Word: rite
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Dates: during 1940-1940
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...Pierian well water of Johann Sebastian Bach to the violet-bordered stream of Schubert's Ave Maria, Fantasia is a long succession of very large orders. Some of these orders (the flower, fish and mushroom dances of the Nutcracker Suite, the hulking, saurian epic of Stravinsky's Rite, the eerie, fantastic Night on Bald Mountain) are so beautifully filled that they may leave callous critics whispering incredulously to themselves. Others (Mickey's Sorcerer's Apprentice, the hilarious ostrich and hippopotamus ballets) set a new high in Disney animal muggery. Others (the wave and cloud sequences...
...never been to a concert in their lives listened to 35 to 710 performances of each composition, ended up whistling Bach. Beethoven and even Stravinsky at breakfast. Idea men, working on the dulcet strains of Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, winced at the bedlam of Stravinsky's Rite which other technicians were playing next door. (The Rite finally had to be quarantined in a special corner of the lot, where its boom-lay-booms could be studied without disturbing the whole studio...
Stravinsky's Rite, which has caused high-brow audiences to rise, shout and pound on their neighbors' skulls in ecstasy, offered a serious problem. To match its cosmic hullabaloo, nothing less than a planetary cataclysm would do. So Disney men began studying nebulae and comets at California's Mount Wilson Observatory, mugged up on theories of protozoic life, earthquakes and other geologic upheavals, did portraits of every prehistoric monster in Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History...
...Museum of Natural History and Chester Stock of California Institute of Technology were called in for advice. A herd of pet iguanas and a baby alligator wriggled over the Burbank lot, while animators studied their lizardy movements. By the time a complete cast had been rounded up for the Rite, the Disney zoo contained eusthenopterons, brachiosaurs, brontosaurs, plesiosaurs, mesosaurs, diplodocuses, triceratopses, pterodactyls, trachodons, struthiomimuses, stegosaurs, archaeopteryxes, pteranodons, tyrannosaurs and enough plain run-of-the-Jurassic dinosaurs to people a planet. Studio cameras groaned under the burden of the whole story of evolution...
...they would spend their lives working for Disney if he would give them the chance. Composer Igor Stravinsky himself has signed a contract to do more music with Disney, has blandly averred that Disney's paleontological cataclysm was what he had had in mind all along in his Rite of Spring. Musicians and sound engineers who came to hear Soundman Garity's gadgets perform found that such recording had never before been even approached. Music lovers crowed that more ears would be saved for Beethoven by Fantasia than by all the symphonic lecture-recitalists...