From Blog to Book: After the Proposal

Status Update and Writing Process

Hello, everyone! It’s been months since I’ve posted on this blog, though I’ve been active on social media—admittedly more with my personal accounts than with the blog’s Twitter and Facebook—to announce excellent news about the book: One month ago, I signed a contract with Clemson University Press for them to publish my book based on this blog. The book is another step toward becoming real!

Of course, there are still plenty of steps between here and the published book. For example, we haven’t completely settled on the title. The contract refers to the book as Riotous Rites and Other Lies about Classical Music—for now. I also have about twenty-five chapters of content to write, as well as a conclusion.

I’ve also had unavoidable delays: chemo side effects, my son being home all day during summer break, etc. 

Whisper (the cat) has been an outstanding writing assistant, aside from behaving like I'm his assistant

My Writing Process: Last week I worked on the introduction and the first chapter, writing and revising the intro to the point I felt secure enough to show it to friends for feedback. Now that I have their suggestions, I’m revising the intro again before I send it to my managing editor for her comments.

I’ve found I work best when I receive feedback early in my writing process because it helps me adjust my tone before drafting the rest of the book. I'll continue asking for comments and suggestions as I go, this time focusing on scholars who are experts (or have at least shown an interest) in the topic at hand. Once I complete writing the whole book, chapter by chapter, I’ll return to the introduction and revise it according to what the book really does instead of what I thought I wanted it to do.

For this early round of feedback, I purposely asked more non-music scholar friends than fellow musicologists because I consider Riotous Rites a trade book as well as a scholarly one. I don’t know whether you, reader, consider yourself a music scholar or not; in any case, I’m grateful you've come to my blog and read this far into my rambling personal post. Thank you.

I invite all of you to buy the book—or request it from a library—in spring/summer 2021.

Too Long, Didn’t Read: I signed a contract with a Clemson University Press for a book based on this blog. Writing has gone well so far, so I am aiming for a deadline that would put it on the shelves mid-2021.

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Did Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring incite a riot at its premiere?

I knew this entry was inevitable from the moment I had the idea to start this blog. Of all the classical music myths, this might be the one most deeply entrenched in the popular imagination: the riot at the premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring.

The Rite of Spring premiered on May 29, 1913 at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris. The ballet depicts ritual sacrifice in prehistoric Russia, or at least what Stravinsky and his collaborators imagined “prehistoric Russia” to be. The premiere was expected to be a major cultural event, given the talent involved.

The Ballets Russes—literally, “Russian Ballet”—was a hot ticket, as Parisians were drawn to the Eastern exoticism of previous productions, including Firebird (1910) and Petrushka (1911), both of which had music composed by the young up-and-comer Stravinsky. Vaslav Nijinsky, the choreographer, was known for his shocking and often risqué choreography (such as his 1912 performance of Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l’Après-midi d'un faune, reproduced in this video).

The performance was unlike anything the audience expected: the costumes were ugly, the choreography heavy, and the music harsh. In the words of 21st-century music critic Ivan Hewett:

“The audience was shocked – and with good reason. Stravinsky’s score for The Rite of Spring contradicted every rule about what music should be. The sounds are often deliberately harsh…The music was cacophonously loud, assaulting the ears with thunderous percussion and shrieking brass. Rhythmically it was complex in a completely unprecedented way.”

Some in the audience booed and jeered at the performance, causing others to defend the artistic integrity of the ballet with shouts and insults, causing such a ruckus that no one could even hear the music, including the dancers. The fighting in the audience got so bad that some resorted to physical violence, causing a riot that overshadowed the actual performance.

So the story goes.

Even sites that aren’t devoted to classical music have published articles covering the riot, especially in light of the premiere’s centenary in 2013. As for classical music sites, you can count on it to appear on lists like “Top Five Crazy Riots in Classical Music” and “10 OMG moments in classical music” Radiolab devoted an episode of their podcast to reimagining the premiere “through the lens of modern neurology.” And, I confess, as a grad student I even taught this to a bunch of unsuspecting undergrads in a music appreciation course. But here’s the problem:

The riot never happened.