"Sacrificial Dance"

The kind of repeat structure that initiates Block B in the "Evocation" is by no means unique to this single movement. Similar configurations are found in the opening two bars of the "Ritual of the Rival Tribes," in the first two

bars of the "Glorification of the Chosen One," and in the initial eight bars of the first section of the "Sacrificial Dance." Indeed, in the "Sacrificial Dance," a hidden meter leads to a higher-level 1-2-3 triple count, similar to that at no. 121 + 3 in the "Evocation," and in which connection similar implications of instability arise.

In Example 36 attention is drawn to the two principal motives a and b (labeled cells by Boulez).^[44] And, as in Example 25 from the March of Histoire, subsequent repeats of these two units are aligned vertically and then marked off by dotted lines. Thus, too, fixed metric identity imposes itself along familiar lines. For notwithstanding the irregular

and measures of the tiny submotives, a punctuation of D or a sixteenth-note rest always falls on the downbeats of these irregular measures, while the reiterating chord itself follows on the second sixteenth-note beat. Hence, as earlier, fixed identity or constancy tends to regulate the irregularity. But neither, of course, are these graphics strictly "mechanical" in conception, for the irregularity reflects an intent to retain a second beat "feel" for the reiterating chord—or, in relation to the eighth-note, an offbeat "feel."

Still, with the eighth-note inferred initially as the tactus with an assigned tempo marking of 126, a concealed

periodicity emerges with little resistance, especially in view of the immediate, verbatim repeat of the a5-b7 succession and its higher-level (and "targeted") 1-2-3 count. Indeed, with subsequent repeats of motive b7, the details of displacement are similar to those pursued on behalf of the B-C-D-(E) sweep in Historie 's opening March. Here, an

[44] Ibid., pp. 124–27.

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Example 36:
"Sacrificial Dance"

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initial identity is established for motive b7 at nos. 142 and 143, which at no. 144 + 4 is displaced by an eighth-note beat, the reversal thus coming by way of the tactus. Finally, at no. 145 + 4 the displacement surfaces more conspicuously in the form of an offbeat-onbeat contradiction, and from this point on the struggle of fixed metric identity and displacement assumes its relentless and by now celebrated disposition.

Of course, the "Sacrificial Dance" does not have the convenience of a basso ostinato. And without question the impact of the disruption, of a periodicity constantly lost to the modification and reshuffling of the metrically fixed elements, is ultimately far more severe, far more disorienting. Yet the strategy itself remains unchanged. Even the more active role of the percussion in the climactic section at nos. 146–48 can revealingly be compared to the climactic stretch at mm. 50–57 in Historie , as examined and discussed apropos of Example 25d.