Ballets Russes drove audiences away from modern music? Just the opposite.

The premiere of Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" in 1913 is often cited as a flash point in the divide between new music and its audience. People began shouting, booing so loudly that the dancers could no longer hear the orchestra. The audience, conventional wisdom had it, still cared about contemporary music, and was outraged when it got too strange, dissonant, "ugly." From this point on -- so the claim goes -- the chasm widened between composers pursuing their own agendas and audiences wishin...