The violin, though centuries old, remains a popular yet remarkably unwieldy instrument. Just squeezing the contraption between your chin and shoulder, then raising your bow arm to the proper height, is enough to induce a pinched nerve. Yet every day countless numbers of people try to make the instrument sing.

Three of the most distinctive violinists have released new albums. Viktoria Mullova continues her exploration of music by J.S. Bach, while Augustin Hadelich teams up with a Spanish guitarist and the adventuresome Carolin Widmann presents an expressive canvas by Morton Feldman.

June 21st has come to be one of our very favorite days on the calendar. It's not just the first day of summer (though there is that). It's also time for Make Music New York, which presents about 1,000 — yes, 1,000 — free outdoor concerts across the city in a single day.

Last year, we commissioned Philip Glass to create a choral work that could be sung by anyone who wanted to give it a go — and the world premiere was in the middle of Times Square, led by the excellent New York-based conductor Kent Tritle.

After that amazing and profoundly gratifying experience, we decided that for 2013, we'd try a different kind of matchmaking. We paired artists who had never before met or worked together, but we thought could create a brilliant collaboration: composer, installation artist and percussionist Eli Keszler and the inventive percussion quartet So Percussion. With a combination of piano wires suspended from the Manhattan Bridge, motors and a small battery of bowed percussion, their world premiere, called Archway, promises to be something really memorable.

Working with Make Music New York, the New York City Department of Transportation, the DUMBO Improvement District, the PAN ACT Festival and our colleagues at Q2 Music to realize this project, we're inviting the public to this singular event: the world premiere of Archway at the DUMBO Archway in Brooklyn (between Anchorage Pl. and Adams St.) this Friday, June 21, at 6:30 PM.

Scored for snare drums and crotales played with mallets and bows, the sonic context for this world premiere is Keszler's installation, also named Archway, that uses stretched and tuned piano wires to create a dynamic piece in and around the DUMBO Archway. The wires are struck with small mechanical beaters that resonate the strings, creating shifting overtones within each string and collectively as a unit. The entire installation will be built on site, heard — and then disassembled in the course of this one day.

Want a preview of Keszler's and So's amazing work? Check out these videos of two of their previous projects.

Eli Keszler's installation Cold pin at the Boston Center for the Arts in February 2011:

And here's So Percussion's John Cage-apalooza at the Tiny Desk last year:

The violin and viola that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart played himself are in the United States for the first time ever. The instruments come out of storage only about once a year at the Salzburg Mozarteum in Austria. The rest of the time, they're kept under serious lockup. I talked to the musicians who got to play them at the Boston Early Music Festival earlier this week before the violin's New York premiere at the Austrian Cultural Forum New York tonight.

I could feel my heart stop. My fingers were trembling. And I'm pretty sure I had a huge smile on my face as I tucked the violin under my chin. The instrument that Mozart used to perform his own concerts! And professional musicians got the same thrill at the Boston Early Music Festival.

For safety's sake, the violin and viola were flown here on separate airplanes. But the six-person team from the Salzburg Mozarteum who are safeguarding them don't make for a very flashy entourage. There are no huge, beefy guys in shades with crossed arms. No SUVs with blacked-out windows. Instead, there's just a small huddle of frankly not very intimidating-looking Middle Europeans.

"Our main thing is to travel so unspectacular as possible, that nobody should know what is inside the cases," says Gabriele Ramsauer, the director of the Mozart Museums. She and the rest of the team refer to the violin and the viola simply as "The Luggage," and the instruments are being held in an undisclosed location during the tour.

They were made in the early 17th 18th century as workhorse fiddles — sturdy and plain, and meant as tools. They're not as splendid or highly ornamented as the instruments you would find at a royal court during this time, or the instrument a full-time virtuoso would use. But they still are the vessels of Mozart's legacy.

The violin, made in Bavaria by a member of the Klotz family, was the one he most likely used to perform his own violin concertos on tour in Mannheim, Germany; and Paris. The viola is an Italian instrument of about the same period, but its maker is unknown. They're quieter than modern instruments and produce less brilliantly colored tones. They force the audience to lean in to appreciate them.

Backstage after the Boston concert, Miloš Valent said it was hard to describe the feeling he had playing the viola Mozart used in Vienna to jam with friends like Franz Joseph Haydn. "For a musician," Valent says, "who is living with music his whole life and Mozart is someone who is somebody who is really, really important in life, to touch his instrument is something extremely personal."

For her part, violinist Amandine Beyer says she couldn't help but wonder if she was channeling some special spirit when using Mozart's fiddle in Boston. "I had all the time this question! But I tried to call this spirit, no? And to say, 'Are you there?'" Beyer says, laughing. "But I think you can do it with every instrument when you play the music of Mozart."

That's exactly the kind of reaction the Mozarteum is hoping for, says its head of research, Ulrich Leisinger. "We listen to the concert and if we close the eyes, we perhaps even think of Mozart playing the violin," he says. "There are typically two methods to deal with historic instruments. One would be to say that we lock it in a shrine and never let anybody touch it again. But we are entirely convinced that you need to play the instruments because these are the messengers of Mozart's music."

And when the musicians in Boston finished playing, not only did they take their bows — but they also thrust the violin and viola forward for their own well-deserved round of applause.

With special thanks to our friends at Classical New England for providing the recordings of the Jordan Hall concert heard in this piece. Next week, we'll have a complete concert video featuring more performances on Mozart's violin and viola, recently recorded live at WGBH's Fraser Performance Studio.

Got an idea for a classical cartoon or a reaction to this one? Leave your thoughts in the comments section.

Pablo Helguera is a New York-based artist working with sculpture, drawing, photography and performance. His new book is Helguera's Artunes. You can see more of his work at Artworld Salon and on his own site.

Composer Mark Adamo has made beautiful music out of classic books. His Little Women is among the most produced American operas today. He also wrote the words and music for his operatic adaptation of Aristophanes' Greek drama Lysistrata.

His latest work, The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, has proved more controversial. The opera, which premieres June 19 at the San Francisco Opera, tells the story of Mary, Jesus and his disciples.

Adamo himself grew up a good Catholic in South Jersey in the mid-1970s. But his mother divorced her first husband, who was abusive, and the church she loved barred her from taking Communion — a decision that angered him in his adolescence.

"I challenged my mother and said, 'Why are you not angry?' " Adamo says. " 'You're sending us off to Catholic school and Mass and you would like to come with us. But you accept this idea that you can't come because somehow you did something that ended up saving your and our lives. Somebody said you colored outside the lines, and therefore you're not welcome. Why aren't you angry?' So I'm angry on her behalf."

Adamo is gay and has a husband [fellow composer John Corigliano], and that, too, colors his relationship with his faith. But he says he never imagined writing a New Testament opera until six years ago, when he stumbled on a New Yorker article about Mary Magdalene. She was a biblical figure often conflated with other Marys, including a reformed prostitute.

"It seemed to me that, in context, Mary Magdalene was the madwoman in the attic of the Christian tradition," Adamo says. "She was associated with the body and sexuality, and she was the opposite of the stainless virgin."

The article also covered the 1945 discovery of the Gnostic Gospels, early Christian texts that sometimes contradict the traditional Gospels. They present a Mary who is Jesus' best pupil.

Adamo introduces her singing lines borrowed from the Song of Songs — an Old Testament book long associated with Mary that uses sexual metaphors to express a spiritual longing for God.

"My goal was to place sexuality, and female sexuality in particular, back into the center of the myth," Adamo says. "[I wanted] to see how much healing that could possibly affect in the imaginations of people who came to the opera, and wanted to take the journey with us."

Adamo spent a year researching the story, and poured his learning into his libretto. It has 116 footnotes. But Adamo makes a leap of faith, so to speak, when he has Mary and Jesus become lovers, and then marry.

Nathan Gunn sings the role of Jesus — called Yeshua, his Hebrew name — in the opera.

"I know a lot of people get hung up on her being his lover," Gunn says. "They fall in love. It's a very human and beautiful thing.

"They teach each other things, too. It's like the yin and yang symbol," he adds. "He's very yang. He's missing the yin and she's missing the yang. They complement each other."

Sasha Cooke sings the role of Mary.

"One thing I love telling people is that I'm [playing] Mary Magdalene," Cooke says. "They say, 'Oh well, she could have been married to [Jesus]. Why not? We don't know.' "

The Gospel of Mary Magdalene was commissioned by David Gockley, general director of the San Francisco Opera. Gockley commissioned Adamo's first two operas when he ran the Houston Grand Opera.

Gockley was disappointed when he found no co-commissioners to help produce the $1.2 million world premiere. He says other companies worried the story was too controversial.

"And they admitted that to me. Others said they're pursuing their own projects," Gockley says. "But I knew when we took this on that it wasn't going to be everybody's cup of tea. And I've been proven right."

Gockley says a local Catholic radio show did cancel an interview with Adamo. But there were no protests when he conferred with local priests and rabbis.

"I'm kind of waiting for some kind of kerfuffle to happen," Gockley says, "and yet the natives are quiet."

Adamo acknowledges the controversial nature of the opera: "The theater is a safe place to talk about risky things," he says.

Both Adamo and Gockley say they expect a good number of journalists and opera directors to be in the audience opening night. Adamo hopes audiences will see that he's not trying to scorn the tradition.

"I love this tradition," Adamo says. "I would not have been able to write it as I wrote it unless I thought the story would gain rather than lose nobility, credibility and passion."

Adamo says he hopes other opera companies see the light and pick up The Gospel of Mary Magdalene after it finishes its San Francisco run in July.

Winners of 14^th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition were announced Sunday night in Fort Worth, Texas. The competition was held over 17 days.

Vadym Kholodenko, 26, of Ukraine, won the top prize of $50,000, but he said the rankings don't mean that much.

"It's kind of fun for audience, for press. It's interesting to put first, second, 10^th and so on. But in life, not so important," Kholodenko says.

And, he says, so much of life involves competing no matter what you're doing.

Cliburn usually presented awards to the winners, but in February he died at age 78 after suffering from bone cancer.

Kholodenko and the other two winners said the competition was hard. Famed composer Bela Bartok once said sarcastically competitions are for horses. But silver medalist Beatrice Rana, 20, of Italy, doesn't feel like a horse.

"Competitions are one of the main ways for us to have a concert pianist career. Competitions can be really for everybody and accessible to everybody. I don't compete very often, but I'm glad that this year we have the opportunity to really play many times after the winning of the Cliburn," Rana says.

She's referring to what many winners consider the real Cliburn prize: three years of management and concert bookings. And winning also usually means no more competitions.

That's something that third place finisher Sean Chen, 24, of Oak Park, Calif., was also happy about.

"This experience has been really awesome but kind of the most stressful thing I've ever done in my life. It's just the nature of the beast. I would be happy to not have to go through it again," Chen says.

But now the pressure of life and career begins.

The Emerson String Quartet is one of the most acclaimed chamber groups in the world of classical music. Since their founding in 1976, the group has won nine Grammys for its recordings. Now, it has a new album out called Journeys: Tchaikovsky, Schoenberg — and it's the last recording with cellist David Finckel, one of the quartet's longtime members.

On the occasion of the new release, Finckel spoke with weekends on All Things Considered guest host Tess Vigeland about the bittersweet close to to a decades-long partnership.

Let's start with this new album, 'Journeys.' It starts out with Tchaikovsky's Souvenir de Florence, which is the first four tracks.

I will say, listening to the Tchaikovsky, it doesn't really sound much like Florence, does it? At least not the Florence I know — maybe the Florence when the Arno flooded. But you know, it's an amazing work because there are moments of Florentine sunshine and leisurely afternoons. But it's basically a very Russian piece. And it's extraordinary and exciting, and I'm so glad I had the chance to record this with my quartet.

What goes into a recording like this one, and how much of that practice is solitary and how much is with the group?

You know, private practice — it's almost like your underwear. You don't wear it out in public, but you make sure it's in good order before put your clothes on, what everybody sees. The working together in rehearsals in an ensemble is something that you have to plan and schedule, and people take a best guess at how many hours it's gonna take to bring it to readiness for stage or recording studio. And sometimes you over-schedule and sometimes you under-schedule. If you've under-scheduled, somewhere in the session you make up the difference.

What was the experience of recording this last album with the quartet? Was it business as usual? Bittersweet for you?

You have to sort of put on your blinders sometimes and remember that the most important thing you're doing is playing the cello, playing in the ensemble, interpreting the work. I went through this not only with the recording but with all the many "last time" appearances that I made with the quartet. I was well aware that it would be the last time I would play in Florence, or the last time I would play in Munich, or even the last time I would play in New York. But you can't let those thoughts overtake you when you have the business of making music in front of you. So yes, in some ways it was business as usual. But when I had a moment to think that, yes, it was my last Emerson session, it was quite a sensation.

Do you think that seeped into these performances, even just in a small way?

I don't think so. I certainly would not have intended anything to be different in these performances other than what we had intended for the music.

The other piece on this album is by Schoenberg, who is, of course, famously atonal, very difficult to play. How did you come up with this pairing?

The result of atonality, or modulating a lot, is that you don't feel firmly grounded — your world is floating. But you know, for all of us, sometimes our worlds float: We're in transition, we're in turmoil. And this music expresses all those things beautifully and very powerfully. The Schoenberg is not "a-romantic" — it is actually one of the most romantic pieces in the literature. There's a story that goes with it: It was inspired by a poem about two lovers walking in the moonlight, and during this walk the woman confesses to the man that she is pregnant by another man. And after a lot of turmoil, the current boyfriend says, you know, I will accept the child as my own. It's an incredibly romantic and turbulent story, and it's all reflected in the music.

Do you have a favorite moment from this CD?

Well, I have to speak selfishly about the cello solos. Both Tchaikovsky and Schoenberg reserved some of their most glorious melodies for the cello. In the Schoenberg, for example, at the moment where the man announces his forgiveness of his girlfriend, there is an incredibly beautiful, positive cello solo. Glowing, magnificent ... I always feel like just the greatest guy in the world when I'm playing that. Unless I'm playing it badly, but I try not to do that.

In the world of classical music it's quite common to swap out players, but certainly not with the Emerson Quartet — you've been the same since 1979. I'm wondering how you broke the news to your fellow performers, your friends, that you'd decided to leave. Did they have an inkling that it might happen?

I think the other guys were shocked but not surprised; the world knows as well as they do how many hats I wear. And yes, of course, they were the first to know, in a very private way, and we had quite a few long, heartfelt discussions — not so much about my leaving but about the future of the quartet and what shape it should take and what the options were. Just a couple nights ago in Montreal they played their first concert with cellist Paul Watkins. I sent them a bottle of champagne backstage, and in my home at 8 o'clock that evening, I opened a bottle of champagne. So it was a really nice moment. It was the culmination of a two-year project for me to successfully disengage from the quartet and see it continue in high style. It was a very proud and wonderful moment for all of us.

As you look back, do any highlights jump to mind of your time with the Emerson?

There are so many highlights. And a lot of them are just personal. I remember when every single one of the Emerson children was born — you know, when somebody got a call in the middle of the night or had to run away from some rehearsal or concert to be with their wives. We've walked out on stage together when we were all absolutely scared to death and had no idea what was going to happen, and somehow got through it. We've lived through various disasters in concerts together and forgiven each other for them. I mean, these are all highlights of a classical music career and we could not be more fortunate to have them.

Got an idea for a classical cartoon or a reaction to this one? Leave your thoughts in the comments section.

Pablo Helguera is a New York-based artist working with sculpture, drawing, photography and performance. His new book is Helguera's Artunes. You can see more of his work atArtworld Salon and on his own site.

Six finalists for the 14th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition were announced last night in Fort Worth, Texas. For the first time since its inception more than 50 years ago, the contest is taking place without its namesake. Cliburn died in February of cancer, and the competition is dealing with his loss and other changes as well.

Cliburn did not play publicly at these competitions, but for decades, he attended performances, met the players and happily handed out the medals every four years. In a 2008 interview, he explained that no one, not even his mother, expected it to last: "And little did we realize that in September of 1962 would be the first competition. To which she said, 'Don't worry, Van. There'll only be one, and that will be all.' "

The event has grown into a year-round organization with 15 full-time staff and some 1,200 volunteers. Louise Canafax participated in every competition — first as a Fort Worth Symphony violist accompanying the pianists, then as the much-loved backstage mother who helped calm competitors with candy, aspirin or a safety pin to repair that broken strap, as she said four years ago.

"It's just a matter of making sure that they're comfortable, whether they're giving me their wallets, their coats," Canafax said. "Some of them have a routine, and I try to write down what their routine is. If they want to sit and roll up their gloves and do it a certain way, then I'm aware of that."

Canafax died of cancer a month after Cliburn. Her friend since the 4th grade, Kathie Cummins, is the new backstage mother and knows she has some big shoes to fill.

"We just encourage them," Cummins says. "And tell them that they're wonderful, they'll play their best, they're human. Don't worry; if something crazy happens, you'll be fine."

Cliburn managers say they'll be fine, too, despite other changes. There's a new board chair. And Cliburn's past director stepped down after the last contest to run Moscow's Tchaikovsky Competition. The new president and CEO is French Canadian Jacques Marquis, who says he'll try to follow Cliburn's lead.

"We decided to do this competition under his vision and legacy," Marquis says. "And for me, I had the chance to talk with him. First, excellence. Second, passion. Third, sharing the music he loved."

Marquis believes the Cliburn competition will be around 50 years from now. And so does Italian pianist Alessandro Deljavan. He competed four years ago and met Cliburn. Deljavan competed again this year but didn't make the final cut. Still, he says the death of the event's namesake will not harm the competition.

"The other big competitions," Deljavan says, "the Chopin, the Brussels Queen Elisabeth, you know, every named competition, the [namesakes] died many years ago. So it was the only one, the Cliburn, where actually the [namesake was] a live person. I think his presence was important, but you know the high standards will be always the same; I'm sure of that."

Other aspects of this 14th Cliburn competition have changed. Pianists are now competing for a top prize of $50,000, up from $20,000. And the gold medalist gets a professionally produced studio recording in addition to the release of live competition performances. Winners receive three years' worth of commission–free professional management with bookings that can — and have — changed careers.

It's easy to think of opera as little more than an affected flock of singers warbling onstage in lacy brocade with pancake makeup, chandeliers and champagne.

But you won't see any of that in Philippe Béziat's artful new documentary Becoming Traviata, now making the rounds of U.S. film festivals and art houses. Instead, Béziat pulls back the curtain to reveal one very smart production of Verdi's La traviata, molded from the ground up by stage director Jean-François Sivadier for the 2011 Aix-en-Provence Festival.

For a film built almost completely from rehearsals on a bare stage, there's a surprising amount of drama — especially between Sivadier and his charismatic star, French soprano Natalie Dessay. Watching the two shape the lead character, Violetta (a free-wheeling courtesan who, despite her best intentions, falls in love), is something of a drama within a drama.

"I'm putting off doing it, maybe we can talk until 5:30," Dessay says with a nervous laugh, trying to stall as she and Sivadier discuss the emotional landscape of her big solo that closes Act 1. Dramatically and technically it's among the most feared 10 minutes in the soprano repertoire.

"It's exactly like 'To be or not to be,'" he tells her. "It's as hard as an actress saying: 'I am a seagull.' We sense you are vulnerable so we identify with you completely."

Dessay absorbs his instructions, sometimes with a skeptical glance. But as she starts the scene, she flips off her shoes, holds her head in her hands, staring at the floor, and begins to sing "È strano! è strano" (It's strange! It's strange.). She's totally believable.

And that's important, as this was Dessay's first time singing Traviata in Europe. She debuted the role in Santa Fe in 2009 with some operaphiles tut-tutting it was vocally at least a size too big for her slim yet expressive coloratura instrument. Rumors still persist that taking on roles like Violetta have caused Dessay to consider shortening her operatic career.

So how does her voice fare in Becoming Traviata? It's a hard to tell completely because she and some of the other soloists employ a common rehearsal practice called "marking," in which they hold back their full voices. Nevertheless, it's fascinating to hear the singers (including tenor Charles Castronovo and baritone Ludovic Tézier) switch gears between croon and full cry — just one more way this film insists on showing opera with its hair down.

One could argue that Becoming Traviata is a film for opera geeks. The long stretches of Sivadier explaining blocking, facial expressions and emotional underpinnings will fascinate some and fatigue others. And although much of Verdi's opera is rehearsed in the film, little of the plot is exposed, which could leave non-opera buffs wishing they had boned up beforehand.

Still, seeing the process unfold up close with a team of players — that in this case includes a stage director, soloists, orchestra, chorus and conductor Louis Langrée — is illuminating for anyone who must do creative work with others.

And there's an added benefit. By uncovering the backstage mechanics of staging an opera, Béziat's film continues the good fight to break down barriers between classical music and popular culture.

Then there's the opera itself, which is a perfect choice for Béziat's format. With La traviata, Verdi achieved something he'd never attempted before: writing about real, everyday people with everyday problems set in contemporary times (although he was forced by the censors to set the premiere circa 1700). In Traviata there are family squabbles to be sorted out, bills to be paid and love that is honest, hard won and ultimately lost.

Verdi wanted the audience members to see themselves in the characters onstage. And something similar happens in Becoming Traviata. Watching Béziat's film, which in French is titled Traviata et nous (Traviata and Us), we come a little closer to seeing ourselves, backstage, struggling to bring our own realities to life.

Got an idea for a classical cartoon or a reaction to this one? Leave your thoughts in the comments section.

Pablo Helguera is a New York-based artist working with sculpture, drawing, photography and performance. His new book is Helguera's Artunes. You can see more of his work at Artworld Salon and on his own site.

One hundred years ago, a landmark of modern music was unveiled before a Paris audience. And that audience famously and mercilessly greeted it with boos, jeers and hisses. It was the premiere of the Ballets Russes' The Rite of Spring.

The setting was a primeval village whose ritual culminated in the choice and sacrifice of a young maiden. The choreographer was the company's legendary dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. The composer of the score was in seat M-20, a young Igor Stravinsky.

Years later, Stravinsky would be faulted for lacking the innovative spirit of his youth, but that night, a century ago, the Paris audience wasn't buying. San Francisco Symphony director and PBS's Keeping Score host Michael Tilson Thomas spoke to NPR's Robert Siegel about that infamous night, the work's longevity and The Rite's surprising singability. You can listen to the radio version at the audio link and read more of their conversation below.

Set the stage for us. What would a Paris audience — or this audience in May 1913 — reasonably expect at the premiere of a new ballet with new choreography and new music?

"They would be expecting to see something bright, colorful, exotic, with lots of leaping, lots of diaphanous costumes that would give you occasional lovely glimpses of gorgeous anatomy. That's not what they got. They got a very dark piece with people mostly moving on the floor, even writhing on the floor. They were all wearing very dark costumes that looked like animal skins and they had very puffy sleeves and hats and very odd, strange movements that they made — very angular, funny movements. And, of course, there was a score, which was at that time being very courageously played, but which must have been right on the edges of what was comprehensible to the musicians and the public."

There's an irony here, which is that Sergei Diaghilev, the great impresario, and Stravinsky, the composer, were both Russians eager to mine the veins of Russian folk tradition for themes. The place not to do that was in Russia, where St. Petersburg was famously Francophile at this point. But Paris was supposed to be a place where people would be interested in such things.

"That's true and so they were in pieces like Prince Igor or other things that were these kind of elegant, noble, czarist fantasies or the fairy-tale world of Rimsky-Korsakov. But the thing that was so extraordinary about The Rite of Spring was that it was not the perspective of a cultural anthropologist observing these quaint behaviors of ancient village people. The music seemed to take you into the actual minds and spirits of those people so that you understood very vividly the kinds of emotions, the kinds of fears, the kinds of lusts and thrusts which were a part of their essential existence. That was very shocking to the world of Paris. ... Parisian society dealt in these things, but they were very carefully put away in appropriate boudoirs and environments selected for that purpose, not out there onstage being observed by a mixed company of men and women."

It was a country that spoke with that irony of a civilizing mission throughout the world, but this ballet is telling them, "That's us! That's you out there! That's you onstage! These are our ancestors; this is where we started. This is how music began for people."

"Yes and, of course, one thing I find so extraordinary about The Rite of Spring is the joyousness of the piece. It really is about renewal of life, and it is true that the renewal of life involves a woman being sacrificed. But her sacrifice is accomplished by she herself dancing into a frenzy, which kills her. She's not killed by anyone; she herself kind of goes across this great leap into life and death."

Let's back up a bit and start with what the audience first heard when The Rite of Spring was being introduced. So they heard an instrument which I gather would be unrecognizable. It's a bassoon.

Well, it was a very unusual sound: the bassoon playing in such a high register. It had, of course, existed in French music, but not quite in this overt, undisguised way. And what the bassoon was playing was a melody of ancient Russia — well, it was really more Ukrainian than Russian — [a] melody with all of the odd little ornaments.

Yes, and throughout the piece, as you illustrate in your documentary about it, there are very unusual combinations of instruments that Stravinsky scores. Each individual instrument might not have been so unusual, but two kinds of clarinets playing at the same time was producing a sound people would be totally unprepared for.

Yes, and, of course, they were playing in dissonant intervals. I mean, most of The Rite of Spring is very melodic, but the melody is very often being played in dissonant intervals — parallel intervals — so that produces a very odd and ecstatic flavor in the music.

From what you've been able to figure — and I gather you met Stravinsky when he was well on in his years and living in the U.S. — did he set out to shock that night, do you think? Was he courting, you know, the rage against the modern or did he assume that people would applaud this and be satisfied with it?

I think he may have had some thoughts on how controversial the evening would be. ... Certainly Diaghilev did and very likely was hoping that there would be a big scandal because it would be great publicity for him and for the company.

What is so essential about The Rite of Spring is what Stravinsky described in the composing of its "Danse Sacrale" ("Sacrifical Dance"). He said of it that he was able to play it for some time on the piano before he could imagine how it could be written down. That's such a provocative statement because it suggests that through his improvisations, through this dance between the rational and irrational, inspired parts of himself, that he'd gotten himself to a world of musical associations that was just beyond any previously existing model. And he kind of had to take that very strong, primitive, visionary mixture of odd, displaced rhythms and accents and squeals and grunts and crunches and imagine how it could be written just in musical notation and then imagine how that could be made into sounds to be produced by a luxurious symphony orchestra. And in both of these things he succeeded very, very well.

Take us back to that evening 100 years ago. What happened? How bad did it get?

Well, as the music was continuing, people began to shout out comments from the audience. Like when they saw a group of maidens dancing in odd posture, they said, "Somebody get her a dentist!" Things like that. And then people began to boo and hiss and kind of sing burlesque imitations of the music and it was just a general murmur of disapproval that got louder and louder. Stravinsky left his seat in the auditorium, made his way backstage and was able to observe onstage the ballet going on with Nijinsky standing on the side there, also yelling out the numbers in Russian very, very loudly for the dancers — the counts to which the dancers dance which of course had nothing to do with the rhythmic structure of the piece, but nonetheless he was yelling, you know, "13, 14, 15, 16, 17," these long numbers which in Russian are polysyllabic. So he was yelling these numbers as loudly as he could because the dancers couldn't anymore hear where they were in the music.

You mean because the audience was making too much noise?

Exactly; it can be a very unnerving experience. Something like this happened to me: About 20 or 30 years ago, I premiered a piece by Steve Reich at Carnegie Hall and the audience became so restive and people were yelling and screaming back and forth at one another and again I had to start saying the numbers of the piece to my colleagues very, very loudly, "15, 16, 17, 18, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5," really screaming at the top of my voice so that we could distinguish where we were in the music.

And when the piece ended, there was an instant of silence and then an avalanche of boos and calls and bravos and I mean it was very, very startling, of course. We went backstage and Steve was as white as a sheet, but I said, "Steve, this is amazing! Nothing like this has happened since The Rite of Spring premiere and I guarantee you tomorrow morning, everyone in the world will know that this took place."

The jeering at The Rite of Spring can be invoked on behalf of some very interesting, good music that's not well-received at first and also some totally cerebral music that is so private, so anti-melodic that frankly it doesn't deserve a re-listening.

Yeah, well, I don't think the issue of cerebral or anti-melodic really applies to this case. What this is really about is a much more basic matter, which is that it is possible for an artwork to initially shock people and thus attain great attention for itself. But whether or not that work will hang around, whether people will still be interested in it years later, decades later in classical music, hundreds of years later, is another question.

Now what did happen with The Rite of Spring is that shortly after the stage premiere there was a purely concert premiere which went much better, and over the next years it was widely recognized by musicians what a stunning, very difficult but amazing piece it was. This is what can happen, what does happen in the world of the performing arts because whatever sensation, whatever riot, whatever scandal may be created by a first performance, it really depends those years later, those decades later, whether the audience still finds the piece to be an arresting and interesting journey to take.

Take away the audience's behavior that night and for that matter, take away the choreography and even the element of human sacrifice. Does Stravinsky's music — is it a landmark by itself? If it had simply been played by concert, would it stand as a major turning point in 20th century music?

Absolutely, because it takes folkloric material and evolves it, abstracts it into something very penetrating, very revelatory of the underlying, psychological drives in these pieces in both chant and dance music coming out of village music life. I mean, there are many other composers who around the same time were wrestling with this issue — the kind of issue of not correcting folk music but rather focusing on the unusual and angular aspects of it.

Examples of this, well, of course, Bartok in later time, a little bit later; Charles Ives exactly of the same time capitalizing on the so-called mistakes of country musicians and making that part of his essential musical language. So Stravinsky was doing this, but he really was continuing the tradition of Rimsky-Korsakov and other people in the Russian circle before him — everything about it to glorify Russian folklore, to glorify the condition of the villagers, to evoke a prehistoric non-Christian past. All these things were very much in the tradition of St. Petersburg intellectuals who explored these kinds of matters because in these kinds of pieces, issues concerning the nature of Russia itself and the lot and condition of its people could be examined.

But I can only imagine what the upper crust of St. Petersburg would have done had he premiered this there.

Yes, how could we have come from this? Or how is it possible that what's being glorified here is a culture which mostly exists amongst the serfs on our estates in the country. It's very amusing to hear them. We can get sentimental about it, but we certainly don't think of that as anything of lasting importance. And, of course, Stravinsky's piece beyond The Rite of Spring was a piece called Les Noces, which was an abstraction of a Russian village wedding. A great masterpiece — some think the most essential masterpiece of the Stravinsky first period. And again, it's based on things that people in the aristocracy would have known from their experiences in the country, but that they didn't take seriously.

It's just like what had happened with Diaghilev when he first had put on his big exhibition of Russian art some decades earlier and he'd gone all around Russia visiting country estates and everyone there had shown him all of their precious French and Italian collections; and then when he decided that what he wanted from their collection was some dusty, old icon or some odd statue or piece of furniture that was stored away in the mustiness of an attic or cellar, they couldn't believe — they were insulted. How could he pick this from their marvelous collections? But of course he was looking for the ancient, original items from the actual culture. They did admit, though, that later — when he took these to St. Petersburg and exhibited them in the palace, and when the catalogue of the collection came out and they discovered that what they had thought to be worthless rubbish from their cellars was now worth a considerable sum of money — they had more respect for Diaghilev's taste.

I gather that it's difficult for the orchestra? I mean, this is a tough piece to play, yes?

You know, it is — it used to be difficult. The thing is it's very gestural. There are reoccurring little rhythmic cells in the piece and once you get those — once you're able to see the large design of those that goes over many, many bars — maybe as over a whole page in some cases, they're swift and moving bars — you really get it into your bones. And young musicians today play this piece with terrifying ease — it's almost necessary to get them to bear down a bit and not kind of fly their way over all these rhythms, but to get to be more rooted, let it seem more powerful, more organic, more hardly strived for, perhaps.

Of course, Stravinsky himself, when he sang his own music or when he played it a little bit — but mostly sang it at the point that I knew him — there was a wonderful gesture to his singing and he had a kind of fractured solfege [sings], kind of hisses and noises that came between his teeth and kind of gravelly sound that came from the back of this throat. But even in the most abstract pieces, there was always that sense of the turnout of the phrase, the kind of choreographic twist of the phrase and that's really what he was after in The Rite of Spring. I don't think to him this music was brutal music; I think it was just music packed full of life and demanding elaborate and finely wrought execution.

You remark on, or I've heard you remark on, well there's a moment when there is, what is it, 11 consecutive drumbeats?

Yes.

One of the great moments for bass drum players?

It's a great moment for bass drum and symphony, absolutely.

This is their star turn moment in the canon.

It's an extraordinary moment in music. It's an 11/4 bar; not too many of those had been seen previously. It's all just unison crunches and then it launches you into the wildest rhythmic music in the piece thus far: "The Glorification of the Chosen One," which is really a test for your musical mind and your sinews and muscles.

I'm just curious — you know, you talk about how Stravinsky would sing his music. It sounds like you could do a vocal representation of the entire Rite of Spring. I mean, you've conducted this enough.

Oh, of course!

You could, yeah?

Yeah, I think it's possible to sing your way straight through The Rite of Spring because it has very continuous, sinuous gestures. And between your singing and maybe a little help from some raps on the table, you could make it the whole way through.

You know, it's great fun to learn this piece, especially as I learned it — on the piano — as I played the four-hand version that Stravinsky had made for the rehearsals, long before I had worked on the orchestral version. And that four-hand version really gets it all into your body and what's nice about it is that you're playing all of the notes. In the orchestra, what's hard is — perhaps the hardest part for the orchestra is you have to rest. It's not so hard to play the notes you have to play, it's just that there are very odd pauses in between them and you have to be very good listening to the thread of the rhythm and you have to be just right in the placement of those notes — it's very tricky.

Well, the only other question I have is, I looked up some 1924 comments on this piece in the American press when Stravinsky was here, I guess, and it was being performed. And by that time, some people say this is great music, some people think it's a lot of banging. By what time is The Rite of Spring, do you think, by what time is it generally accepted as having been a really great piece of music?

Probably right around then — the '20s. By the '30s, people were taking Stravinsky to task for not writing stuff as great as what he had done when The Rite of Spring was written, and Stravinsky joked about that often that whatever he was doing now, people were complaining about and wished that he was doing what he had given up doing 10 or 15 years before.

But he had insatiable curiosity about words, about geography, about just things that he encountered in his day-to-day life and I think that curiosity also was extending into musical matters; he was never going to stay still, he was always going to move forward. And, of course, he realized how central this piece was for him and his life. The things he most appreciated perhaps were the "Danse Sacrale" and very much the beautiful harmony which is in the piece, and I think he liked the fact that over the years the piece had become less bangy and it was more possible to discern what beautiful notes he had actually written. And at the same time, he didn't want the piece to become deluxe. You remember he criticized Herbert von Karajan, saying that his performance of the piece sounded like driving through a jungle in an air-conditioned Mercedes with the windows rolled up.

A few weeks ago, we asked you to take the last minute of Stravinsky's famous music for The Rite of Spring, transform it into something new and post your creations to YouTube. And boy, did you guys deliver, just in time to mark the ballet's 100th anniversary — it premiered May 29, 1913 — in brilliant fashion.

We can't say enough how much fun these have been to watch, and we hope you've had a lot of enjoyment making them. Your collective creativity and love of music are amazing. We've put together a handful of our favorites: They're beautiful, goofy, clever, thought-provoking and just plain funny — and more often than not, a combination of all of those things.

If you'd like to see the full versions of the videos we've clipped, check these out on YouTube:

• Ann Robideaux' shadow play with dancers
• Garrett Ott and friends' hilarious poolside paganism
• Dan Fu's clever commentary on a common springtime rite of passage
• James Kearney's amazing/creepy/amazing bacon-rind "choreography" (talk about primordial ooze!)
• Seth Boyden Demonstration School's lovely tribute to vernal colors (which my colleagues felt was a clear favorite; I abstained on this one, since I shot it and my child is one of the participants)
• Youth Arts in Action's contribution, featuring the incredibly graceful Maria Sascha Khan
• A trio of dancers moving in an urban streetscape choreographed by Alexandra Pinel

Alas, some entries arrived too late for inclusion in our montage, but we heartily recommend you spend some time with them, including an intriguing narrative short filmed in San Francisco's Stern Grove Park, an extremely cool painted film by Fredecie Mageia and a pair of videos from music critic Will Robin, starring his cats Igor and Coco — yes, really — in which one of the felines may or may not be sporting a banana costume. (I can't beat New Yorker critic Alex Ross' insta-analysis of Will's oeuvre: "These dancers abjure the clichés of mimetic gesture and capture the score's interplay of tense stasis and predatory motion.")

And be sure to take a look at some of the other incredibly creative submissions we've received — including another smart little California vignette called "The Cyborg Express"; the beautiful dancers of Geeksdanz; a funny take on a familiar springtime battle from Steve Emahiser; exuberant classes at the Friends Seminary School in New York City; a "world-famous" air drummer rocking out; a loopy, one-take living room horror show; and primordial, muddy glory (of very different kinds) from Brian Schmidt and the duo of Mina Lawton and Kimberly Thompson. To find even more, try searching #ritenpr at YouTube.

Thanks again to Boosey & Hawkes and Universal Music Group for making this project possible, and to all of you for contributing! What should we all dance to next?

One of the most brilliant and exciting commemorations of the 100th anniversary of Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring is a new work that references the Russian composer's music — but in an entirely new cultural framework. It's a pairing of film and music called Radhe, Radhe: Rites of Holi.

Created by two Indian-American artists, pianist and composer Vijay Iyer and filmmaker Prashant Bhargava, and played by Iyer and members of the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Radhe Radhe transports Stravinsky's semi-mythological tale of mysterious primordial Russian rituals with an actual religious festival that takes place each spring: the Hindu festival of Holi. The duo's work was commissioned by Carolina Performing Arts at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, which dedicated its entire 2012-13 season to examining and celebrating The Rite of Spring from an enormous variety of vantage points, including several world premieres of pieces inspired by Stravinsky. One such work is Radhe Radhe, which was debuted in March.

Bhargava's footage comes from the city of Mathura in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Mathura has special prominence in Hindu tradition: It's claimed as the birthplace of Lord Krishna, one of the most important deities of the Hindu pantheon and who is especially tied to this springtime holiday, and so the city becomes a place of pilgrimage for Holi celebrants. In Mathura, Holi is a celebration of the goddess Radha's and Krishna's love for each other, a love depicted throughout Hindu poetry, religious ritual, music and art as feelings that are at once divine and deeply human. (The reference to Radha is what gives this project its name.) Holi is also known as "the festival of colors" for the brilliantly shaded powders that people throw on each other during the festival.

Iyer and Bhargava's Radhe Radhe picks up upon Stravinsky's musical and conceptual ideas in smart and subtle ways. Bhargava, a filmmaker whose previous credits include the feature-length Patang (The Kite), has an extraordinary eye for small gestures and visual details — no small thing, given Mathura's overwhelming whirl of brilliant hues and pressing crowds. He captures the upending of social norms during Holi, when women have free rein to beat men with sticks — playfully, but with the undercurrent of society experiencing a temporary respite from rigid gender roles during a time of magic.

Bhargava also captures the simmering menace inherent in the Stravinsky. The shots move deftly from pre-festival preparations to exuberant celebrations to far more unsettling scenes. Bonfires roar; in Hindu tradition, they symbolize the triumph of good over evil, but here you're highly aware of fire's destructive power. And Bhargava witnesses how the good-natured tossing of colored powders — the quintessential Holi activity — sours into ugly bullying, particularly of women, on the street.

Similarly, Iyer uses the spark of Stravinsky in creative and dexterous ways that may not be immediately apparent. Just as the original Rite opens with a solo bassoon traveling a strange and lonely melodic path, the music of Radhe Radhe begins with Iyer and fellow pianist Cory Smythe, spinning in their own musical galaxy before opening up to the ensemble. And just as Stravinsky seized upon Russian folkloric musical ideas though not directly quoting them, Iyer occasionally transforms ICE into a band of Indian musicians playing devotional-sounding creations of his own devising. (And that's not even to touch upon the long history jazz musicians have had with Stravinsky's Rite; for more on this, go to our colleague Patrick Jarenwattananon's excellent survey of these relationships, past and present.)

Radhe Radhe is both a testament to Stravinsky's continued influence and a richly successful creative expression on its own terms, well apart from the Rite centennial. Bhargava and Iyer are planning that their visually and sonically dazzling collaboration will get wider exposure through the film festival circuit and potentially a DVD release; here's hoping that many viewers and audiences get a chance to experience Holi through Bhargava and Iyer's eyes and ears.

Composer, pianist and software engineer Stephen Malinowski has created one brilliant solution to an age-old problem: how to communicate and understand what's going on in a piece of music, particularly if you don't know standard musical notation. Over the course of some forty years, he's honed what he calls his "Music Animation Machine" from a 20-foot printed scroll to the software and iPad apps he's created — but the results are art.

His animations posted on YouTube have gleaned over 100 million page views, from Debussy's "Claire de lune" to the Allegretto movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. And Bjork enjoyed his work so much that she commissioned him to create the animations for her "Biophilia" project.

Most recently, Malinowski has created animations for Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring, just in time for the ballet's 100th anniversary on May 29. (He even created a one-minute version for our own #ritenpr project.) Through this visualization, you can start to follow and understand the composer's dazzlingly dense interplays of melody, instrumentation and the relationships between the instruments.

I reached the California-based Malinowski by phone a few days ago to discuss his work on The Rite of Spring, and to talk a bit more about how his Music Animation Machine came to be — and how it's evolved in the four decades since its original incarnation.

I think what you create is just incredible and brilliant— especially as a way for non-musicians to get a better grasp of what they're hearing. From your vantage point, what's the benefit of visualizing scores?

People usually respond to sound in a unitary way. It's the reason why you can't follow more than one conversation at a time at a party, for example. But with vision, your brain is trained to comprehend multiple things at once: you can take in many more elements simultaneously. In music, there's often much more going on than you can grasp in that moment of hearing. When you have a visualization, your eyes lead your ears through the music. You take advantage of your brain's ability to process multiple pieces of visual information simultaneously.

When I was young and studying piano and really getting into music, I started reading along with scores as I listened to music — that's the way you're traditionally supposed to learn what's going on in a piece. But I started to get really frustrated by very complicated scores.And the symbols in conventional musical notation only go so far. For example, an eighth note takes up the same amount of space on a page as a whole note, though a whole note sounds for much longer. So you have to learn all those symbols in order to perceive what's going on, which can be really frustrating. And the score can never clue you in to the differences in instrumental timbre — how different a note of the same pitch can sound if played by a trumpet versus a violin, for example. And I came to realized that scores are really for musicians, not for listeners. When that information is presented as graphs, it's very easy to understand.

Do you have a standard way of notating different pieces of music?

At this point, I have a toolkit of what I call different renderers. I have about 20 now, and each renders a different visual effect. When I start working with a piece of music, I have to figure out which renderers will work within that particular composer's work. And if it turns out that nothing I already have in that toolkit accurately represents what the composer is doing, I write new programming.

But I feel like I'm only at the very beginning of what's possible. I'm working with the very basics, technologically speaking — it's like I'm at the caveman level of evolution, just as they figured out that if you took an animal bone and blew into it, it would make a sound, and that you could make other nice sounds if you banged some holes into the bone and then wiggled your fingers over the holes.

There are certain elements that the Music Animation Machine can do quite well, like tonality and schemes of harmonic pitch. But it doesn't touch rhythm at all, and of course that's such a strong part of music.

You've mentioned to me that you didn't really know The Rite of Spring particularly well before you took on this visualization project in time for the piece's 100th anniversary. So what did you learn about the architecture of the piece during the process of translating it into visuals?

I was not aware of the kind of harmonic things Stravinsky has going on. There's a lot of bitonality — he'll have multiple tonal areas going one after the other, and then they'll coexist for a while. And I have rendered each of those in different color schemes, so you can see them as they exist independently and then come together, in and out. There are also a lot of places in the score with very subtle shifts in instrumentation and texture, and the software can represent those differences in timbre. It's incredible — Stravinsky continually torques you, startles you, and frustrates your anticipations