would not be performed in Cuba for decades and no recording was yet available.Footnote 55 Pichaco quotes an anecdote according to which the score was stocked by Casa Iglesias, a music shop, and that Carpentier and ‘his gang’ (consisting of Roldán and García Caturla, among others) used to whistle the opening bassoon tune as a secret sign.Footnote 56
As Rae states, ‘[w]ith Stravinsky as his model, [Carpentier] transported Caribbean Africanisms to Paris as eagerly as he transposed pre-Christian Russian paganisms to Latin America, his collaborations with Roldán and García Caturla representing the quintessence of his aesthetic direction’.Footnote 57 Roldán, who was mixed-race (although he could pass as White), and García Caturla, who was married to a Black wife, were firmly in the progressive and ‘pro-Africanist’ camp. Among the fruits of their shared enthusiasm for Afro-Cuban traditions are La rebambaramba (1928) and El milagro de anaquillé (1928), two ballets Roldán wrote on scenarios provided by Carpentier. La rebambaramba, Roldán’s most popular work, focuses on the traditional carnival procession of the Black population on Three-King’s-Day (6 January). El milagro de anaquillé revolves around the restaging of a ritual of the Abakuá, a male Afro-Cuban secret society originating from the Cross River region in West Africa.Footnote 58 Carpentier and Roldán had observed Abakuá rituals during fieldwork in the footsteps of the pioneering, if controversial, ethnomusicologist Fernando Ortiz Fernández.Footnote 59 The resulting works, specifically La rebamberamba, might be candidates for a response to The Rite (although Tomé relates El milagro to Parade by Satie, Cocteau, Picasso and Massine).Footnote 60 If so, this is harder to detect in this case than in the others discussed here, since the most conspicuous element is Roldán’s penchant for Afro-Cuban percussion rhythms as observed during his fieldwork. However, the legitimation if not inspiration for this emphasis on rhythm and percussion was found in the ‘primitivism’ of Stravinsky and his supposed emphasis on rhythm. This, at least, was Carpentier’s reading, who, as we have seen, drew a direct connection between Stravinsky’s rhythms in The Rite and Abakuá rituals in his Music in Cuba.Footnote 61 In that context, he also refers to Milhaud’s use of Brazilian samba rhythms (a somewhat problematic comparison in the context of nationalist aesthetics, considering that Milhaud was French, not Brazilian) and Mexican mural painting by Diego Rivera and Orozco. On another occasion, he went a step further, claiming that the Blacks of his country had composed Les Noces (the second of Stravinsky’s work that Carpentier admired almost as much as The Rite) long before Stravinsky. Or, as he summed it up even more pithily: ¡Abajo la lira, arriba el bongó!Footnote 62 (‘Down with the lyre, long live the bongo!’). Not surprisingly, he was ambivalent about neoclassicism, thus agreeing with Ginastera in his clear preference for the early Stravinsky.
Carpentier’s interest in Afro-Cuban culture was highly controversial in Cuba, which, at that time, was no less racist than its US neighbour. While this admiration has to be respected, the reasons for it and the connections Carpentier established between Afro-Cubanism, Indigenism and Stravinskian paganism have understandably proved contentious. As Chornik has pointed out, he had joined the Afro-Cuban movement in the interwar years and ‘became involved with the Bureau d’Ethnologie Haïtienne, whilst writing for white Cubans and a French audience swept up in a craze of négrophilie’.Footnote 63 As she goes on to explain, he was influenced by Lucien Lévy-Brühl’s La mentalité primitive (1922), so his fascination has to be seen in the context of 1920s anthropology, which, despite its seemingly positive appreciation of non-Western cultures, appears racist in today’s climate. It is this notion of ‘primitivism’ that allowed Carpentier to establish a connection between Stravinsky’s paganism and Afro-Cubanism. In addition, he was in thrall to Oswald Spengler, seeing Europe as a civilisation in decline, as opposed to the ascending culture of Latin America, propelled by the supposed primitivism of its Indigenous and Black populations – that Spengler, although a critic of the Nazis, is regarded as one of the intellectual founders of fascism only goes to illustrate the problematic nature of some of Carpentier’s ideological framework. Indeed, Moran points out that Carpentier conflates Indigenous and Afro-Cuban peoples, arguing that the role played by the Piaroa Indians in the earlier novel Los pasos perdidos (1953) is equivalent to that of the Yoruba in La consagración de la primavera,Footnote 64 a conclusion that can also be drawn from Chornik’s discussion of Carpentier’s scholarly work, notably El orígen de la música (which provided the model for Los pasos perdidos) and the chapter on ‘The Blacks’ (Los negros) in Music in Cuba.Footnote 65 Luiza Franco Moreira similarly points to the limitations of Carpentier’s position, arguing that ‘the outlook of an outsider, privileged and white, comes to the fore’.Footnote 66 Moran goes further:
Carpentier’s almost obsessive striving to empower the black and the Indian often relies on stereotypes of negritude and Indianity – physical strength, sexual prowess, an inborn musicality and sense of rhythm, solemnity, stoicism, durability etc. – germane to the alien tradition which he is ostensibly seeking to overthrow, so that black skin remains hidden beneath white masks. This occasionally wearisome essentialism is often accompanied by an alarming reductionism (which, ironically, Carpentier interprets as universalism) on the historical plane.Footnote 67
It is difficult to disagree with this reading, except to point out that ‘striving to empower the black and the Indian’ was a courageous, important and progressive step at the time, and this historical context needs to be recognised.
A more detailed reading of La consagración de la primavera arrives at a similarly ambiguous conclusion. It is a novel of revolution, constructing a grand historical arch from the Spanish Civil War (looking further back to the Russian Revolution) to the Cuban Revolution, ending with the successful repulsion of the attempted Bay of Pigs Invasion. It is told, in alternating chapters, through the perspectives of its two main protagonists, Vera, a former member of the Ballets russes living in exile, and Enrique, a Cuban exile who has swapped his comfortable upper-class existence with life in the international brigades in the Spanish Civil War. Both meet during the Spanish Civil War – Vera as the lover of a Parisian intellectual and Enrique as his comrade-in-arms who takes the former’s place after his death in battle. Enrique shares many of Carpentier’s own traits: the author too came from an upper-middle-class background (if not quite as privileged as Enrique), and the circumstances of his imprisonment and flight into exile are likewise similar (although Carpentier did not attempt to shoot the President, like the fictional Enrique). Furthermore, Carpentier initially studied architecture, Enrique’s profession, and like him he spent many years in Venezuela. The main difference is that Carpentier never fought in either the Spanish Civil War or the Bay of Pigs Invasion, although, living in Paris on the earlier and in Havanna during the later occasion, he must have known many who did.
Vera, by contrast, shares some traits with Stravinsky (while obviously not ‘embodying’ him): like him, she hails from the landed gentry, and she too is an exile from the Revolution and remains a political conservative if not reactionary throughout much of the book, undergoing a gradual conversion that only reaches its conclusion near the end, giving the novel a strong didactic flavour. Her name may also refer to Stravinsky’s second wife, herself a dancer. Through Vera, Carpentier evidently attempted to reconcile the contradictions inherent in the novel and in his aesthetics more widely, namely making the work of an anti-revolutionary the embodiment of aesthetic and political revolution. Having performed in the Ballets russes’ productions of The Rite (in the corps, not as soloist), Vera increasingly sees it as her life’s work to re-stage it. After moving with Enrique to Havana, she initially teaches ballet to the daughters of the upper classes, until she opens a second school in the city centre in which she works with the multiracial working-class kids of the area. With their supposedly innate sense of rhythm, these children immediately grasp the revolutionary and liberating nature of Stravinsky’s work, opening the prospect for a production that would finally do it justice – more than the Ballets russes, stuck as they were in European conventions and sentiments, ever could. Except that Battista’s henchmen brutally destroy the school and, with it, the dream, which, supposedly, can only finally come to fruition after the Revolution in a Socialist Cuba.
It is after experiencing an epiphany when witnessing an Abakuá ritual like the one that Carpentier and Roldán had attended that Vera articulates the connection to Stravinsky: ‘If Nijinsky had been able to count on such dancers, his first choreography of The Rite of Spring would not have been the failure it was. This was what Stravinsky’s music demanded: the dancers of Guanabacoa, not the soft and effeminate ones of Dhiagilev’s ballet.’Footnote 68 Guanabacoa is a suburb of Havana with a large Black population, near Regla, which was mentioned at the outset, and where Carpentier had witnessed an Abakuá ritual himself. Before long, now told from her own perspective, Vera invites the dancers from Guanabacoa to perform for her students and, as an experiment, play the ‘Sacrificial Dance’ from The Rite to them. Of course, they not only show an intuitive understanding but also see similarities to their own music, notably the Efí and Efó rhythms. These are indeed lineages of Abakuá music, but any similarity to Stravinsky’s ‘Sacrificial Dance’, beyond a general emphasis on cross-accents and syncopation, has probably to be regarded as fanciful.Footnote 69 It is Vera’s mulatto star pupil Calixto who is able to dance to the music in an improvisatory way, thus enabling Vera to experience The Rite in a new way:
What I had just seen had opened up a world of possibilities for me. In a few seconds my traditional vision of The Rite, based on Roerich’s first scenario which, to tell the truth, had always left me somewhat unsatisfied, had changed … No. Now I did not see this ending as a sacrificial rite but as the ascending vernal rite, promising fecundity, that it must have been at the dawn of time.Footnote 70
It seems hardly necessary to point out the frequent references to the ‘instinctive’, ‘primordial’ and related categories. Clearly, the notion that Abakuá music and dance may not only be the product of intuition but also of a process of development, refinement and reflection, or that the individual musicians and dancers are likely to have undergone years of disciplined training, and that Afro-Cuban, Indigenous and Scythian cultures are highly distinctive and not at all alike or, for that matter, ‘primitive’ did not occur to Carpentier. To be fair, these are the views of the characters, which may be distinct from those of the author, but what is expressed in the novel is very closely related to Carpentier’s scholarly and critical work.
La consagración de la primavera is a latecomer among the works discussed here, which otherwise originate from the first half of the twentieth century. In that sense, it cannot be considered a direct response to Stravinsky’s epochal Rite along the same lines as the pieces by Ginastera, Villa-Lobos or Revueltas, or for that matter, Roldán. However, although Carpentier later distanced himself from his early portrayals of Afro-Cuban culture, such as in his first novel Ecué-Yamba-O (1933), judging them superficial and uncomprehending,Footnote 71 his views on Stravinsky and primitivism did not change drastically in the roughly fifty years separating La rebamberamba and La consagración, and in many ways the later work appears as the consummation of a lifelong fascination with Stravinsky’s work as well as Abakuá ritual and music. To the end, Carpentier saw an inherent and profound connection between the ‘primitive’ qualities of Stravinsky’s paganism and Abakuá dance, even going so far as to hear (or fantasise) similarities between them and suggesting that Guanabacoa dancers would present a truer realisation of Stravinsky’s aesthetic ideas than any performance by the Ballets russes.
Conclusion
To an extent, Carpentier articulated the reason why so many Latin-American composers were fascinated by Stravinsky’s Rite and why his example served as an inspiration or legitimation for exploring their own mythical pasts and non-Western sources of musical modernism. There are significant differences, however: Ginastera was thinking of the Indigenous peoples of Northern Argentina, not of Afro-Argentines (an arguably neglected part of Argentina’s history and culture), and a similar point can be made about Villa-Lobos (although he was otherwise receptive towards Black music). As we have seen, however, Revueltas’s Sensemayá is at least ostensibly on an Afro-Cuban subject; whether the composer’s work has nevertheless to be seen in the context of indigenismo, which is a more recognisable trend in Mexico, is a moot point. Neither would these composers necessarily have shared Carpentier’s problematic anthropological views. While a certain ideological adherence to primitivism is arguably inherent in their basic conceptions, it does not necessarily follow that they would have regarded Indigenous, Afro-Cuban and Scythian cultures as essentially primitive and interchangeable.
This raises the question to what extent these artists knew of one another, shared ideas and formed something like a movement. We have already seen that Ginastera later became aware that his fascination was shared by others. Likewise, Carpentier and Villa-Lobos were close friends, particularly during Carpentier’s exile in Paris, when the Brazilian composer had also returned to the city and when Carpentier attended the premiere of Amazonas.Footnote 72 Carpentier also knew and appreciated Revueltas’s Sensemayá: it is named as one of the compositions that Vera in La consagración de la primavera is planning to perform to complement her projected staging of The Rite.Footnote 73 There is little indication of a reciprocal influence on this occasion, however, although Revueltas’s selection of an actual Afro-Cuban poet, rather than a white intellectual who saw the value of Afro-Cuban culture primarily in its primitivism, provides an indication of his priorities. It is probably fair to say, then, that the group discussed here had some knowledge and appreciation of one another’s activities, leading to a sense of collective endeavour, but with little evidence of a cohesive movement.
Nevertheless, indigenismo was such an influential discourse throughout much of Latin America and so closely tied to musical nationalism as the dominant ideology that it must have had an important impact on the reception of Stravinsky’s work from the start, converting its paganism into a culturally potent and transformative force, which suggested ways of renewing composition and forging a path to modernity that relied on home-grown materials and histories rather than imports from former colonisers – even if such a cultural import provided the inspiration. This search for local ties that can only be guaranteed through Indigenism has to be seen in the context of the peculiar anxieties of settler colonialism. It is therefore no surprise that the overwhelmingly white, middle-class, urban composers had little in common with pre-Columbian or contemporaneous Indigenous communities.
The overview provided here is not intended to be comprehensive. As the parallels to Tan Dun and John Anthill indicated, there are likely more examples of compositions in response to Stravinsky’s Rite from the region and from others around the world. What these examples demonstrate is the importance of transnational connections in the historiography of musical modernism. On this occasion, there are several significant points of contact: first, between Stravinsky and the Latin-American composers and critics; second, between the individuals in the latter group, such as the relation between Carpentier and Villa-Lobos; and third, the parallels and differences to the reception of The Rite in other parts of the world, as indicated by the examples of Tan Dun and John Anthill, or, for that matter, the lack of a similar response in Europe or North America.
