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Why Othello Is The Best Ballet Of The Last 30 Years

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Joffrey Ballet Othello 2009
Fabrice Calmels and April Daly in Othello, Photo by Herbert Migdoll

by Scott Speck

This week the Joffrey Ballet embarks on its encore production of Othello: A Dance in Three Acts, with choreograhy by Lar Lubovitch and music by Elliot Goldenthal. This is my favorite ballet to conduct, and for good reason: It’s the greatest full-length ballet of the past 30 years.

The Joffrey’s visionary Artistic Director Ashley Wheater really stuck his neck out when, very early in his tenure, he brought Othello to the Joffrey. As far as anyone in Chicago knew, this was a huge financial risk. This ballet was originally so expensive that it took two companies — American Ballet Theatre and San Francisco Ballet — to co-produce it in 1998. Yet Ashley had no doubts. He knew what an incredible success this would be.

As a conductor at the San Francisco Ballet during the premiere, I had the unforgettable experience of conducting for the original SFB production, together with Emil de Cou (who is now Music Director for Pacific Northwest Ballet). Ashley was Associate Artistic Director at SFB at that time, and we saw how this ballet absolutely electrified audiences, both in San Francisco and on tour at the Opéra Garnier in Paris. Having practically memorized the score at that time, I mourned the end of the San Francisco production, and hoped for a chance to conduct it again someday.

It was Othello that brought me to Chicago. When Ashley boldly programmed the work for the Joffrey Ballet’s 2009-10 season, he invited me to conduct it, and thus began my association with the Joffrey. As Ashley predicted, the production was enormously successful in Chicago — so much so that it is now coming back, three seasons later.

I have conducted hundreds of ballets, and seen hundreds more. Yet if I had to choose one full-length ballet from the past generation, Othello would be the one. Here’s why.

All of the elements are original from the ground up. When Tchaikovsky wrote his score for Sleeping Beauty, he had particular choreography in mind. The music was inextricable from one choreographer’s vision, one costume design, one set design, and one lighting design. And the same goes for Elliot Goldenthal’s music for Othello.  It’s a completely new score written for a completely new ballet. How many full-length ballets in the last generation can claim that distinction? I can count them on one hand. And none of them are as ingenious as Othello.

It sustains a mood for two hours. Since I’m a musician, I’ll start with the music. Elliot Goldenthal is the master of mood-setting. From his Fire Water Paper: A Vietnam Oratorio to his scores to Frida, Interview with a Vampire and Batman Forever, he has continuously discovered compelling techniques to keep us on the edge of our seats with anticipation. In Othello, the moods range from deep love and ecstatic frenzy to dread, rage and horror. He pulls us along through the drama, from beginning to end. And the great Lar Lubovitch accomplishes similar wonders, because…

The choreography is unmistakable. If you have ever seen a Lar Lubovitch dance, you know that his style is unique. The shapes that he creates with human bodies are impossible to mistake for the work of anyone else. More importantly, Lar has found a way to tell the story of Othello entirely through gesture. Yes, the dancers portray their roles with intensity and passion, but those are secondary to the moves they make. Lar has discovered a unique shape or momentary pose to communicate each hyper-specific emotion and plot point of the story. It’s not just love or anger — those would be simple enough to portray. It’s the much more complicated sentiments like “I derive erotic pleasure from the thought of ascending to the throne,” or “I submit to your brutality out of a sense of duty,” or “I am devastated by the fact that I now have to murder you.” One gesture is all it takes. And not a hint of ballet mime.

Interestingly, Lar doesn’t really consider himself a ballet choreographer. Though Othello clearly incorporates advanced ballet techniques and could never be performed by anything other than a world-class ballet company, Lar modestly calls it “A Dance in Three Acts.”

(For much more insight into the ingenuity of Lar’s vision, in his own words, please read this terrific recent interview.)

It’s a uniquely integrated work of art. Not only are the costumes, sets, projections and lighting totally in service to the story —  as you would expect in any great ballet — but here, the dance is completely in service to the music, and the music in service to the dance.

There’s a reason for this: They were composed at the same time. Once Lar identified Elliot Goldenthal as the perfect composer for this project, he gave Elliot an elaborate “storyboard” to work from. From that point on, the two of them worked simultaneously. Each night Elliot composed a section of the music; and the next morning, he brought it into the studio for Lar to choreograph. If Lar needed more time for a particular dance, he asked Elliot to expand it by a few measures. If he wanted to omit a scene, cuts were made in the music. This is exactly how Peter Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa collaborated on Sleeping Beauty.

I want to point out one chillingly beautiful example of how well-integrated the elements of this ballet are. At the beginning of Act II, we see a ship come in: it’s Othello, Iago and his men returning from battle. When the ship docks, sailors quickly stretch three thick and heavy ropes all the way across the stage, securing them on the other side. At the same time, another group of three ropes appears onscreen, higher than the original group. Now picture this: While the two groups of ropes are clearly separated, the ropes within each group are tangled and twisted.

Now, if you were to express the concept of three ropes in music, you might use three long notes. And since the ropes are tangled, the notes don’t form a straight line up or down, but instead they create a twisted pattern. You might choose one long note — say F, followed by the closest possible higher note, G-flat, followed by the note that’s lower than the first, yet as close as possible, E. There you have it: three twisted ropes.

Now to describe the second, higher set of ropes in music, you might do the same thing, but higher up. Those three notes would be C, D-flat, and B.

Elliot Goldenthal’s music to Act II of Othello is completely based on these two groups of three twisted notes each: F, G-flat, E,  followed by C, D-flat, B.  Not only do they appear as long tones, describing the ropes themselves — but these notes are also the basis of an enormous, breathless, thousand-measure-long tarantella which makes up the entire second act.

Why would Elliot Goldenthal choose the ropes, of all things, to depict in music? As Act II progresses, this becomes clear: the ropes are a visual depiction of the story. As Othello becomes increasingly deceived by Iago, more and more tangled ropes gradually appear in the background, until they form a literal web of lies. And simultaneously, the music becomes increasingly complex, dissonant, and twisted.

It’s compelling to all audiences. When Othello first played in Chicago three and a half years ago, word spread fast. This was not your typical girls-in-tutus type of ballet. It was searing, electrifying, and sometimes brutal. People who never saw a ballet in their lives flocked to watch Othello, and I’m sure that will happen again.

Othello appeals to our modern sensibilities more than any other ballet I know. It’s an ancient story that pre-dates Shakespeare, but it’s told in a way that we can immediately identify with. Without sacrificing quality, line or technique, it takes ballet off the pedestal and brings it to the people.

If you are anywhere near Chicago, don’t miss this production. And if you get a chance, please steal a glance at the orchestra pit, where the Chicago Philharmonic and I will be having the time of our lives with a modern masterpiece. Did I mention that this is the greatest ballet of the last 30 years?

—
Scott Speck is Music Director of the Joffrey Ballet, Mobile (AL) Symphony, West Michigan Symphony and Washington Ballet, and the newly designated Artistic Director of the Chicago Philharmonic. His books Classical Music for Dummies, Opera for Dummies and Ballet for Dummies have been translated into dozens of languages and reached a worldwide audience.

Opus 5: Herr Bach in the Scanner with Uncut Diamonds, Part II

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by Allan Greene

(If you haven’t read Part I of this two-part series, please start here)

The case of Scott Flansburg

Having improvised fugues and constructed them on paper piece by piece, I have a pretty good sense of what mental operations are required to make one.  It’s not a knee-jerk assumption to assert that arithmetic operations are central to assembling a fugue.  The first voice “sings” the motif for x number of bars, the second voice enters with the motif for x + (x ± 1)bars at the interval of a perfect fifth, then the third voice repeats the entrance of the first voice, an octave lower; in the meantime, the other voices are doing separate melodic figurations which are in harmony with each other and the third voice… and this is just the beginning (of a three-voice fugue).  Some restatements of the motif are of a duration of x/2 or 2x; some passages have voices in parallel at the interval of a major third or a major sixth; some passages have voices moving in contrary motion (Voice 1 moves +1, +2, +3, -3, -4, +1, while Voice 2 moves -1, -2, -3, +3, +4, -1).  You get the idea… a lot of arithmetic.

Illustration 2: What contrary motion looks and sounds like. Note that the motif is in the soprano voice.

So the areas of the brain that are involved in addition and subtraction are engaged in the creation of fugues.  My conjecture, building on Ramachandran, is that some neural wiring is shared by arithmetic-processing areas and music-processing areas of the brain.  So I went in search of Brodmann areas identified with the two.

According to the Wikipedia, “Together with left-hemisphere B[rodmann]A [rea]45, the left hemisphere BA 44 comprises Broca’s area a region involved in semantic tasks. Some data suggest that BA44 is more involved in phonological and syntactic processing. Some recent findings also suggest the implication of this region in music perception…”

Illustration 3: Brodmann Area 44 (in Red) has been associated with arithmetic operations and music perception.
Illustration 4: Frontal view of the location of Brodmann Area 44

From The calculating brain: an fMRI study, a 2000 article in Neuropsychologia by  T.C. Rickard, et al, of the Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego: “For the arithmetic relative to the other tasks, results for all eight subjects revealed bilateral activation in Brodmann’s area 44…Activation was stronger on the left for all subjects, but only at Brodmann’s area 44 and the parietal cortices. No activation was observed in the arithmetic task in several other areas previously implicated for arithmetic, including the angular and supramarginal gyri and the basal ganglia.”  (My boldface in both quotes.)

So in most test subjects, music and math undergo processing in at least one shared area, possibly.  But what about Bach’s instantaneous mental picture of the completed fugue?

A clue to the answer to that question is further down in the Wikipedia article.  Under the rubric Trivia, we read: “Scott Flansburg of San Diego, California is a “human calculator” who can perform complex arithmetic in his head. Interestingly when his brain was scanned while doing complex calculations using fMRI; which was recorded for the show Stan Lee’s Superhumans; his brain activity in this region was absent. Instead he showed activity somewhat higher from area 44 and closer to the motor cortex.”

I looked at the clip on YouTube.  Mr. Flansburg, a rather ordinary-looking middle-aged guy from Herkimer, New York who has the extraordinary ability to mentally calculate dates, arithmetic operations, square- and cube-roots, and who-knows-what-else faster than any computer, is tested while being recorded by an fMRI at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California.  The surprise in the results is that Mr. Flansburg barely uses Area 44 when doing his mental calculations.  The imaging shows the brain activity during his calculations mostly in areas of visual processing, areas that are unique to human brains and have appeared very recently in the evolution of the human brain.

Illustration 5: fMRI image of Flansburg’s brain doing a calculation. Note how different the area of activity (in orange) is from the location of Brodmann Area 44 in the previous illustration.

Is it possible that the lightning speed of Scott Flansburg’s calculations and J.S. Bach’s fugue-composing related to the same brain activity as normal human visual object recognition?  Is one aspect of musical genius caused by a rare variant in neural activity?

Modern Dance and Imitative Counterpoint

This was Louis Horst’s insight about composing dances: that since they are intimately entwined with music they should be constructed as music is constructed.  This belief led inevitably to Bach.  It is Bach, after all, whose 335 four-part hymn arrangements form the model for all the theory and all the rules for writing musical voicing.  It is Bach who pretty much wrote the book on writing music in all tonalities (The Well-Tempered Clavier, Books I and II).  It was Bach who invented the piano (keyboard) concerto (Brandenburg Concerto No. 5).  It was Bach who in 1736 suggested improvements on the very new keyboard instrument called a piano e forte which set it on its course to take over all of Western music.  Bach’s innovations could fill pages.  Bach was, and is, considered by many to be the  fountain from which all subsequent music sprang.

As such, many subsequent “rules” for how to write music are based on autopsies of Bach’s works.  In a simplified way, Horst adapted these rules to dance movement.  He called choreography “dance composition”.  His results were remarkably successful.  His Wikipedia listing gives an idea of his influence: “…Apart from being a personal friend and mentor to [Martha] Graham, Horst worked and wrote scores for many other choreographers, including: Ruth St. Denis, Ted Shawn, Helen Tamiris, Martha Hill, Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman, Agnes de Mille, Ruth Page, Michio Ito, Nina Fonaroff, Adolph Bolm, Harald Kreutzberg, Pearl Lang, Jean Erdman [and] Anna Sokolow, Horst’s assistant and demonstrator.”

Uncut Diamonds in the Scanner

Are there in the wide world of dance today current or future choreographers whose minds are wired in meaningfully different ways from those of the preponderance of their colleagues? Uncut diamonds who compose or will someday compose dances fully-formed in their heads, of such beauty as mathematical logic?

We should be on the lookout, brain scanners at the ready.

Allan Greene

Contributor Allan Greene is a New York-based composer, pianist, teacher and musical director who has collaborated with dancers for 33 years. He has been Company Pianist with Dance Theatre of Harlem and Aterballetto (Italy).

He has worked with many distinguished teachers, beginning with Valentina Pereyeslava, Leon Danielian and Patricia Wilde at Ballet Theater School; Hanya Holm, Doris Humphrey, Janet Soares, Kazuko Hirabayashi and Hector Zaraspe at Juilliard; Alvin Ailey and Judith Jamieson; and Arthur Mitchell, Karel Shook, and Bill Griffith at Dance Theatre of Harlem. At Princeton University he worked with Ze’eva Cohen, Elizabeth Keen and Jim May. He worked with Merce Cunningham at his studio in Westbeth. At New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts he has collaborated with Gus Solomons, Jr., David Dorfman, Tere O’Connor, Joy Kellman, Jolinda Menendez, Liz Frankel, Cherilyn Lavignano, Jim Sutton and Jim Martins. At the Joffrey Ballet School he has played for Francesca Corkle, John Magnus, Eleanor D’Antuono, George de la Peña, Michael Blake, Mary Ford, Alexandre Proia, Diane Orio, Brian McSween, Davis Robertson. Then there’s John Butler, William Carter, Maurice Curry, Gabriela Darvash, Agnes de Mille, Robert Denvers, Tina Fehlandt, Eliot Feld, Frederic Franklin, Cindy Green, David Howard, Stephanie Marini, Mark Morris, Dennis Nahat, Patricia Neary, Irina Nijinskaya. Francis Petrelle, Christine Sarry, Victoria Simon, Paul Sutherland, Glen Tetley, Violette Verdy, Michael Vernon. There are many others, including many Russian names he transposes with one another. Dvoravenkos, Messerers, Jouravlevs, Koslovs; and Alexander Goudonov, and now I think I’ve spewed enough.

Mr. Greene holds degrees in music (B.A., Carleton College) and architecture (B.Arch., City College of New York). He worked as an architect briefly, from 1993-1996, specializing in computer-aided design and drawing. He studied and charetted at the Instituto Politecnico of the Universidad de la Habaña in Cuba. He was awarded fellowships for musical composition by the Thomas J. Watson Foundation, and the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France. He holds a New York City #6 Boiler Operator’s License. He studied orchestral conducting at Mannes College of Music.

He has been Musical Director for several Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway productions, and has scored one film.

He has completely forgotten to mention his myriad musical compositions, many of which have been created for his wife, the violinist Juliana Boehm. Here are some of his funny titles: Talas (“rhythm” in Sanskrit), Uneasy Dream, Liebestod, Core Piece No. 1, ...awake, December, An Island in the Moon. Although there are a great many others, Mr. Greene prefers not to dwell in the past.

Mr. Greene is currently on the staffs of the Joffrey Ballet School, the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School at American Ballet Theater, The Juilliard School and NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. He is also working on a 24-year project, his sons Oliver, 9, and Ravi, 6.

In summary, Mr. Greene draws this life-lesson: Raising kids sucks up most of one’s available oxygen; fortunately, Art returns most of it.

Try www.balletclasstunes.com  for your ballet and modern class music… download individual selections or complete classes directly to your mp3 player, smart phone or computer.  Visa/MC/PayPal.

Opus 5: Herr Bach in the Scanner with Uncut Diamonds, Part I

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by Allan Greene

Bach: Antipathy, Sympathy, Neuropathy

I recently was hired to play some classes at the Juilliard School.  Even though I’ve been playing for dancers in New York City on and off for the last 34 years, I hadn’t really worked at Juilliard since my early days, the winter of 1980, when I was taken aboard to play Janet Soares’ dance composition classes.

Since the 2006-2009 expansion and renovation, Juilliard the physical plant has shed its insular, monastic feel and opened out to the world.  It’s become a contemporary palace with a continuous view of its fiefdom, the collective components of Lincoln Center.  Where in the past all you could see from inside was a bit of daylight from clerestory windows in each of the perimeter studios you now see the city and all its bustling creativity.  This is important, because historically the inwardly-focused Juilliard (music) community had, intellectually and psychologically, largely lost touch with the world around it.

Back in 1980, I was exposed to the predominant choreography pedagogy of the time, which had sprung from Louis Horst, a dance accompanist, long-time companion of Martha Graham, and, for many decades, teacher of how to make dances at Juilliard.  Mr. Horst taught that one could compose dances the same as one composes music, as an abstract language made of gestures manipulated in musical periods of time.

The style of musical composition that Mr. Horst’s approach most closely approximated was that of the Baroque contrapuntal masters, above all, Johann Sebastian Bach.  This led to a lot of modern choreography set to imitative counterpoint, much of it very good.  Horst had certainly discovered something.

As the accompanist to many of the new dances, I had to come up with a lot of Baroque material.  Frequently, the length of the dances did not fit with any particular piece, and I had to improvise.  I got pretty good at improvising in most Baroque forms, and especially in three- and four-part fugues.  I never really thought that much about it, because I just sat down and did it.  No big deal.  Baroque music wasn’t all that interesting to me, and most of Bach’s music I found emotionally stunted.  I really didn’t get what so many others seemed to get out of it.

A couple years ago, I was working with Alexandre Proia, the great New York City Ballet dancer and now teacher and choreographer.  He had asked me to play from Bach’s Goldberg Variations so he could create material for a class.  The exercise and the class went quite well, and afterward Mr. Proia was waxing eloquent about how wonderful Bach was.  I confessed to him my feelings about Bach, and he gave me that “I can’t believe it” reaction I had seen so many times from Bach fans.

I decided then and there that I was going to find out what it was I wasn’t getting.  I read a book of pop musicology about the Six Unaccompanied Cello Suites (The Cello Suites: J. S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece by Eric Siblin).  I bought a big book (Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician) by the pre-eminent contemporary Bach scholar, Christoff Wolff, and read it slowly from cover to cover.  I listened to many works he praised that I didn’t know or found uninteresting in the past.  I started going over the Well-Tempered Clavier again, after ignoring it for three decades.  I devoured a book written about the political and cultural context in which Bach composed his Musical Offering (An Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment by James R. Gaines).  One anecdote in the Musical Offering book that stuck in my mind was this.  Bach was apparently so adept at composing fugues that he could look at a few notes and plan in his head how the entire piece would turn out, in such detail that he could say at what measure what particular event would have to happen.

Bach wrote an astounding amount of music, made the more so because he had some pretty demanding day jobs (married twice, father of twenty children, Kapellmeister for a number of Thuringian courts, head of the music school at the Church of St. Thomas in Leipzig, regional publisher and distributor of his and other composer’s works, consultant on organ construction and repair).  Hundreds of fugues poured out of him.

Constructing a fugue is not for amateurs.  It has many working parts that simply must fit together, and the way the parts fit is dictated by the mathematics of the fugue melody and different for each fugue.  I consider myself a pretty good fugue improviser, but to write fugues with the variety and perfection of form that Bach did is on another level altogether.  Bach, I have come to believe, must have had something wrong with him.

The Neural Architecture of Creativity

I got interested in Bach’s brain.  I knew a little about current models of how the brain works, and I thought I might be able to gain some insight into how Bach’s worked.

Illustration 1: A typical human brain cell (neuron) with an inset showing how electro-chemical signals are passed from cell to cell. Courtesy urbanchildinstitute.org.

The human brain is rife with nerve cells, called neurons.  A recent (2009) study calculated the possible average number of neurons in the human brain at 86 billion.  The neurons are linked by pathways called axons, each of which ends in a little bundle called a synapse.  The synapse at the end of the axon  is an incredibly tiny distance from another synapse, connected to another axon and another neuron.  Small amounts of electrical current pass through the neuron network by jumping across the gap from synapse to synapse.  The network among the 86 billion neurons is, in the normal brain, complete, like a highway system with no dead ends (although plenty of lightly-traveled right-of-ways).

The modern science of neurology started in the years after the Civil War.  The use of firearms resulted in numerous skull injuries, and there were many survivors who sustained less severe physical damage.  Doctors observed that some of the wounded who had lost pieces of their brains were impacted in specific functions, and began mapping the affected areas of the brain.  In the early years of the twentieth century, Korbinian Brodmann mapped the brain based on the locations of different kinds of cell structures, and correlated these areas to differing functions (hearing, body sensation, emotion, taste, memory, motor and vision).  There are fifty-one of these “Brodmann areas”.

What’s interesting to me is how the neural network passes in and out of the Brodmann areas, enabling differing brain functions to “light up” in an infinite variety of sequences.  This enables us to have complex thoughts and perceptions.  (Allow me to be enormously simplistic for the sake of clarity.)  Just as there is an infinite variety of individuals all called human beings, there is an infinite variety of ways that the neural system can grow inside the brain.  From before birth, the neural system is growing.  Neurons are connecting to other neurons in all sorts of sequences, in all sorts of areas.  The neurons of the part of the brain that allow us to understand words develops prior to the area that enables us to speak words, and only after more than a year outside the womb do the neurons of the infant reach each other from both areas so that speech and understanding language can begin.

Now we can begin to talk about synesthesia.  Synesthesia is a phenomenon that was first noted by Darwin’s cousin Sir Francis Galton, but until recently not been the subject of serious study.  Synesthesia is the experiencing of two linked senses simultaneously and habitually.  As an example (of grapheme→color synesthesia) there are many people who see numerals as specific colors, 7 as purple, 5 as a rust color, 2 as a throbbing white (I’m just assigning random values here, because each synesthete’s palette is different).  There are people who hear specific tonalities (not pitches, but tonalities) as specific colors (known as sound→color synesthesia): c-sharp as blue, d-natural as yellow, and the like.

There are many categories of synesthesia: grapheme→color synesthesia, spatial sequence synesthesia, sound→color synesthesia, number form, ordinal linguistic personification and lexical→gustatory synesthesia.  Those who have spatial sequence synesthesia see numbers as occupying specific locations in three-dimensional space.  Ordinal linguistic personification is a condition in which an individual experiences actual personalities for ordered numbers, letters, days, and the like.  (An example from Richard Cytowic’s 2002 study A Union of the Senses is a woman who says, “”I [is] a bit of a worrier at times, although easy-going; J [is] male; appearing jocular, but with strength of character; K [is] female; quiet, responsible….”)

What’s going on here, suggests the neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran, is that neural connections that run through adjacent functional areas of the brain, which are “trimmed” by the activation of certain genes in most people, are not trimmed in synesthetes.  Instead of the normal separation of sound and color, for example, they remain neurologically linked, their connected synapses remaining active when most people’s don’t.

In my own experience, at the piano, I associate the feeling of different tonalities (what we usually refer to as “keys”, like C major or E-flat minor) with “personalities”.  These are “personalities” not in the Jungian sense of highly-developed modes of thinking and behavior, but rather personages who embody a range of potential behaviors.  As I play them, whether as an interpreter, improviser or composer, I am aware that I’m interacting with them as I would be with real people.  When I start to play, I begin a “conversation” in which there’s a give-and-take between the piano keys, the particular tonality I’m in, and me.  The fact that there’s an E-flat in the middle of the keyboard isn’t important in itself.  If, however, I play a melody in which that black key, that E-flat, is central, then whether I’m in the tonality of E-flat major, which requires three black keys (E-flat, A-flat and B-flat) to play a diatonic scale (making the E-flat an important member of the family), or in the key of C major, which uses no black keys to play a diatonic scale (thus making the the E-flat an intruder), is a critical difference.  And I’m in a constant mental dialogue with the keys and the tonalities as the music develops over time.  I’m trying to shape a message, or a mood, or an experience, while the sound and the ivory are sending me suggestions as to how to proceed.

Improvising a fugue is another matter again, introducing several higher levels of complexity.  First off, it is defined by a very particular beginning, middle and end.  The beginning is defined by a melody (usually called a motif) that is sequentially repeated in all the musical lines (usually referred to as voices).  Secondly, although harmonic modulation is typically one of the factors that gives a fugue its variety, the modulations as the voices enter in sequence in the beginning must be simple and fairly obvious.  Anything too chromatic starts sounding like the middle, called the development section.  The middle may introduce new melodies to create more variety.  The motif may be played twice as slow or twice as fast, or even upside down or backwards, in the  development section.  The end section almost always features a device called a stretto, in which each voice performs the motif in a sort of one- or two-beat delay, creating something like an echo effect.  The effect is more like everybody deciding to jump into the pool at almost the same time.  It makes a big sonic splash, in other words.  And the end almost always features broad final chords, called a perfect cadence, that telegraph the end of the piece to the listener.

Add these considerations to the relationship one already has with keys, harmonies and tonalities: one can start to appreciate the enormity of Bach’s astounding output.  (And on top of all this, some scholars have detected coded messages in his motifs.  What was he, the Mata Hari of Saxony?)

V.S, Ramachandran, the neurologist, has suggested that since synesthesia is many times more common in creative artists than in the general population that there is a link between the two.  He hasn’t gone so far as to suggest that synesthesia is a pre-condition for artistic creativity, but you know that’s where he wants to go.

I would, on the other hand, say that in addition to synesthesia, there are many other “mutations” in the way the mind processes information that enable the kind of mental agility that results in, say, improvised fugues.

What really got me going on this jag was an account I read of Bach orally outlining how a given motif could be made into a three-part fugue.  The incident, as described by James Gaines in An Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment (2006), concerned “Old Bach”, as he was called by his kids, sixty-two years old, brought to Berlin to meet the King of Prussia (and fellow composer) Frederick the Great.  Bach’s second son, Carl Phillip Emanuel, was the court composer and the keyboard stylist in Frederick’s orchestra.  Possibly to amuse themselves by making fun of the aesthetically old-fashioned J.S., C.P.E. and Frederick hustled the old man to the palace and thrust a weird, specially-composed motif at him and commanded that he improvise a three-voice fugue on it.  Bach reportedly looked at it and described exactly how he was going to do it, including such improbable details as in which measures (he could say which by number) the various devices I described above as integral to fugal form would occur.  Then he sat down and played it.  (Bach apparently brooded about this incident afterward.  Three weeks after returning home to Leipzig, he produced one of the great works of the eighteenth century, a compendium of eighteen fugues, sonatas and canons based on that weird motif, which he called, collectively, A Musical Offering.  He bound the work in a gold-leaf volume and sent it off to Frederick, who never acknowledged it.)

Most composers have to sit down and methodically construct their fugues like a carpenter constructs a table.  Apparently Bach did not have to do this.  In fact, the evidence suggests that, similar to Mozart and Tchaikovsky, the music just “appeared” in his head, fully-formed.  How could this be?

Check back tomorrow for part two of Opus 5…

Allan Greene

Contributor Allan Greene is a New York-based composer, pianist, teacher and musical director who has collaborated with dancers for 33 years. He has been Company Pianist with Dance Theatre of Harlem and Aterballetto (Italy).

He has worked with many distinguished teachers, beginning with Valentina Pereyeslava, Leon Danielian and Patricia Wilde at Ballet Theater School; Hanya Holm, Doris Humphrey, Janet Soares, Kazuko Hirabayashi and Hector Zaraspe at Juilliard; Alvin Ailey and Judith Jamieson; and Arthur Mitchell, Karel Shook, and Bill Griffith at Dance Theatre of Harlem. At Princeton University he worked with Ze’eva Cohen, Elizabeth Keen and Jim May. He worked with Merce Cunningham at his studio in Westbeth. At New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts he has collaborated with Gus Solomons, Jr., David Dorfman, Tere O’Connor, Joy Kellman, Jolinda Menendez, Liz Frankel, Cherilyn Lavignano, Jim Sutton and Jim Martins. At the Joffrey Ballet School he has played for Francesca Corkle, John Magnus, Eleanor D’Antuono, George de la Peña, Michael Blake, Mary Ford, Alexandre Proia, Diane Orio, Brian McSween, Davis Robertson. Then there’s John Butler, William Carter, Maurice Curry, Gabriela Darvash, Agnes de Mille, Robert Denvers, Tina Fehlandt, Eliot Feld, Frederic Franklin, Cindy Green, David Howard, Stephanie Marini, Mark Morris, Dennis Nahat, Patricia Neary, Irina Nijinskaya. Francis Petrelle, Christine Sarry, Victoria Simon, Paul Sutherland, Glen Tetley, Violette Verdy, Michael Vernon. There are many others, including many Russian names he transposes with one another. Dvoravenkos, Messerers, Jouravlevs, Koslovs; and Alexander Goudonov, and now I think I’ve spewed enough.

Mr. Greene holds degrees in music (B.A., Carleton College) and architecture (B.Arch., City College of New York). He worked as an architect briefly, from 1993-1996, specializing in computer-aided design and drawing. He studied and charetted at the Instituto Politecnico of the Universidad de la Habaña in Cuba. He was awarded fellowships for musical composition by the Thomas J. Watson Foundation, and the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France. He holds a New York City #6 Boiler Operator’s License. He studied orchestral conducting at Mannes College of Music.

He has been Musical Director for several Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway productions, and has scored one film.

He has completely forgotten to mention his myriad musical compositions, many of which have been created for his wife, the violinist Juliana Boehm. Here are some of his funny titles: Talas (“rhythm” in Sanskrit), Uneasy Dream, Liebestod, Core Piece No. 1, ...awake, December, An Island in the Moon. Although there are a great many others, Mr. Greene prefers not to dwell in the past.

Mr. Greene is currently on the staffs of the Joffrey Ballet School, the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School at American Ballet Theater, The Juilliard School and NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. He is also working on a 24-year project, his sons Oliver, 9, and Ravi, 6.

In summary, Mr. Greene draws this life-lesson: Raising kids sucks up most of one’s available oxygen; fortunately, Art returns most of it.

Try www.balletclasstunes.com  for your ballet and modern class music… download individual selections or complete classes directly to your mp3 player, smart phone or computer.  Visa/MC/PayPal.

The Joffrey: Live Music For American Legends

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Scott Speck conducting
Scott Speck, Photo Courtesy of The Joffrey Ballet

The Joffrey Ballet’s American Legends series is coming up at The Auditorium Theatre in Chicago, and this mixed repertory program will feature live music with the Chicago Philharmonic. We wanted to learn more about the process of what goes on behind the scenes to bring this partnership between dance and music to life, so we reached out to Scott Speck, Music Director for the Joffrey. He shares some insights here about how the program has taken shape, as well as what life is like for him during the process…

How far in advance will you arrive prior to conducting for the Joffrey’s American Legends performance series at the Auditorium Theatre—and where will you stay while you are in town? 

Well, although I regularly conduct symphony orchestras around the country (including the Mobile Symphony and West Michigan Symphony, where I’m Music Director), I should tell you that I am a part-time Chicagoan. Chicago is one of my home bases, and I have a beautiful apartment overlooking Millennium Park. It’s a four block walk in one direction to the Joffrey Studios, and a four block walk in the other direction to the Auditorium Theatre, where the Joffrey Ballet performs.  Couldn’t be more convenient!

The Joffrey Ballet usually begins rehearsal for all the season’s programs during the previous summer, so I spend several weeks during the summer in the studios, learning to understand the dancers’ needs and the choreographers’ vision. For the upcoming American Legends, some of the ballets were also rehearsed throughout the fall. One of the ballets, Stanton Welch’s Son of Chamber Symphony  (set to the music of John Adams), was performed several times during the company’s most recent national tour — and most recently, I conducted it for them with the LA Opera Orchestra at the Los Angeles Music Center. So I am very familiar with all of these works by the time I show up to conduct for them in Chicago.

What type of advance preparation do you do before your arrival? 

First and foremost, I learn the music as music, rather than as accompaniment.  Since the vast majority of my experience is as a symphonic conductor, I have developed ways of analyzing and internalizing a score that work for me. Of course, some pieces are much more complicated than others. In some cases, preparation means starting to learn a score a year in advance. And in other cases — for example, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring — I’ve been studying the music on and off for 20 years!

Once I know the musical score inside and out, it’s time to learn what the choreographer has been inspired to do with it. It’s fun to see how a certain melody or sonority gets translated into movements of the bodies onstage.

Tempo is a very important consideration. The choreographer usually has a particular tempo range in mind when he or she sets a work.  Sometimes, as in John Adams Son of Chamber Symphony, the music has a steady motor rhythm with very little leeway for tempo changes — so that no matter what the dancers are doing, the music has to go a certain way. But in other pieces, such as Gerald Arpino’s Sea Shadow (set to Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G), there is room for plenty of ebb and flow, give and take, going faster and slower. Especially in pieces like this, I try to understand exactly what the dancers need to do on each beat, and where they need time to breathe. My goal is to be true to the intent of the music while simultaneously supporting the dancers and allowing them to do their best.

joffrey ballet
Son of Chamber Symphony, Victoria Jaiani & Miguel Angle Blanco, Photo by Christopher Duggan

Once you are in town, what is does your schedule look like in terms of rehearsing/meeting with Joffrey, etc.? 

At the Joffrey studio, almost all rehearsals take place between 11:30 am and 5:30 pm. So when I’m in town, I plan to be in the studio for most of that time. That gives me the morning for exercise, Bikram yoga (my biggest hobby), writing emails, and taking care of other orchestra business, and the evening for studying scores and then unwinding, alone or with friends. We performers tend to be late-to-bed, late-to-rise types.  Breakfast? What breakfast?  But I’ve had some great dinners at 1 am.

Performance days are different — especially Saturdays, when we usually do two shows. Then the performance dominates the day, and I plan everything around it. I’ll usually get plenty of sleep, maybe exercise in the morning, do mindless stuff for a few hours, eat a big high-energy meal a few hours before the show, take a short power nap, and then spend a couple of hours getting into the right head space for performance. I once asked a Broadway performer, who had been in Les Miserables on Broadway for several years, what time each day he started thinking about the show and getting into character. His answer was, “When the curtain goes up.”  I couldn’t be more different — not at this point, anyway! I’m living the music for a couple of hours before I get on the podium to conduct.  But after the show, the rest of the night is mine. That’s one reason I like to stay up late!

What is it like to work with Ashley Wheater and the dancers? 

Ashley Wheater is a truly great Artistic Director, with a very clear creative vision for the company. He knows what he’s aiming for, and he knows how to make it happen. He has already brought the company to a new level, recognized throughout the world.  My primary role at the Joffrey is to support this vision and give it a brilliant soundtrack.

Ashley Wheater
Ashley Wheater, Photo by Jim Luning Photography

Ashley is extremely musical, more so than just about any other Artistic Director I have ever met in the field of ballet. I am gratified to be working with a leader who values the great musical tradition so highly. And having concentrated my conducting career on the great symphonic masterworks, I truly have a foot in each world — I feel that I can offer our company an enhanced perspective on the music that accompanies ballet. Ideally, the music is a full partner to the dance. In so many companies the music falls by the wayside. Here, I am doing everything I can to ensure that we eventually have live music for every performance. What a pleasure it is to know that this is Ashley’s vision as well.  Despite the extraordinary expense, Ashley has gone to the mat for live music, because it’s the right thing to do.   (More on working with the dancers below!)

How do you prepare the Chicago Philharmonic to work with Joffrey?

We concentrate on the music first, just as I do when I’m studying the scores. The Chicago Philharmonic is a finely-tuned instrument, truly a stunningly good orchestra. The musicians are already very well-versed in listening to each other and reacting in real time. So first we prepare the music as if we were going to perform it in an orchestral concert. This is extraordinarily gratifying to us, even when we perform underground in the orchestra pit.

What makes this work unique is that we know that while we’re playing, there are 42 virtuoso athletes dancing above our heads.  It’s a fine balance, and it works best when the musicians and I truly appreciate the intricacies of the dance, and the dancers appreciate the intricacies of the music. In orchestra rehearsals I often tell the musicians exactly what is happening onstage so that they can imagine the movement as they are accompanying it. And in the studio, I often help individual dancers to understand how they are embodying a musical phrase. In performance, of course, my job is to act as a conduit between the two. I’m the only person in the theater who can see all the musicians and all the dancers at once. When a dancer makes a leap, my baton follows the same arc as the dancer’s body, landing at the same instant so that the music can connect exactly.

But there’s something more. In an ideal performance, there is a marvelous creative spirit that infuses the dancers, the musicians and me simultaneously. We are not so much reacting to each other as sharing equally in this communal spirit. This is something I feel in the best symphonic performances as well. We’re not making music — the music is making us.

Do you have any places you especially enjoy going in Chicago when you are in town?

Since I live right by Millennium Park, I love hanging out there. I don’t know of a better park in the world.  During the summer there are free concerts nearly every night, and fireworks all year long. I also love getting to know the incredibly diverse neighborhoods in Chicago, and especially their restaurants. I’m currently in love with the Vietnamese food near the Argyle stop on the Red Line.

joffrey ballet
Joffrey Ballet Performing Le Sacre du Printemps with Stacy Joy Keller, Erica Lynette Edwards & Jennifer Goodman, Photo by Herbert Migdoll

Not all your work with Joffrey is in Chicago. What is it like to work with them on tour?

Intense! We just came back from a fantastic set of performances at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles. The highlight of the program was Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, with a brilliant reconstruction of Nijinsky’s original choreography by Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer. We had three highly-charged, sold-out performances, and I’ve almost never seen such a rapturous response to ballet. The Joffrey Ballet is one of the world’s great companies, and it’s on tour that they find out how much they are appreciated around the world. What a pleasure to be a part of that.

American Legends runs from February 13th through February 24th at Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre

scott speck
Scott Speck

With recent performances in London, Paris, Moscow, Beijing, Chicago, San Francisco and Washington, Contributor Scott Speck has inspired international acclaim as a conductor of passion, intelligence and winning personality.

Scott Speck’s recent concerts with the Moscow RTV Symphony Orchestra in Tchaikovsky Hall garnered unanimous praise. His gala performances with Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, Joshua Bell, Midori, Evelyn Glennie and Olga Kern have highlighted his recent and current seasons as Music Director of the Mobile Symphony. This season he also collaborates intensively with Carnegie Hall for the seventh time as Music Director of the West Michigan Symphony. He was recently named Music Director of the Joffrey Ballet; and he was invited to the White House as Music Director of the Washington Ballet.

In recent seasons Scott Speck has conducted at London’s Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, the Paris Opera, Washington’s Kennedy Center, San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House, and the Los Angeles Music Center. He has led numerous performances with the symphony orchestras of Baltimore, Houston, Chicago (Sinfonietta), Paris, Moscow, Shanghai, Beijing, Vancouver, Romania, Slovakia, Buffalo, Columbus (OH), Honolulu, Louisville, New Orleans, Oregon, Rochester, Florida, and Virginia, among many others.

Previously he held positions as Conductor of the San Francisco Ballet; Music Advisor and Conductor of the Honolulu Symphony; and Associate Conductor of the Los Angeles Opera. During a recent tour of Asia he was named Principal Guest Conductor of the China Film Philharmonic in Beijing.

In addition, Scott Speck is the co-author of two of the world’s best-selling books on classical music for a popular audience, Classical Music for Dummies and Opera for Dummies. These books have received stellar reviews in both the national and international press and have garnered enthusiastic endorsements from major American orchestras. They have been translated into twenty languages and are available around the world. His third book in the series, Ballet for Dummies, was released to great acclaim as well.

Scott Speck has been a regular commentator on National Public Radio, the BBC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and Voice of Russia, broadcast throughout the world. His writing has been featured in numerous magazines and journals.

Born in Boston, Scott Speck graduated summa cum laude from Yale University. There he founded and directed the Berkeley Chamber Orchestra, which continues to perform to this day. He was a Fulbright Scholar in Berlin, where he founded Concerto Grosso Berlin, an orchestra dedicated to the performances of Baroque and Classical music in a historically informed style. He received his Master’s Degree with highest honors from the University of Southern California, served as a Conducting Fellow at the Aspen School of Music, and studied at the Tanglewood Music Center. He is fluent in English, German and French, has a diploma in Italian, speaks Spanish and has a reading knowledge of Russian.

Scott Speck can be reached at www.scottspeck.org

Opus 4, No. 3: The Personality Dynamics of the Music for Tchaikovsky’s White Swan Pas de Deux (Part II)

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by Allan Greene

PART THE SECOND

(Read the PART THE FIRST here)

Games Musical Personifications Play

Let’s parse some of the possible stock personality types we’ve met in White Swan score.  We may use the language of Jungian analyst David Kiersey popularized in his books on personality types, Please Understand Me (1984) and Please Understand Me II (1998).

Here a little homework is in order.  We’re entering the Kingdom of Personality Typology, that lovely branch of Jungian psychology that sorts temperaments and predicts behavior based on the interplay among temperaments.

First, if you’ve not done so, take the test, just for fun.  After you’ve scored yourself and determined which of the sixteen personality types you belong to, read the blurb about that type (in the right-hand column of links).  Again, for fun, see how close or how off-the-mark the blurb about your type is to your actual behavior.  Read some or all of the other blurbs.  Incidentally, I always score as an INTP (Architect), which is my former profession.  Curieux, non?

(A quick side note:  The sixteen four-letter acronyms relating to the sixteen personality types originally proposed by Isabel Myers Briggs are composed of a shorthand for the three categories Jung identified as components of personality, and one category added by Myers Briggs.  Each category is either/or, so the number of permutations is sixteen: sixteen personality types.  I am including the acronyms as a reference for readers who either already know about these or who want to find out more about them.)

I have selected personality types for the various sections of the pas d’action.  I couldn’t administer any temperament-sorters or temperament-indicators, so I’ve had to rely on a what you might call a musician’s clinical observation of the various sections.

As I view it, the scheme is pretty simple.  There are four distinct “personalities” in this music,  five if you include the coda.  There’s the harp solo, the “notturno” music, the pulsating woodwinds and the “Peasant Pas” music.  There is no overlap among appearances: the harp solo does not become blended, either polyphonically or texturally, with the notturno; the notturno does not blend, harmonically, rhythmically or thematically, with the pulsating woodwinds, and so forth.  Musically, the interactions between sections are one-to-one: B reacts to A, C reacts to B, D reacts to C, B reacts to D…

We will also have to look at a branch of Jungian typology favored by Russian researchers, Socionics, which focuses on the interaction among personality types.

Introduction: Harp Solo

Counselor (INFJ): My reading of the “personality” of the harp solo is that it is a portrait of Nature as a spiritual, centering influence.  The ripples of surface tension on the lake are, figuratively, beckoning the prince into the swans’ world.  Kiersey: “Counselors have an exceptionally strong desire to contribute to the welfare of others, and find great personal fulfillment interacting with people, nurturing their personal development, guiding them to realize their human potential. interested in helping people with their personal problems…

“Counselors… are highly private… with an unusually rich, complicated inner life…  They have mysterious, intricately woven personalities which sometimes puzzle even them.

“Counselors are concerned with… feelings and are able to act as a barometer of… feelings…

“… Counselors are often seen as the most poetical of all the types, and in fact they use a lot of poetic imagery… Counselors are highly intuitive and can recognize another’s emotions or intentions – good or evil – even before that person is aware of them.”

Section A: Notturno 1:  This melody, with its chromatic swoops and leaps, and its harmonic yearning, is a courting song.  Accompanied by the spare strum of the lute, it awakens the ear gently.  It is Orpheus.

Performer (ESFP) or Composer (ISFP), depending on whether the tenor is outward- or inward-looking, Gene Kelly or George Balanchine.

The “Gene Kelly” Performer (ESFP)  interpretation of the prince:  It seems a little ridiculous to analogize this music to Gene Kelly, but hear me out.  If the prince is a leading his merry band of huntsmen in pursuit of adventure, amusement, and what we reductively refer to these days as male bonding, then capping the day with an evening full of wine, a feast, song and bonhomie.

Kiersey: “Performers have the special ability… to delight those around them with their warmth, their good humor, and with their often extraordinary skills… Whether on the job, with friends, or with their families, Performers are exciting and full of fun, and their great social interest lies in stimulating those around them to take a break from work and worry, to lighten up and enjoy life…

“The Performers’ talent for enjoying life is healthy for the most part, though it also makes them more subject to temptations than the other types. Pleasure seems to be an end in itself for them, and variety is the spice of life. And so Performers are open to trying almost anything that promises them a good time, not always giving enough thought to the consequences…

“In so many ways, Performers view life as an eternal cornucopia from which flows an endless supply of pleasures.”

Don’t say the prince isn’t played that way, because he is, frequently.  So I’m suggesting it as one possible “personality” for the Notturno 1 segment of the music.

The “George Balanchine” Composer (ISFP) interpretation of the prince: I’m a composer, and since my composing activity has always been solitary, I have always assumed that all other composers were just like me.  Then I read Kiersey, whose observations of the “composer” type described a person unrecognizable to me.  Unrecognizable in the sense that it wasn’t remotely me.  I’m constantly holding back and self-editing, preferring to say very little very well.  Kiersey’s composer can’t hold back, the music spills forth, the compulsion to create overwhelms modesty.  Kiersey’s characterization of the composer made me look at all composers with an eye to their work habits.  It got me to see that, indeed, most people who call themselves composers have a compulsion to express themselves, a compulsion which is only a sufficient and not necessary component in my own creative process.  But when you look at the productivity of  Mozart, Bach, Vivaldi, Schubert, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, there’s not much self-doubt. As much as Beethoven worked and re-worked scores, the amount of music he penned, and much of it while in a great deal of pain, is stunning.  And even though Tchaikovsky was wracked with misgivings about much of his œuvre, and destroyed or hours of music, the music continued to gush forth, mostly fully-formed and unrestrained.

Tchaikovsky reveals in his letters that he believes deeply that all music tells specific stories, even Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony; and that his own music is at least partly autobiographical.  Thus it is easy for me to see a self-portrait in the notturno.

Kiersey: “Composers are in tune with their senses, and so have a sure grasp of what belongs, and what doesn’t belong, in all kinds of works of art…

“Although Composers often put long, lonely hours into their artistry, they are just as impulsive as the other Artisans. They do not wait to consider their moves; rather, they act in the here and now, with little or no planning or preparation. Composers are seized by the act of artistic composition, as if caught up in a whirlwind. The act is their master, not the reverse. Composers paint or sculpt, they dance or skate, they write melodies or make recipes-or whatever-simply because they must. They climb the mountain because it is there.

“This ability to lose themselves in action accounts for the spectacular individual accomplishments of some Composers, and yet on their social side they show a kindness unmatched by all the other types. Composers are especially sensitive to the pain and suffering of others, and they sympathize freely with the sufferer. Some have a remarkable way with young children, almost as if there were a natural bond of sympathy and trust between them. A similar bond may be seen between some Composers and animals, even wild animals. Many Composers have an instinctive longing for the wilds, and nature seems to welcome them.”

Shall we visit the lake, see the water-fowl, anyone?

Introduction’s “relationship” with Notturno 1:  Another variant of Jungian typology, Socionics, addresses the kinds of relationships there are, typically, between type-designated individuals.  It delves into some detail to characterize these relationships.

According to a suspiciously reductive table from www.the16types.info, a Socionics forum, the  ESFP (Performer, Gene Kelly, Notturno) tends to dominate and be judgmental in any relationship with an INFJ (Counselor, Harp Solo).  Accepting this requires a little imagination, but the claim is based in certain strong personality similarities and certain equally strong dissimilarities, enabling the extroverted Performer to hold the introverted Counselor in thrall.

In Swan Lake terms, the prince easily and quickly wrests the situation from the relatively passive natural setting.  He swoops in and grabs the reins.

Back at the Socionics table, we find the ISFP (Composer, Balanchine, Notturno) and the INFP (Counselor, Harp Solo) have what is called an Activity relationship, which means that they bring out the best in each other.  In my opinion, this is another perfectly good way to interpret the prince.

Section B: Pulsating woodwinds 1:  Odette is trying to fight her physical attraction to the prince.

Provider (ESFJ) or Protector (ISFJ): My conception of Odette is as either the provider for or protector of her flock of swans.  How she’s portrayed depends on whether she draws impulse from the world around her or from her inner life.

Again, the music is Pulsating Woodwinds, a little staccato folk fragment and ear-worm, a unique musical moment.  Marrying this musical moment to the story that Tchaikovsky is very clearly telling requires letting go of being literal; in the same way, the beautiful slow melody of the notturno cannot be understood as a musical portrait of the prince without accepting Tchaikovsky brandishing his poetic license.

This is how this Jungian musical analysis sloshes differing layers of understanding back and forth in one flask.  Eventually one reaches an equilibrium where the music, the story and personalities become one.

Provider (ESFJ): Kiersey: “Providers take it upon themselves to insure the health and welfare of those in their care, but they are also the most sociable of all the Guardians…

“Providers are extremely sensitive to the feelings of others, which makes them perhaps the most sympathetic of all the types, but which also leaves them somewhat self-conscious, that is, highly sensitive to what others think of them. Loving and affectionate themselves, they need to be loved in return. In fact, Providers can be crushed by personal criticism, and are happiest when given ample appreciation both for themselves personally and for the tireless service they give to others.”

Socionics:  ESFJ / ESFP relationship: Quasi-Identical.  V.V. Gulenko, A.V. Molodtsev, Introduction to Socionics: “This is a relations of coexistence in complete misunderstanding of each other…  Sometimes there is a sense that you are wasting time. Because nothing in particular unites quasi-identicals, these relations break up easily, without regrets. Rather colorless relations, which are described well by a [Russian] proverb: ‘You have your own wedding, and we have ours.’”

At the moment that Section A joins Section B, this may very well be the state of the relationship.

ESFJ / ISFP relationship: Mirror.  Wikisocion: “Mirror is an intertype relation of intellectual stimulation and mutual correction. The pair shares common interests, but differ slightly in thought process and methodology…

“Perhaps more than any other relation, Mirrors can stimulate each other’s creativity and work in tandem on the same project, but this interaction is primarily intellectual (i.e. work-related) and does not result in a feeling of closeness or needing the other on a more instinctive level.”

It’s hard to imagine anything involving Tchaikovsky’s music that is “primarily intellectual”.  But it’s not that difficult to play these roles as two intellectually distant personalities at this point in the drama.  All etiquette, no passion… all form, no substance.

Protector (ISFJ): Kiersey: “[Protectors’] primary interest is in the safety and security of those they care about – their family, their circle of friends…  Protectors have an extraordinary sense of loyalty and responsibility in their makeup, and seem fulfilled in the degree they can shield others from the dirt and dangers of the world…  Protectors believe deeply in the stability of social ranking conferred by birth, titles, offices, and credentials. And they cherish family history and enjoy caring for family property, from houses to heirlooms.

“They are not as outgoing and talkative as the Provider[s]… [ESFJs], and their shyness is often misjudged as stiffness, even coldness, when in truth Protectors are warm-hearted and sympathetic, giving happily of themselves…”

Peasant Pas 1 (Personality D):  This is a Baroque violin solo stretched out in time and pulse, as if a country fiddler were sight-reading the Bach Chaconne. (Here’s Maxim Vengerov nailing it.) Tchaikovsky transforms a moment of high drama in Undina into a moment that verges on comic parody in Swan Lake.  Did he deliberately juxtapose the Russian nationalism (folk-derived) popular in his circles with the moment of maximum drama in the choreography?  Was this meant to be a political statement?  Since there’s such a disconnect between the music and the story line here, what would the true Personality D be?  Parody would entail exaggeration, which would be at cross-purposes with the drama, so I would keep this section sober.  The music is Sancho Panza to the drama’s Don Quixote.

Peasant Pas 1 is the Swan Queen’s moment.  She is in crisis, her world rent apart by the sudden appearance of this prince.  How does the Protector (ISFJ) behave under these stresses?  Eve Delunas, another Jungian therapist, in her book Survival Games Personalities Play (1994, SunInk Publications), hypothesizes that the four major personality categories (remember Galen, the First Century physician, who described Melancholy, Phlegmatic, Sanguine and Choleric?) play each a particular game and assume each a particular role when in crisis.

Dr. Delunas writes that “[Protectors and Providers] play Complain when their ability to be accountable, unselfish and to belong is at risk.  To play this game, they present themselves as decommissioned by complaining loudly of being sick, tired, worried and/or sorry.  As they immobilize others with fears, pains, worries, fatigue or sorrow, [they] manage to entangle others who feel obligated to take care of them.”   That’s a pretty damn good description of what plays out between the Swan Queen and the prince.

Pulsating Woodwinds 2 (Personality B):  Here is Odette in further conflict with herself over the prince.  Expressively and according to the musical structure, however, this is Odette confronting herself (Personality B versus Personality D).

Socionics: R.K. Sedih, Informational Psychoanalysis: “This interaction leads to an interesting effect. The mask that every person fits for living in society is almost transparent for your identical. This effect has both positive and negative sides.”

Is this the foreshadowing of Odette/Odile?  Could the seed of that schizophrenia be in Odette’s struggles to escape her instincts?  Interesting.

Peasant Pas 2 (Personality D): This is the second attempt at achieving escape velocity from the prince’s magnetism.  Personality D versus Personality B presumably plays out the same as Personality B versus Personality D.  The music is meanwhile adumbrated and increasingly tense.

This personality is in crisis.  Sick, tired, worried and/or sorry?

Pulsating Woodwinds 3 (Personality B):  Last attempt at escape.  How does the ISFJ or ESFJ deal with this?

Cello Cadenza (Personality A1) and Notturno Duet (Personality A1+2): The Queen surrenders.  The Prince takes control.  Two spirits enlace.  The music tugs, tightens and knots them together.

No matter how many times I’ve played this, whether in rehearsal or performance, I can never get enough.  I’ve rehearsed it for hours with ballet stars and with students (using the Alexander Siloti piano transcription).  I’ve performed it with a violin soloist and in my own violin, cello and piano transcription.  It only gets better with repetition.

In a future post I’ll explore what inspiration means.  Suffice to say that this music is one of Tchaikovsky’s inspired moments.

Now, dealing with the personality of the duet is problematic.  Is the counter-melody in the violin a new personality superimposed on the notturno personality A, or is it an elaboration of it?

To me, it  is clearly a new personality, which we could then subject to the same Socionics (or whatever other personality-versus-personality analysis we choose) as we have between prior sections.

I’m calling the two personalities A1 (cello) and  A2 (violin).  Musically, the two solos are stylistically similar and melodically complementary.  They are yet another allusion to the Baroque.  This time, its DNA comes from the Baroque trio sonata.

A trio sonata as understood by Bach and Handel is really a duet with accompaniment.  In many cases, the ensemble would be violin, cello and cembalo (any available keyboard).  The violin has its thematic material, the cello has similar or contrasting thematic material, and the cembalo has a set bass line and set harmonies which would be realized as improvisations.  Aesthetically, it’s a three-threaded braid with two much more prominent threads.

Understanding the Baroque trio sonata makes understanding what Tchaikovsky was doing here clear.  The musical braid was even a metaphor for how the Swan Queen and the prince had come together.

Nottturno Duet (Personality A1+2): Remember the two personality types suggested for Notturno 1?

Performer (ESFP) or Composer (ISFP),depending on whether the tenor is outward- or inward-looking, Gene Kelly or George Balanchine.

Socionics has a category for this kind of relationship: Extinguishment.  This is what happens when Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby sing a duet (as they finally, unconvicingly, did in Cole Porter’s High Society).  Eugene Gorenko, Vladimir Tolstikov, Nature of Self:  “Partners have all functions in common, except their direction is opposite. It would seem that they should have a lot in common, but in practice it turns out that what one see from the outside, while the other sees from the inside. This leads to misunderstanding of each other. Partners do not find each other interesting, dialogue is not too fascinating. Peaceful communication is possible if there are no other people in presence, but as soon as someone else comes into picture, the attention of one partner (usually the extrovert one) switches on to the third person.”  [As an occasional cembalo player, I appreciate the attention in trio-sonata dynamics.]

This suggests that the way to approach interpreting the duet is to highlight the rivalry between the two solos, to play up their emotional tension.  This makes sense.

Coda (Personality E): Two Performer (ESFP)s, although I’m inclined to stop at this point, since neither the drama nor the story is developed in this pro-forma end-cap.

IN SUM

So here we have another way to interpret the story told by the Pas D’Action, through an interpretation of Jungian personality dynamics.  We can use our poetic imaginations and artistic skills to retell the story inside the music by telling the story of so many “personalities”, strutting onto the stage one after the next.  The personalities tell the music’s story yet depend on the communicative skills of the musician to shape their voices.

I’m not claiming that everyone should or even can take this approach.  The approach makes sense to me because I happen to possess a rich creative mental world.  This is a world out of which I am able to draw the many strands, feelings and experiences of my life and analogize them into the characters I find in the music.

In a way, such analysis is the social scientist’s version of what the ancient storytellers did to make their heroes both universal and real.  Tchaikovsky the storyteller would have been drawn to the archetypes embodied in the prince and the Swan Queen, as he had been with those of Undine and Huldebrand.  He would have relied on his observation of human behavior and his intuition as to its trajectory in this particular situation.  The prince, on a hunting expedition, comes across a bird so beautiful, so alluring, that he finds himself falling in love with it.  As a hunter, he is impelled to capture it.  The bird, of course, is really a woman who has been put under a spell, which is enough to deal with.  But she needs to kiss the prince to regain her human form.  Being a bird, she behaves like a wild creature, not a civilized person.  That wildness is part of all of us, and all our learned civility is a thin cloak that strains to keep the animal inside us from shredding our civilization.

As an interpreter of Tchaikovsky’s score, I see it as my job to elucidate these tensions and their resolutions for my audience, which happens to include the dancers, the folks in the seats and my fellow musicians.  The more deftly I can relate the musical material to the story’s emotional fever chart, whether it’s the water imagery of the harp solo, the crooning of the solo violin, the nervous flight of the pulsating winds or the double love arias between the cello and violin, the better I serve my audience.

In my own mind, I imagine there is a necessary relationship between a personal encyclopedia of cultural references, including a particular provisional understanding of human behavior and an amateur’s grasp of neurobiology, and what’s going on in the Swan Lake score.

But then again, I would.  I’m just the type.

 

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