Ballet (music) of Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake" after the composer's death. In many cases ballets were still short scenes within operas, to enable scenery or costume changes. Perhaps the best-known example of ballet music that is part of an opera is the "Dance of the Hours" from Amilcare Ponchielli's opera "La Gioconda" (1876). There was a violent change in mood when Igor Stravinsky's ballet "The Rite of Spring" (1913) was performed. The music was modernist and dissonant, and the movements were highly stylized. In 1924 George Antheil wrote "Ballet Mécanique," which was actually for a film of moving objects, not for dancers, but
The Rite of Spring that the work's opening bassoon melody was derived from an anthology of Lithuanian folk songs, but maintained that this was his only borrowing from such sources; if other elements sounded like aboriginal folk music, he said, it was due to "some unconscious 'folk' memory". However, Morton has identified several more melodies in Part I as having their origins in the Lithuanian collection. More recently Richard Taruskin has discovered in the score an adapted tune from one of Rimsky-Korsakov's "One Hundred Russian National Songs". Taruskin notes the paradox whereby "The Rite", generally acknowledged as the most revolutionary of the composer's early