That Rising, Sinking Spring Feeling

When Stravinsky wrote the Rite of Spring, he wasn't referring to some gentle warming, nascent buds prying apart moist soil to peek colours charmingly into the mundane; he was referring to the violent crack of change from ice-locked and barren to fertile and frantic, the fierce struggle for survival, the battle for nesting grounds, the savagery of the fight to feed. When this ground-breaking symphony premiered in Paris, at the moment the trombones made that tearing, descending minor noise, riots broke out.

Women have it easier in spring. Men veer like the seasons from immobility to movement. Here comes the sap; there goes my flatlining winter testosterone. It takes courage and a degree of resignation to take the flow with the ebb. Men ride a rollercoaster of awakening, and it takes the entire gamut of civilised procedures to hold us in reasonable check. I could shag three times a day, and I want to shout at the spring-singing birds to shut the fuck up, so that I can hear myself sink. Think.

Stability left unbroken becomes stratification, and while I know that the old structures stultify our natural desire for change and must be replaced by the new, progress can seem like chaos, and spring often is exactly that.

We never do think of the trombone as being a revolutionary instrument, but in Igor's hands and ears, it was. Who would have thought that the rite of spring would sound like this?


spring innit