On Thursday, November 4, the renowned pianist and composer, Michael Arnowitt, who - lucky for us! - just happens to live down the road in Montpelier, delivered a plenary lecture/recital to the Honors College first-year class (and others) on "Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring and the Music of 1911." Arnowitt's wonderfully engaging lecture and his moving demonstration of pieces by Sergei Rachmaninov, Bela Bartok, Arnold Schoenberg, and finally Igor Stravinsky - in an absolutely virtuosic transcription of the Rite - explored the year 1911 as what he calls a "crossroads time between the old and the new." The Rite of Spring, as the students learned in two essays they'd read that week - one by Alex Ross, the music critic for the New Yorker magazine; the other by Jonah Lehrer, a writer interested in the neuroscientific implications of Stavinsky's landmark piece - famously (or infamously) incited a riot when it was first performed in Paris in May of 1913. Arnowitt's fascinating lecture painted a picture of a very turbulent period in European history and the way in which the turmoil caused by things like the women's and workers' movements and the birth of new technologies like the electric dynamo and the automobile extended to the arts world where the challenge of such massive change was expressed in innovative and edgy ways by artists like Stravinsky and Picasso and Virginia Woolf, often prompting feelings of extreme discomfort in a public that had become accustomed to the lush, rounded textures of the Romantic era.
A very appreciative first-year class responded to Arnowitt's presentation with a resounding ovation and a request for a kind of encore - a piece of his own composition. Arnowitt rather apologetically explained that he now mainly composes jazz, an admission that was met, not surprisingly with great enthusiasm by the students, who asked him please to play one of his jazz compositions. He did; it was completely wonderful, and all in all, one of the most memorable and truly moving plenaries of the fall.