It’s so easy for modernists to sneer at the notion of being angered by truly brilliant music. I’m more impressed if they can appreciate why music such as this was so dangerous and outrageous; if they can’t, they can neither appreciate why this music is so brilliant.
For centuries, classical music was the domain of the truly civilized, the cultivated. Beauty meant engineering, design, perfection, tradition. Before quantum mechanics and chaos theory, science was set about reducing the secrets of the universe to clock-like predictability. Although this fact has been forgotten, and nature itself emasculated, nature always strives to kill you, as anyone who has actually dwelt in nature, as opposed to merely looking at pictures of polar bears, would know.
Stravinsky found the beauty in the wild, in the creative destruction, in the unplanned, in the chaotic. In doing so, classical music would never be the same. And those who loved what it had been were rightfully alarmed.
The Western church adorned Easter with gold; the Eastern church to which Stravinsky belonged adorned it with live trees. To understand how enormous this social gulf was, understand that the English word, “green” comes from the French word, “grey,” (”gris,” which is pronounced, “gree”) and signifies not life, but death. Green meant the reclamation by the natural (un-Christianized) world through death; but to the East it mean the return to God.
“understand that the English word, “green” comes from the French word, “grey,” (”gris,” which is pronounced, “gree”)”
I’m pretty sure it comes from the Germanic “grun”/”groen”.