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The Sacred Spring of Slavs is a musical depiction of proto-Slavic pagan rites created through the juxtaposition of Igor Stravinsky’s mythical "The Rite of Spring" and Ukrainian composer Ihor Shamo’s "Hutsulian Watercolours". Serhiy Salov’s goal with this project was to highlight the parallels between the two works, both of which have a coarse side, favour irregular rhythms and feature the most bizarre dissonances. In reworking the "The Rite of Spring", Serhiy Salov paid particular attention to the various strata of sounds that needed to be reproduced: “Because there is a limit to what ten fingers can accomplish, I chose to use the sostenuto pedal (the middle pedal on the piano), for example, to help clarify the textures." The Hutsulian Watercolours evoke the daily lives of the Hutsuls, highlanders of the Carpathian mountains whom Ukrainians find highly exotic, having trouble even understanding the local dialect, a mixture of Romanian, Hungarian and Ukrainian. Ihor Shamo shrewdly conceived the suite to alternate between scenes of nature and of daily life, in much the same way Igor Stravinsky introduced the two large sections of his ballet to highlight the brutality of the pagan rites.