Albright, Daniel: Class lecture: 15.

THE RITE OF SPRING

Listen to Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring (1913).

Today’s themes: the première–riot as the proper response to Modernism.

Nijinsky’s choreography: the hunched-in as opposed to the turned-out;
Dalcrozean arithmetic. Stravinsky’s hard bits of rhythm. Roerich’s
archeology of pagan Russia. T. S. Eliot on Stravinsky’s convergence of the
archaic and the up-to-date. The odd look of the Joffrey reconstruction of the
ballet.

The desire to capture the body, which we’ve been studying in Hulme and
Braque and others, and will be finding in D. H. Lawrence, leads to a fascination
with primitivism, on the theory, perhaps not completely obvious, that in
prehistoric times people lived more intensely corporeal lives than we
desiccated civilized folks live today. Insofar as Cubism began with Les
demoiselles d’Avignon, Cubism has a strong primitivist impulse: you reduce
visual phenomenon to cube, cylinder, cone, the elementary forms of
perception, as if savages saw stark rudiments instead of the surfaces of things.
At the end of this course we’ll be studying D. H. Lawrence, one of the greatest
of all primitivists; and to introduce the world of primitivism in music today I’ll
cite a passage from Lawrence’s novel Women in Love (1920, but finished in
1916), in which the hero remembers an African statuette that he saw in the
living room of a London painter with advanced taste:

It was a woman, with hair dressed high, a tall, slim, elegant figure from West
Africa, in dark wood, glossy and suave. It was a woman, with hair dressed
high, like a melon-shaped dome. He remembered her vividly: she was one of
his soul’s intimates. Her body was long and elegant, her faced was crushed
tiny like a beetle’s, she had rows of round heavy collars, like a column of
quoits, on her neck. He remembered her: her astonishing cultured elegance,
her diminished, beetle face, the astounding long elegant body, on short, ugly
legs, with such protuberant buttocks, so weighty and unexpected below her
slim long loins. She knew what he himself did not know. She had thousands
of years of purely sensual, purely unspiritual knowledge behind her. [. . .]
knowledge such as the beetles have, which live purely within the world of
corruption and cold dissolution. This was way her face looked like a beetle’s:
this was why the Egyptians worship the ball-rolling scarab [. . .]

Modernist Primitivism tends to be just such a mixture of fascination, disgust,

and something like terror: the statuette is, for Lawrence, an image of a knowing
body, a body that Western civilization has lost through the bleaching,
attenuating effect of cerebral thought–a body that is the source of wonder, and
yet is intimate with dung and pus. The co-presence of sexual desire and sexual
anxiety, the eerie intimacy of love and death, are the motivating forces of
Primitivism, from Gauguin’s Tahiti to Picasso and onward.

Primitivism in music tends to differ from Primitivism in literature and painting,

in that the darker side is sometimes minimized. When folksong researchers
carried their recording equipment to out-of-the-way places, they reported their
experiences in an almost completely positive manner: here, in Transylvania, or
Lincolnshire, was something unspoiled and precious. One such researcher was
the Australian-born Percy Grainger, who spoke of the primitive in the most
ebullient manner conceivable: Grainger considered “the root emotion of my
life: the love of savagery, the belief that savages are sweeter and more
peaceable and artistic than civilized people, the belief that primitiveness is
purity and civilization filthy corruption, the agony of seeing civilization advance
and pass its blighting hand over the world.”

But musical Primitivism wasn’t a matter of pure research; it also involved the
application of the fruits of research into sophisticated new contexts. And when
folklore-collecting composers wrote pieces that evoked the archaic instead of
directly transcribing, the pieces often had something of the frightening quality
that Lawrence found in African statuettes. Here is the Hungarian composer
Béla Bartók transcribing a real folk dance from Rumania:

Bartók, Rumanian Dance 5: Rumanian polka

It’s exciting, it’s catchy, it’s cheerful. But here is Bartók writing a primitivist
piece of his own:

Bartók, Allegro barbaro

(Here Bartók himself plays the piano.) This uses some of the rhythmic tricks
that Bartók found in his folk research, but there’s a frenzy, a savagery to it not
found in the originals: this is music for Neanderthals as imagined by one of the
most sophisticated musical intelligences of the twentieth century. Indeed it’s
possible that it’s a sort of parody of the barbaric: at this level of advancement
it’s hard to tell Bartók’s intention. I spoke at the beginning of this course of the
convergences of extremes in Modernism–the way in which, for example, the up-
to-date and the prehistoric become one and same, the whole urgent complex of
attraction and revulsion is clearly on display:

The law of parity: every value system presupposes a counter-value exactly

equal. Bartók’s stage pieces, such as Duke Bluebeard’s Castle (1911; 1918)
and The Miraculous Mandarin (1918-19; 1926) depict, not cheerful peasants
clapping their hands in a round dance, but Symbolist spectacles full of sadism
and Angst–such as a murdered Mandarin, dripping blood, who refuses to die
until he embraces a prostitute. Even in Bartók’s music, the ritualistic aspect of
Primitivism is sometimes transposed into expressions of terror, terror before
archaic sexual intensities that are beyond our power to comprehend.

Similarly, in the most famous of all Primitivist experiments, The Rite of Spring,
the chief rite of spring is the mass execution of a virgin. The defining moment
of Modernism–not just in music, but in all the arts–took place on a hot day in
Paris, 29 May 1913, at the première of Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring.
This established the gold standard for twentieth-century artistic scandals: from
that day on, young composers such as George Antheil clung to the hope that
they, too, could achieve a comparable riot. At The Rite of Spring, a rite of
spring occurred in the auditorium as well as on stage.

The ballet had a rich cast of characters. The organizer of the Ballets Russes
was Serge Diaghilev (Sergei Dyagilev,1872-1929), a man of sensitive taste in
the field of the astonishing. The importance of his work as an impresario can’t
be overstated. He promoted many different kinds of musical stagecraft, but his
initial notoriety grew out of his presentations of flamboyant, sexually charged,
sensorily overloaded exoticism–the advanced art of Russia, often of an
orientalizing tendency, was little known in the west. He changed forever the
notion of ballet.

There is nothing odder about the careers of Diaghilev and of Stravinsky himself
than the fact that they chose to make their reputations in the field of ballet.
Ballet at the turn of the century was a threadbare, somewhat disreputable
genre. With the exception of Tchaikovsky’s three masterpieces and a few works
by Adam and Delibes, the music of repertory ballets tended to be perfunctory if
not actively awful. Degas’s endless paintings of ballet dancers usually show
dancers not taking wing in ecstatic leaps, but somewhat put-upon, garish, even
seedy girls going through mechanical exercises:

91. Degas, Ballet Rehearsal (1875)

The man with the stick seems perfectly capable of beating the girls; Degas’s
ballet pictures, like many of his pictures of women, have a deliberately
contorted, somewhat unpleasant quality, as if he were investigating the
aesthetics of painful twists and extensions of the body. A Degas dancer tends
to be a woman twisting himself in order to please a man; and in Degas’s day,
the ballet had the reputation of a venue where wealthy men inspected the
supple charms of young women with an eye toward finding mistresses.

Diaghilev changed all that. His lead dancer and chief sex object at the time
was male: Vaslav Nijinsky (1890-1950), a short, somewhat stocky man capable
of inhumanly high leaps–one critic called him a “celestial insect.” Nijinsky
wasn’t himself drawn to men, but was willing to become Diaghilev’s lover; he
was puzzled that Diaghilev, a passive homosexual, liked to play the woman’s
role in bed. Some critics charge Diaghilev with singlehandedly homoeroticizing
the whole art of ballet. Nijinsky appeared on stage in a variety of roles, from
blue god to slave sex toy–these roles were often Dionysiac in character, but
highly mannered, somewhat fey:

92. Nijinsky as faun, photo

93. Nijinsky as faun, Bakst

Here is Nijinsky as the faun in the famous ballet of Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-
midi d’un faune, choreographed by Nijinksy himself. Nijinsky did little work as a
choreographer, but his work in that field was astonishingly original: he
conceived the faun ballet as a Greek frieze, in which the dancers appeared
almost exclusively in profile. The end of the ballet caused a great scandal:
Nijinsky as the faun grabbed the scarf of the nymph as she danced out of his
grasp, and proceeded to masturbate with the scarf as the curtain came down.
But this scandal was as nothing compared to the scandal of another ballet he
choreographed, The Rite of Spring.

The painter mainly responsible for the ritzy, glitzy riot of oriental color was Lev
Bakst, whose painting of Nijinsky as faun you’re looking at. But the painter of
the stage sets for The Rite of Spring, as well as the ballet’s scenarist and chief
instigator, was Nicholas Roerich (Nikolay Ryorikh, 1874-1947), painter,
archeologist, and folklorist, specializing in pagan Russia.

94. Roerich, design for first act of Sacre

This is Roerich’s final design for the first act set of The Rite of Spring. It shows
a burial mound of the sort built by the Scythians in prehistoric Russia. Roerich’s
scenario for the ballet described the ceremonies and ritual games preparatory
to the sacrifice of a virgin, the Elect, the chief female character, to the pagan
sun god Yarilo. The nineteenth-century folklorist Alexander Afanasyev, whose
monumental works Roerich read carefully, described Yarilo as follows: “The
significance of Yarilo is wholly explained by his name [“ardent god”] and in the
surviving traditions associated with him. The root yar’ combines within itself
the ideas: (a) of vernal light and warmth, (b) of youthful, impetuous, violently
awakening forces, (c) of erotic passion, lasciviousness, and fecundation: ideas
inseparable from the manifestations of spring and its terrifying phenomena.”
Yarilo, then, is the god of the spring thaw; and Stravinsky sometimes claimed
that his music was inspired by memories of the “violent Russian spring that
seemed to begin in an hour and was like the whole earth cracking” (Mem). The
Yarilo of Afanasyev and Roerich is one of a number of European attempts to
understand a savage, preconscious, archaic seizure of feeling. In the
eighteenth century, Giambattista Vico and Johann Gottfried Herder tried to
understand the savage mind as a sort of continuous fantasia of divine
presence: The “savage saw the tall tree with its mighty crown and sense the
wonder of it: the crown rustled! There the godhead moves and stirs! The
savage falls down in adoration! . . . Everywhere gods, goddesses, acting being
of evil or of good. The howling storm and the sweet zephyr, the clear source
and the mighty ocean . . .” as Herder put it in his essay on the origin of
language. Indeed Nietzsche’s Dionysus can be understood as an attempt to
ground the truth of the civilized human condition in old ideas of the prehistoric
condition.

I don’t know that Nietzsche’s writings had any particular impact on the creators
of The Rite of Spring, but the Nietzschean idea is strongly present, that real
tenor of modern human life can be best comprehended through an evocation of
some archaic prepersonal state of being. The dancers in this ballet are
designed in many ways to be almost subhuman. In one of Roerich’s synopses
of the plot, he says that the elders who watch the final dance have “donned
bear-skins as a sign that the bears is considered the forefather of humankind.
The elders will give the victim up the sun god Yarilo. I love antiquity, its high
elations and its profound designs” (Taruskin 876). Stravinsky completely
absorbed and participated in this line of development; as Stravinsky wrote in an
article published in Ricciotto Canudo’s magazine Montjoie!:

I have tried to express in this Prelude the fear of nature before the arising of
beauty, a sacred terror at the midday sun, a sort of pagan cry. The musical
material itself swells, enlarges, expands. Each instrument is like a bud which
grows on the bark of an aged tree; it becomes part of an imposing whole.
And the whole orchestra, all this massing of instruments, should have the
significance of the Birth of Spring.

In the first scene, some adolescent boys appear with a very old woman,
whose age and even whose century is unknown, who knows the secrets of
nature, and teaches her sons Prediction. She runs, bent over the earth, half-
woman, half-beast. The adolescents at her side are Augurs of Spring, who
mark in their steps the rhythm of spring, the pulse-beat of spring.

During this time the adolescent girls come from the river. They form a circle
which mingles with the boys’ circle. They are not entirely formed beings;
their sex is single and double like that of the tree.

In later years Stravinsky was embarrassed by this article and claimed he’d said
nothing of the kind, but most scholars accept it as a reasonably authentic
statement of Stravinsky’s intentions in 1913. Herder described how the savage
gazed at a tree and felt a shiver, a spasm of divine awe; Stravinsky attempts to
make the orchestra in the prelude into a kind of god-tree, an occasion of
“sacred terror.” Furthermore, Stravinsky emphasizes the loss of category, the
weird liminality, that prevails in these neolithic time: the augur-woman is
centuries old, half-woman, half-beast; the adolescents seem to be
hermaphrodites: “their sex is single and double like that of the tree,” as if they
were as much vegetable as animal. Dressed in bear-skins, according to
Roerich, the dancers seem threshold creatures between the human and the
lower world; here is a tempura that Roerich painted in the earliest stages of the
conception of the ballet, though here he’s obviously imagining not were-wolves
or were-bears but were-moose:

95. Roerich, 1910 tempura, the Great Sacrifice

I compare this to Nietzsche’s sense that the Greek chorus so loses itself in the
worship of Dionysus that all individuality vanishes, and the celebrants join into
the whole animate and inanimate world. If The Rite of Spring erases the signs
that divide mankind from the domain of the beasts, it also seems to erase the
signs that divide mankind from inert matter: as the musicologist Jann Pasler has
noted while studying Valentine Hugo’s sketch of the première of The Rite of
Spring “the dancers look to be an extension of the series of boulders painted on
the backdrop.”

96. Hugo, sketch of Rite (1913), Pasler, p. 75

As for the music of The Rite of Spring, I think it is fair to say that the abyss
speaks.

The sources of the music’s uncanny power have been the object of speculation
ever since the first performance. As the result of the work of Richard Taruskin
and others, it is now clear that Stravinsky’s music was built up out of fragments
of folk tunes, as if Stravinsky were trying to approach the prehistoric by
consulting the researches of folklorists: in distant corners of Russia were some
specimens of archaic music that might be dug up, like frozen mammoths, out of
the tundra. The melody in the first bars of the prelude, played by a bassoon in
a bizarrely high register, is itself taken from an anthology of folk tunes that
Stravinsky consulted:

Stravinsky, Rite, opening (Monteux 1951)

The sonority is supposed to evoke the sound of the dudki, a pagan Russian
wind instrument. But Stravinsky’s archaism isn’t the result simply of quoting
folk songs: he also keeps alluding to a sort of implied kinesthesia of Neolithic
existence. What would you feel like if you were a barbarian? Well, I think that
Stravinsky answered that question as follows: barbaric life consists of bouts of
lethargy interrupted by spasms of grotesque excitement. In other words, you
would be living the life of bear, hibernating much of the time, but sometimes
rousing yourself to chase and tear apart your quarry.

I suspect that Stravinsky made much use of Roerich’s bear-skins in trying to

imagine the music. Stravinsky liked bears: in his previous ballet, Petrushka
(1911), a dancing bear appears at the carnival:

Stravinsky, Petrushka, bear

And in fact a sort of ursine torpor is an important part of Petrushka’s musical

dialectics:

Stravinsky, Petrushka, moor

This is the Moor, Petrushka’s rival for the affections of the ballerina. In The Rite
of Spring, too, heaviness-in-music is present in many places, as if Stravinsky
were thinking of winter sloth that resists the energizing of Yarilo:

Stravinsky, Rite, Round dance (Stokowski 1930)

Later, in the second act, the bear, in fact a whole group of bears, or at least
were-bears, will circle around the Elect. Heaviness is significant in the
choreography too. The movements of classical ballet are expansive, poised,
pigeon-toed, turned out; the movements of the dancers in The Rite of Spring
were huddled, hunched, knee-buckled, turned in. Classical dancers seem on
the brink of escaping the pull of gravity; Nijinsky’s dancers seemed to live on a
planet like Jupiter–they stooped under the weight of their own bodies:

97. Hugo, Rite of Spring, crouchers

I suspect the Joffrey reconstruction is a bit too airy and delicate, not sufficiently
thumpy. At the original performances, the dancer complained that they found
it physically painful to jump in the air and land flat-footed, as Nijinsky
commanded; and yet these calculated awkwardnesses seemed to possess a
sort of grace of force. Indeed it is now thought that the Rite of Spring riot was
a response less to Stravinsky’s music, which could scarcely be heard amid the
uproar, than to Nijinsky’s choreography, which inverted most of the
conventions of ballet.

Opposed to this dragging of leaden feet in the round dance there are of course
many sorts of elation. Often horn calls blat out as if summoning the dancers to
some bloody ritual:

Stravinsky, Rite, rival (Stokowski 1930)

Stravinsky, Rite, mystic (Stokowski 1930)

The score is unthinkably complex, and yet it’s made out of extremely simple
elements: folk motives, trivial du-DUH horn calls, and hard bits of rhythm. This
agglomerating of the simple into the complicated may recall the procedures of
Cubism: a few elementary shapes are put together in all sorts of intricately
wrong ways. Perhaps the most cubist (in this sense of the word) section of the
score is the quite incredible final dance, where a simple five-note pattern (C-
B♭-A♭-C-D and similar phrase-shapes) is endlessly out of sync
with itself:

Stravinsky, Rite, Danse sacrale, penultimate section (Stokowski

1930)

In folk music there is a technique called heterophony, in which a melody is

sung by several singers at the same time, but only approximately at the same
time: some singers are going too fast, some too slow, some too high, etc. This
section of the Danse sacrale is a sophisticated imitation of heterophony: as the
dancer dances herself to death, the musical lines go out of tune and out of
rhythm in all directions at once, as if they were fuzzing out into the whole
audible spectrum–the abyss. Of course this effect is calibrated to the last hair:
it’s a supremely controlled loss of control.

Sometimes in the score you hear half-familiar things that tease your ear to try
to place them. I hear a number of Spanish gypsy tropes in the ecstatic sections
of the ballet–there may be a certain mediterranean character to Stravinsky’s
sexual imagination. Consider for example the final section of the final dance:

Stravinsky, Rite, Danse sacrale, final section (Stravinsky 1960)

This is the part where the Elect danses herself to death–in Stravinsky’s words,
“When she is on the point of falling exhausted, the Ancestors recognize it and
glide toward her like rapacious monsters in order that she may not touch the
ground; they pick her up and raise her toward heaven. The annual cycle of
forces which are born again, and which fall again into the bosom of nature, is
accomplished in its essential rhythms.” This is all very highfalutin, but looks in
practice, at least in the Joffrey reconstruction, a bit like a cheerleader calling
out “give me an V” while doing a sort of Atlanta-Braves tomahawk chop–in a
strange way maybe all the more impressive for these strange orthogonals to
homely late twentieth-century practices. Some of the basic material is
commonplace: the descending tetrachord, the basis of a great many old Italian
and Spanish dances:

Soler, Fandango (1:50)

It is disconcerting to think of fandangos in connection with the pagan rites of

this ballet, but the simple effective harmonic patterns of a fandango are part of
the elementary stuff of music. Perhaps I might compare Stravinsky’s way of
isolating and magnifying small familiar musical details to the practice of the
great primitive painter Henri Rousseau:

98. Rousseau, The Snakecharmer (1907)

99. Rousseau, Combat of a Tiger and a Buffalo (1909)

Seduction and fatal danger are part of Rousseau’s exotic landscape. But the
jungle is just overgrown houseplants, as if savage wilderness consists chiefly of
big philodendrons. So Stravinsky will take a gypsy riff and construct a gigantic
fantasy of the prehistoric rite. It is even possible, in the Auguries of Spring, to
hear the stamping of flamenco dancers’ heels above the strumming of a guitar
if you’re in the right mood:

Stravinsky, Rite, Auguries (Markevich 1959)

Of course, other people have heard other things:

Film clip: Disney, Fantasia (1940) volcanoes

Stravinsky dismissed Disney’s movie as an “unresisting imbecility,” but
something like geologic upheaval, the rendering asunder of worlds, seems
perfectly plausible; it also rids the ballet of human subjects, who were always
something of an embarrassment. Stravinsky came to prefer hearing The Rite of
Spring in the concert hall, and it in fact lends itself well to abstraction from the
theatre.

So far I’ve been considering the concrete or pictorial aspects of The Rite of
Spring; but it is also an extremely abstract, even antiseptic work. Just as
Petrushka juxtaposes its lethargic bears and moors against the perky ballerina,
so The Rite of Spring counterpoises its various evocations of pagan life against
pure clockwork:

Stravinsky, Rite, end of Introduction (Stravinsky 1960)

This twilight-zone ticktock seems to belong to some cleaner, more modern, less
mysterious world; this too is an elementary form, a cube, but one that doesn’t
seem to want to belong to a picture of pagan life; instead it seems to remind us
of the up-to-date twentieth-century world.

The music, with its rapid shifts of meter and displaced accents, presented
insuperable challenges to conventional choreography; and in fact Nijinsky
responded to these challenges by creating a choreography as remarkable for
its abstraction as its concreteness. Diaghilev had Nijinsky and some of the
dancers attend Dalcroze’s exercise classes, to learn a callisthenic method for
translating musical rhythm into bodily gesture. Using this system, Nijinsky was
able to move in a manner amazingly crammed with musical detail. His sister
Bronislava, who would have danced the role of the Chosen One at the première
if pregnancy had not interfered, left this account:

Nijinsky demonstrated a pas mouvement in the choreography to the musical

count of 5/4. During his huge leap he counted 5 (3 + 2). On count 1, high in the
air, he bent one leg at the knee and stretched his right arm above his head, on
count 2 he bent his body towards the left, on count 3 he bent his body towards
the right, then on count 1, still high in the air, he stretched his body upwards
again and then finally came down lowering his arm on count 2, graphically
rendering each note of the uneven measure.

In The Rite of Spring, Nijinsky found a way of letting the strange meters
generate strange gestural icons. The heaviness of the gestures were designed
to evoke the sheer weight of ancient ritual, burdened by an excess of meaning;
and yet interweavings of the dancers’ lines had a strongly abstract character.
The ballet represented a remarkable intersection of the plausibly primitive and
the obviously studied–no one spontaneously moves by counting 3s and 2s with
different body parts.
Almost every spectator had some reservations about Nijinsky’s choreography,
which seemed more appropriate to the American Indian wild-west shows that
Nijinsky had seen in his childhood than to a Parisian ballet. Stravinsky came to
regard Nijinsky and his willful arithmetic–sometimes proceeding from the
music, sometimes pasted arbitrarily on top of the music–with a kind of
contempt:

During the whole performance I was at Nijinsky’s side in the wings. He was
standing on a chair, screaming ‘sixteen, seventeen, eighteen’–they had their
own method of counting to keep time. Naturally the poor dancers could hear
nothing by reason of the row in the auditorium and the sound of their own
dance steps. I had to hold Nijinsky by his clothes, for he was furious, and
ready to dash on to the stage at any moment and create a scandal.
Diaghileff kept ordering the electricians to turn the lights on or off, hoping in
that way to put a stop to the noise. . . . what struck me then, and still strikes
me most, about the choreography, was and is Nijinsky’s lack of
consciousness of what he was doing in creating it. He showed therein his
complete inability to accept and assimilate those revolutionary ideas which
Diaghileff had made his creed, and obstinately and industriously strove to
inculcate.

What the choreography expressed was a very labored and barren effort rather
than a plastic realization flowing simply and naturally from what the music
demanded. But I’m struck instead by how well, as far as I can judge, the
choreography follows the peculiar rhythm of the music, its laboriousness, its
elation. Much of The Rite of Spring consists of games, so labeled in the
scenario and the score: the abduction game, the game of the rival tribes–that
is, mock rape, mock war; even the final dance, where real blood is shed, is a
kind of game. The ropes of dancers winding across the stage seems to me
unusually faithful to the fact that The Rite of Spring is, at all levels, a kind of
sublime hopscotch. Just as Cubist painting is a magical seizure of reality and a
game of piecing blocks together, so this ballet is an image of the deepest
convulsions of the body and of the disengaged play of the mind.

The critics at the early performances of The Rite of Spring were oddly split
between those who were transported to pagan Russia and those who saw an
exercise in abstract movement. One reviewer was struck by Nijinsky’s “use of
the human body to realize arbitrary conceptions of movement, to devise a
scale of gesture just as abstract as a scale of musical notes,” and compared the
ballet to non-representational painting; another spoke of “the fallacy of
Nijinsky’s exacerbated ‘cerebralism’ . . . What is there cerebral and intellectual
in Stravinsky’s superhuman force, in the athleticism of his brutal art that
continually parries direct hits to the stomach and right hooks to the chin?” The
ballet seemed extraordinarily abstract and concrete at the same time: at once
a pure play of arbitrary forms and a punch in the gut. But perhaps the wisest of
all reviewers didn’t hear the music until 1921, T. S. Eliot, who wrote that the
music seems to “transform the rhythm of the steppes into the scream of the
motor-horn, the rattle of machinery, the grind of wheels, the beating of iron and
steel, the roar of the underground railway, and the other barbaric noises of
modern life.” So we see again that extremes converge: in the domain of
Modernism, The Flintstones and The Jetsons are always the same show.