When Igor Stravinsky's ballet Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) premiered during the 1913 Paris season of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, its avant-garde music and jarring choreography scandalized audiences. Today it is considered one of the most influential musical works of the twentieth century. In this volume, the ballet finally receives the full critical attention it deserves, as distinguished music and dance scholars discuss the meaning of the work and its far-reaching influence on world music, performance, and culture. Essays explore four key facets of the ballet: its choreography and movement; the cultural and historical contexts of its performance and reception in France; its structure and use of innovative rhythmic and tonal features; and the reception of the work in Russian music history and theory.

Severine Neff is the Eugene Falk Distinguished Professor of Music Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is author of The Musical Idea and the Logic, Technique, and Art of Its Presentation (with Patricia Carpenter); Coherence, Counterpoint, Instrumentation, Instruction in Form; and The Second String Quartet in F-Sharp Minor, Op. 10: A Norton Critical Score. She served as Editor-in-Chief of Music Theory Spectrum.

Gretchen Horlacher is Professor of Music at the Jacobs School of Music, Indiana University at Bloomington. She is author of Building Blocks: Repetition and Continuity in Stravinsky's Music.

Maureen A. Carr is Distinguished Professor of Music Theory at The Pennsylvania State University. She is author of After the Rite: Stravinsky's Path to Neoclassicism (1914–1925); Multiple Masks: Neoclassicism in Stravinsky's Works on Greek Subjects; and two facsimile editions for A-R Editions: Stravinsky's "Pulcinella": A Facsimile of the Sources and Sketches, and Stravinsky's "Histoire du soldat": A Facsimile of the Sketches.

John Reef is Assistant Professor of Music Theory at Nazareth College.