Finding Patterns in the Chaos
You are sitting near the front of the stage at Paris's Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. It is the 29th May 1913. You have watched a pleasant ballet, “Les Sylphides” - Chopin music with some pretty ballerinas in white dresses.
The curtain drops and there is a pause as the conductor prepares for the next piece.
An instrument starts playing a slow melody, high up. Is it a bassoon, playing that high? It is soon joined by other woodwind instruments, playing different tunes. For the next couple of minutes the woodwind scrabble about, playing bits of tunes that start and stop and overlap and develop into a rather noisy profusion of half-tunes, occasionally “supported” by some quiet strings.
What is that about?
Then the music stops briefly and curtain rises as the bassoon plays that beginning tune again.
This time the strings start repetitively playing two quick plucked notes, then go on to play a loud, heavy chord. At apparently random times the rest of the orchestra thump down on top of one of the chords, then the woodwind play a couple of random, shrieking chords on top.
What is going on?!?
On stage, a bunch of ballerinas in folk costumes hold themselves in awkward positions and as the orchestra thump about they too thump about and stamp their feet!
“What is going on?!? What on earth do they think they are doing? This is chaos! It makes no sense, no sense at all to me!”
You are not the only one. This is the famous, riotous premiere of the Rite of Spring. The chaos is intensified as people get up, shouting and jumping about, either in protest or support!
So how do you “find a pattern in the chaos”? How do you come to make some sense of this?
Is it just a matter of time and a few more listenings? Would it help if you thought of this as some kind of "Marionette Ballet"?
Many years later a friend puts a disc on the record player. It is one of his favourite records by the Mothers of Invention.
The band play slowly and one chap starts singing some odd words. (Something to do with a lovely girl and some prunes? Eh!?) Then the band pauses, the voice holds the note, the drums roll and then...
The band break into a sort of fanfare while the vocalist sings a bit of the fanfare tune over the top. Then the rhythm section start playing a strong rhythm in an irregular, awkward time with parts of the percussion playing against that rhythm.
Over this the voices are playing around with bits of the woodwind intro. A chap is talking in the background. Other voices are singing bits and crying out. Another chap starts chanting “dook, dook, dook, dook of prunes”.
Chaos!
After a minute of this chaos the band lurch back into the main tune.
A pattern? Hmmm.
Actually, the "... sort of fanfare..." of this chaotic middle section is a quote from the Rite of Spring (from the Ritual Action Of the Ancestors). Plus one of the voices and the soprano sax are playing random variations around the bassoon introduction to the Rite!
Final Thought:
Perhaps one does not find a pattern - but perhaps one starts to see some clarity? We could come back to this question.