When the rhythm hits you like a truck 

Stravinsky's iconic Rite of Spring. Most would mention its extraordinary reimagining of rhythm and its place in the musical discourse; rhythm, after all, has always been in service of the melody but Stravinsky seems to blatantly flip the hierarchy - melody is nowhere to be found and rhythm takes the lead. Indeed, this is most obvious with the violent ostinatos in the strings at the beginning where the accents are rhythmically displaced to throw off the listener and yet, this rhythm becomes a motif in itself - whenever the accented ostinato comes back, Stravinsky either takes individual rhythmic cells (e.g dum-DUM-dum-DUM) or simply restates the phrase again in its entirety. (00:51) Other interesting rhythmic points would be 1. the flexibility in rhythmic variation at 00:34 where you get essentially the same descending chromatic motif but slight changes in rhythm between triplets and duplets. 2. the various rhythmic fragmentation of the same motif which is then stretched by simple addition (seen at 00:58 with the melody in bassoons) which is a technique we see best exemplified in a movement of Stravinsky's previous ballet, Petrushka, Danse Russe.
Stravinsky's genius in orchestration helps to create different textural layers that enable us to separate motivic ideas more clearly as well. Notice how the ostinato is always given the same orchestration, in the lower registers of the strings with accents backed up by horns, the trumpets are mostly given these accentuated sharp triplet motifs on a different sonority plane while the lower double reeds are favoured in terms of important and distinct motifs.
Perhaps the most interesting facet of composition to me would be the way this movement is constructed because, like many of the composers at the time, Stravinsky was looking to move away from the traditional methods of motivic development. His solution was to continuously piece together different pieces of textures in a seemingly mosaic-like form, cutting directly to distinct motifs even before fully developing one of them, or even squarely superposing different motifs to create a rich sonic landscape. This block-like compositional form manifests itself fully in his Symphonies of Wind Instruments and perhaps served as inspiration to Messiaen later on.
Recording(Boulez): • "LE SACRE DU PRINTEMPS...