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Behind The Keys – Ballet Pianist Anna Buchenhorst

September 2, 2013 by 4dancers

At 4dancers we believe that music is a big part of dance, and that the people who conduct it and play it are as much a part of the art form as the dancers themselves. To that end, today we hear from Swedish pianist Anna Buchenhorst, who recently released a CD of ballet music.  Learn a little bit about what life is like for her behind the keys…

Anna Buchenhorst
Anna Buchenhorst

How did you get involved with playing music for dance?

I was dancing ballet myself from the age of four until eighteen. At that age I choose the piano 100% and it wasn’t until ten years later that I came back into a ballet studio as a pianist. I instantly liked being there!

What do you think the challenges are in terms of playing this type of music?

The challenge is to play helpful music that fits to the steps, and still use beautiful, inspiring music with a big variety. One dancer once told me that she could feel it in her body the whole day, that I had been playing her favorite music for class. That was really nice to hear.

How do you select the music you use for dance?

To me it´s like a sport. Even when I go to the opera, or listen to the radio I can think that this aria, or ballade would be great for an adagio in the middle and so on. I am a collector of great pieces and I want to leave them like they are as much as possible. I also improvise a lot, but not on this record.

What do you like best about playing music for dancers?

To watch the dancers improve, when you pick the right music. It´s functional, fantastic and full of good spirits.

BIO: Anna Buchenhorst is a piano soloist and the full-time ballet pianist of the Royal Swedish Ballet since 2002. She has a repertoire that extends from the baroque to contemporary music, including solo works, chamber music and concertos for piano and orchestra. She has worked together with leading European choreographers and ballet teachers of our time, among them Mats Ek, as well as playing for celebrities such as Mikhail Baryshnikov, John Neumeier and Dame Beryl Grey.

She graduated as a Master of Fine Arts, under Professor Stella Tjajkovski, at the Academy of Music and Drama in Gothenburg.

In the early nineties she received a scholarship from the Swedish Institute enabling her to become a full-time student of the Liszt Academy in Budapest. With Professor Márta Gulyás as her piano teacher, she refined her virtuosic technique and musical insights.

 

 

Filed Under: Music & Dance Tagged With: Anna Buchenhorst, ballet CD, ballet class music, music for dance

Music Within The Dance Class

July 29, 2013 by 4dancers

by Janet Neidhardt

students dancing
Photo by Catherine L. Tully

It’s amazing how influential music can be on the dancing body. Some sounds get the heart pumping and feet moving quickly while others lend the body to slow and meditative motions–and then there is everything in-between. As a dance educator, it is important to me that I educate my students about the relationship between music and dance.

Students can sometimes be resistant to music that is different than what they hear on the radio, so I have developed a system of creating openness to new music. I start the year off with music they might recognize for a warm up and then slowly start to bring in more ethnic music with strong beats. Then I introduce music that doesn’t have clear down beats and might be counted in 5’s or 7’s etc. This is a good challenge for students to count to and can also work well for phrases that might not have counts, where timing is more free form.

I like to play with music when teaching movement. I often have students perform movement phrases to various styles of music to compare and contrast how the music changes the feeling and emphasis within the movement. This kind of activity pushes students to think more deeply about movement and how it feels from the inside to dance as opposed to what they look like on the outside. For teenagers who tend to focus on what they look like a lot this can be an especially challenging and needed task.

When students are given a choreography assignment I often push them out of their comfort zone by only allowing music without words. They are able to explore the various interpretations of music and movement without the meanings that words can give within a song. Using music without words can provoke more creativity, wider range of movement possibilities, and open up ideas for relating movement to the music.

I spend a lot of time during the summer months searching for new and different music to use for the upcoming school year. (Songza is a great app to use with various playlists.) It is important to recognize how influential music is to the movement of our bodies and to our choreography. Since I have to choreograph about 4 pieces a year it is important that I find music that inspires my own creativity.

Whether it’s choosing music for teaching or choreography, thoughtful and intuitive choices are needed. Sometimes we need to wake up to Destiny’s Child and sometimes we need to improvise with Philip Glass–and sometimes it’s vise versa!

When I know the goal of a class I’m teaching, I find the music I need to play to help my students achieve that goal.

Do you have any tips for choosing/using music for students? Feel free to share!

dancer posing upside down
Janet Neidhardt

Contributor Janet Neidhardt has been a dance educator for 10 years. She has taught modern, ballet, and jazz at various studios and schools on Chicago’s North Shore. She received her MA in Dance with an emphasis in Choreography from the University of North Carolina-Greensboro and her BA in Communications with a Dance Minor from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Throughout her time in graduate school, Janet performed with Sidelong Dance Company based in Winston-Salem, NC.

Currently, Janet teaches dance at Loyola Academy High School in Wilmette, IL. She is the Director of Loyola Academy Dance Company B and the Brother Small Arts Guild, and choreographs for the Spring Dance Concert and school musical each year. Janet is very active within the Loyola Academy community leading student retreats and summer service trips. She regularly seeks out professional development opportunities to continue her own artistic growth. Recently, Janet performed with Keigwin and Company in the Chicago Dancing Festival 2012 and attended the Bates Dance Festival.

When she isn’t dancing, Janet enjoys teaching Pilates, practicing yoga, and running races around the city of Chicago.

Filed Under: 4teachers, Music & Dance Tagged With: dance teachers, music and dance, music for dance class, teaching tips

Christopher Hobson – Creating Music For Ballet Class

July 9, 2013 by 4dancers

Christopher Hobson
Christopher Hobson

We love talking with musicians that are involved with ballet–after all–the music is such a big part of it! Today we have Christopher Hobson with us to talk about his experience playing for dancers and making music for class…

How did you get involved in doing music for ballet class?

I originally started playing for contemporary dance. I suppose like most musicians, I got into this by accident! I was playing a jazz gig and got talking to somebody at the bar who said they liked what I was playing and would I be interested in auditioning for a job playing for contemporary dance. As I wasn’t working at the time I thought ‘why not’! When I started I didn’t know what the job entailed and was thrown in at the deep end.

After a couple of years of contemporary dance I moved cities and took a job with Elmhurst School for Dance, specialising in ballet! This was the first time I’d ever played for ballet and again it was a real learning experience and some of the great teachers who were in this institution at the time took me under their wing and took the time to explain to me just what was required when playing for ballet and what the differences were in terms of style, accompaniment and support between ballet and contemporary dance. Without this support from colleagues I doubt I would be where I am today. I was only 18 when I first entered a dance studio as a musician!

What is the most difficult thing about creating music for dance class?

You have to be able to be creative, 100% of the time! There is no time to sit on your reputation or relax – I believe that my job is to inspire the dancers who are in the class and if I do my job well it will enable the dancers to not only do their job well, but enjoy doing their job. This can be particularly difficult if you’ve been stuck in a recording studio for days, travelling from venue theatre to theatre or just if you’re slightly tired!

What is the most rewarding thing about making music for ballet class?

When playing live, I try to use music from as many different genres as possible – from baroque, classical, jazz standards, musical theatre and popular culture – also not forgetting the occasional improvisations! I love it when a particular melody I play reflects the movement of a dancer. From behind the piano you can see the smiles on dancers faces and that of the ballet master. This makes me feel like the movement and music are working as one – just as it does in a good performance.

Do you find your approach has changed at all over time? [Read more…]

Filed Under: Music & Dance Tagged With: ballet class, ballet class music, international dance teachers association, music for dance class, piano music

Opus 7: The Once and Future Arvo Pärt, Part II

May 18, 2013 by 4dancers

by Allan Greene

(Read part one of this series here)

music_notesPart’s works and his crises

Arvo  Pärt (pronounced “pair-t”), the contemporary classical composer, insists, as recorded in Arvo Pärt in Conversation (Enzo Restagno, et al., 2010), that in contrast to whatever anybody else takes away from his highly spiritual compositions, he is driven by technical goals; and that the “system” that he devised after 1976, which he calls Tintinnabuli, is meant to prove that “1+1=1”, that in the End is the Beginning.  In other words, Happiness is a Cosmic Blanket.

His route to happiness took him through his own extended breakdown, between 1968 and 1976, a span during which he had largely stopped composing.  He had already changed direction twice in his short career.

Born in 1935 into an independent Estonia at the fringes of Western culture, he grew up as the Soviets took effective control during the war and then complete control afterward.  The Estonian musical community had been pretty much ignored by the powerful and reactionary Composers Union in Moscow.  Pärt, however, was a seeker, not an entertainer, and when visiting artists performed and brought recordings and scores of what was happening in the West (Boulez, Stockhausen, Henze, Dallapicola, Berio, and above all Webern), he found the path he was seeking.  His early popular success (1960) with a student composition, Nekrolog, which was one of the first twelve-tone pieces written inside the Soviet Union, drew “relentless criticism from elevated cultural circles” (Restagno, p. 14) because it allowed a corrupt Western aesthetic to penetrate the Iron Curtain.  A few years later he was trying heterogeneous pieces (Collage on B-A-C-H, 1964) which he described as:

A sort of transplantation: if you have the feeling you don’t have a skin of your own,you try to take strips from skin all around you and apply them to yourself.  In time these strips change, and turn into a new skin.  I didn’t know where this experiment with the Collages would lead me, but in any case I had the impression I was carrying a living organism in my hands, a living substance, such as I had yet not found in twelve-tone music… But one cannot go on forever with the method transplantation. (Restagno, 17)

He was in a record store (remember those places?) and overheard a short Gregorian chant, just a few seconds of it, as he recalls (ibid., 18).

In it I discovered a world that I didn’t know, a world without harmony, without meter, without timbre, without instrumentation, without anything.  At this moment it became clear to me which direction I had to follow, and a long journey began in my unconscious mind.  (ibid., 18)

Pärt continued to experiment in the mid-Sixties with works juxtaposing radically different styles, like his Second Symphony (1966), which after the most frightening clashes of sound masses introduces a note-for-note symphonic quotation from Tchaikovsky twice in the final movement.

He gave up on twelve-tone, serial, musique concrète, even Webern-like miniatures, after that, having decided that mid-Twentieth Century New Music was a carrier of “the germ of conflict”.  The conflicts had lost their power and meaning for him.

One could say I had come to terms with myself and with God – and in so doing, all personal demands on the world receded into the background.  (ibid., 22)

I have come to recognize that it not my duty to struggle with the world, nor to condemn this or that, but first and foremost to know myself, since every conflict begins in ourselves. (ibid.)

And so I set off in search of new sounds.  In this way, the path itself becomes a source of inspiration.  The path no longer runs outwards from us, but inwards, to the core from which everything springs.  That is what all my actions have come to mean: building and not destroying. (ibid.)

In 1968 he composed a Credo (Summa), a work for piano, orchestra and chorus with Latin texts from the Gospels.  The Composers Union caught up with him, and soon he was receiving coded threats that investigations were going on at the highest level.  This combination of twelve-tone language and Jesus’ suffering proved too provocative for the authorities.

After this I was interrogated several times, and the interrogators repeated the same question over and over again: “What political aim are you pursuing in this work?” (ibid.)

His wife Nora added, “And they added, ‘And do not forget that this work must never again be performed, and you must not offer it to anyone else’”.  (ibid.)

Understandably, the confluence of all these doubts and pressures led to his choice to cease composing.  This was his nervous breakdown moment, when nothing which had worked for him in the past worked now. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Making Dances, Music & Dance, Music Notes Tagged With: arvo part, choreography, composers, liszt, music for dance

Opus 7: The Once and Future Arvo Pärt, Part I

May 17, 2013 by 4dancers

by Allan Greene

Let me get this out right up front: if you go for Arvo Pärt, you’ll love the late works of Franz Liszt.

music_notesI’ve played and loved the late Liszt since I was kid.  It was in the late Sixties on a trip into Manhattan to the old Schirmer’s that I found a newly published Schirmer number called The Late Liszt.  I was thirteen or fourteen and I had been composing atonal music for a few years; but as a piano student, Liszt, the Romantic, was my god.  After going to considerable trouble to master his Liebestraum No. 3, I was taken by surprise that late in his life Liszt had composed these spare, non-bravura morceaux.  That some were nearly atonal, un-moored from traditional harmony, made me even gladder.

All these years I’ve accompanied dance I’ve used pieces from that collection in classes.  I have never, with one unhappy exception (Sir Frederick Ashton’s Mayerling), seen choreography to this music.  This volume held, and holds, such meaning for me, its contents might almost be my autobiography.  I’ve been troubled me all these years that I haven’t seen great dances to this profound music.

And then, while researching a column on Arvo Pärt, who is wildly popular with choreographers, it hit me.

Late Liszt is late Pärt.  I mean, really.

Do they have a spooky, supernatural, counter-intuitive relationship, filled with seemingly strange coincidences?  Let’s see.  Liszt was Hungarian, Pärt is Estonian.  Their native tongues are both members of the  the Finno-Ugric language group.  Both had an affinity for the avant-garde from the very beginning.  Both suffered mid-career life changes that sent them into a quasi-religious bout of self-examination.

Except for the “dark night of the soul” that each went through, the coincidences don’t prove much.  Liszt was a very public figure who set the People Magazine standard for celebrity and scandale in his day; Pärt is a private person, thrust into the public eye by his success translating his privacy into music.  He has a stable home-life and a happy family.

But it is extraordinarily interesting to me these two composers more than a century removed from one another cross paths at a very particular point in their artistic journeys, after having gone through depression and soul-searching.  The fact that Pärt has become so popular among choreographers and Liszt is not tells me something is wrong.

I’m going to right that wrong.

Initially, I’d like to suggest that Pärt may have led us to the edge of an age of Radical Diatonicism, much as Liszt blazed a path to radical chromaticism 150 years ago.

Diatonic versus Chromatic

It is a bit easier to follow my thesis if we understand the historic relationship between the diatonic (white-key) scale and the chromatic (all the keys on the piano) scale.

The diatonic scale held absolute power in Western music at least as far back as the 12th Century, when the earliest surviving notated music, that of the monk Perotin, was composed.  Music was organized around seven tones, what we today call A, B, C, D, E, F and G.  Music was characterized based on which of those seven tones dominated the melody.  Depending on which tone it was, the music had a certain sound, called a mode (modus).  What we today call a major scale was called the Lydian Mode.  What we today call the minor scale (or natural minor scale) was called the Hypodorian (or Aeolian) Mode.  There were eight modes, the most dissonant being the Phrygian and Hypophrygian or Lochrian.

music
Illustration 1: The eight Medieval musical modes. The “f” refers to the fundamental tone which determines mode.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Making Dances, Music & Dance, Music Notes Tagged With: arvo part, ballet music, franz liszt, music for dance, music for making dances

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