The Rite of Spring composer Julius Harrison acknowledged the uniqueness of the work negatively: it demonstrated Stravinsky's "abhorrence of everything for which music has stood these many centuries ... all human endeavour and progress are being swept aside to make room for hideous sounds ..." In "The Firebird", Stravinsky had begun to experiment with bitonality (the use of two different keys simultaneously). He took this technique further in "Petrushka", but reserved its full effect for "The Rite" where, as the analyst E.W. White explains, he "pushed [it] to its logical conclusion". White also observes the music's complex metrical character, with combinations of duple and
The Firebird was looking for fresh compositional talent. The ballet was the first of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes productions to have an all-original score composed for it. Alexandre Benois wrote in 1910 that he had two years earlier suggested to Diaghilev the production of a Russian nationalist ballet, an idea all the more attractive given both the newly awakened French passion for Russian dance and also the ruinously expensive costs of staging opera. The inspiration of mixing the mythical Firebird with the unrelated Russian tale of Koschei the Deathless possibly came from a popular child's verse by Yakov Polonsky, "A Winter's Journey"