Music & Dance – Page 5

Choosing Music For Ballet Class

September 3, 2012 by 4dancers

by Catherine L. Tully

I’ve been doing a lot of CD reviews on the site lately. That, feedback from my adult ballet class, and a discussion with a fellow dance professional have inspired me to share some of my thoughts about selecting music for ballet class with you here…

And–I’d also like to ask for your feedback…your thoughts and ideas about how to select good music for class. Feel free to leave a comment below.

When I first started teaching, I used pretty much anything for class. I figured it was all ballet music, so it was fine for classes, right? Wrong.

With more experience, and some input from my own teachers, I began to uncover the fact that there are many things to think about when it comes to selecting the right music for the class you are teaching. With that in mind, I’d like to share some of the things I have learned here with you today: [Read more…]

Opus 3: Fragility

August 24, 2012 by 4dancers

by Allan Greene

I want to say something about that in which musicians are most expert: time. This is not, however, about tempo, or about rhythm, or about the proper length of a piece of music. This is about time passing, and how everything that passes becomes part of our collective aesthetic. This is about the razor’s edge on which we artists struggle to perch. This is at once sad and happy.

When I was on tour in Japan in 1983, the translator hired for the company, an all-round good guy named Hiro, led a couple dancers and me on a backstreets ramble through Kyoto. After a few temples, a few gardens and several kilometers of shoe-leather, he took us for refreshment into a dessert shop that specialized in kakigōri. Kakigōri is a mound of shaved-ice over which a flavored syrup is poured. The photo here shows how much it looks like volcanic rock, which is a classic motif in Chinese art. Hiro pushed me in the direction of sweet-bean-flavored kakigōri, and urged the others to order the green-tea flavor and the lemon flavor.

The kakigōri were served piled hill-high in stainless-steel dessert dishes, and when they were placed on the table before us, we were all sure there was too much. But, ah, were we wrong.

The first spoonful that penetrated the hill caused it to collapse to half its volume. The spoon filled with the most gossamer of ice-webs, tasting mostly of water with just the slightest tint of flavoring. In the blink of an eye, the dessert was gone, and cold ice-melt was all that swirled in the dish. It was, amazing to me, a dessert of negative space. It was positive expectation and negative fulfillment, a very Eastern essay on want and need.

It’s also the way many of us in the art world live our lives. We spend years in training, more years creating our repertoires, and when we finally put the final punctuation on the process by presenting ourselves to the public, the whole thing evaporates. It lives in the memories of those who were witnesses, but otherwise, sayonara.

What brought all these thoughts on? A week’s vacation with my family, coming home to our beloved Brooklyn, and a letter in the mail informing us that in two days we would be dropped from our health coverage. [Read more…]

Opus 2: Why Can’t We All Get Along? (Dancer’s and Musician’s Edition)

July 13, 2012 by Allan Greene

by Allan Greene

I was thinking of starting this series by getting a few things off my chest that have been weighing me down for a while. Not a list of grievances (I can wait ’til Festivus for that), but instead a few lectures that I was going to give at an unnamed professional training program which, as happens, got lost in an administrative power play. I have decided that these would be no match for summer’s long days and their journey into, uh, serious refreshments, so I came up with something else.

Conductors. Tempi. The irrational fraction expressed by dividing the musician’s meter and the dancer’s meter.

Let me start with a story the late conductor/rehearsal pianist Harry Fuchs told me. Harry was working at the New York City Opera in the mid-seventies when they were producing Sarah Caldwell’s celebrated production of The Barber of Seville. As a conductor, Harry was curious as to how Ms. Caldwell would be beating time in the finale of the overture, at the point at which the tempo accelerates suddenly and concludes the piece in a breathless finish.

Now, this is the principle: the faster the musical pulse, the fewer beats the conductor can make per measure. In very slow music a conductor may indicate eight separate beats in a measure that is written in 4/4, four quarter notes to the bar. For a more moderate tempo (think “When Johnny Comes Marching Home”), a four beat pattern is best. “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” or most Sousa marches would be conducted two beats to the bar, as are most of the famous Rodgers & Hammerstein songs, like “Getting to Know You”, “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” and “Surrey with the Fringe on Top”. [Read more…]

10 Questions With…Allan Greene

June 5, 2012 by 4dancers

Today on 10 Questions With… we have Allan Greene, a pianist that works in the dance world…

We would also like to welcome Allan to our contributing writer staff here at 4dancers. He’ll be writing a new monthly column appropriately titled, “Music Notes”…

1. How did you get started in music?

I started composing on my own when I was eight years old after I tired of copying songs from our third grade songbooks. The next year I began studying the cello at my elementary school, and the next year I began studying piano with the wife of one of my father’s electronic engineer colleagues. Things moved rapidly from there.

The cantor at my family’s synagogue recommended me to a Viennese choir-master who passed me on to an eccentric Juilliard-trained pianist. The intensity of the Juilliard training was too much for me and conflicted with Boy Scouts and after-school basketball. I moved on to a retired violinist / pianist who devoted his Saturdays to me, and presented me in recital several months before my 16^th birthday.

All the while I was composing on my own. At the age of twelve I was composing suites of atonal works, for various chamber music combinations as well as solo piano. My high school choir performed a setting I created of a poem by James Joyce. Stylistically, I was heading out the trajectory blazed by Charles Ives, inventing what I called “stream-of-consciousness music” analogous to Joyce’s literary technique: I created a musical narrative out of musical objets trouvés, using juxtaposition of styles and recognizable snippets to shape the drama. A generation later, due to the invention of sampling synthesizers, personal computers and audio production software, some of my ideas were independently showing up as common compositional tools in film and television scores.

2. What brought you into the dance world?

Accompanying ballet and modern dance classes was a work-study contract gig available at Carleton College (Northfield, Minnesota) in my freshman year. After a term washing dishes at one of the college’s cafeterias, it was a god-send. I found it easy, delightful to watch and participate in, and, importantly, made being a musician both quotidian and artistic. I’ve never liked having the spotlight trained on me, so this allowed me to participate and observe simultaneously. Accompanying dance became a laboratory for me to study the effect on collaborating artists of all kinds of music and all sorts of harmonies, melodies, rhythms and textures. It still is.

3. Where has your career taken you in terms of playing for dancers? [Read more…]

The Value Of Improvised Music In The World Of Ballet

May 28, 2012 by 4dancers

Music and Dance photo — Photo by Alan Crumlish

Today we have a guest post about music from Karen MacIver…

Many years ago my composition-for-film tutor Howard Goodall (the genius behind the themes for BBC British TV hits Blackadder, QI and Mr. Bean) once asked me what exactly makes music so important to the moving image. He was interested that I had come from the world of dance as a musician working in Ballet Companies. This seemingly simple question had a profound effect on me and I spent the rest of my time at film school – and my professional career – defining the answer.

The wonderful psychological impact music makes on us reaches far deeper than mere entertainment. Having returned to the world of Ballet, I now realize the most valuable asset a dance organisation can hope for, is to work with great music and great musicians. For here begins the symbiotic journey for the most elemental part of any dancers’ life – Class.

There is a small but growing army of inspirational musicians who have made it their life’s work embracing the world of music and the moving image. Mastering the art of improvising or recalling music perfectly takes time, passion and most of all comprehension of dancers’ needs during Class. Class is the fundamental ritual that ignites each working day, from beginner to ballet master. And so music nourishes not only the muscular requirements for the sporting qualities of a dancer, but also the emotional depth needed for choreographic demands.

If a musician ‘gets it wrong’ (and I use this term with fear and frustration) they are in peril of causing disruption to Class and at best will be artistically ignored for the oncoming hour. The very conundrum of what is needed to define a “great class” is the starting point of the Masters in Accompaniment for Dance course I am proud to be part of here in the UK.

So where do we find the ley lines connecting music and dance?

Well. There are two definitive structures that lie at the core of all good art and they are both found in the world of architecture. Proportion and tension-release.

Our delight in perfect proportion is embodied visually through classical structures dating back to the time-honored buildings of ancient Greece, balancing the principles of space (silence and stillness) versus material (movement and sound). Coco Chanel herself described her particular art in this simple statement “Fashion is architecture : it is a matter of proportion” and musician Laurie Anderson rather clumsily declared, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture”. But we know what she was getting at!

And of course the ‘Mozart Effect’ reaches deeper than an educational context which states that our ability to learn and concentrate is refined in the proximity of hearing classical music. No, there are varying ballet structures given daily in class that not only seem to mirror the demands of musical phrasing but actually are the visual representation of great musical themes. The famous Elvira Madigan (Mozart’s piano concerto no.21*) theme embodies all that is perfect in proportionality and therefore complements so many of the dance exercises delivered in everyday Class. Understanding this gives the musician freedom to improvise around the perfect structures already created by the great masters of composition.

Understanding tension and release both physically and musically defines another equally important bridge connecting the two art forms. They are felt universally both in musical chord structures and in anatomical muscle memory. Architecturally it is felt as the invasion of space in the landscape, balanced with the satisfaction of creating man-made structures in apposition to nature.

If the musician thinks like a dancer, they will play music as a dancer – with breath and freedom balanced with strength. Thinking of music ‘anatomically’ – SKIN,MUSCLE,BONE – gives depth and understanding to the response of accompanying the dancer. Let me expand.

A child views her first years of taking Class in terms of skin only . She copies shape only in silhouette form with little comprehension of the underlying meaning of the movement. Similarly, a novice musician will copy the outward shape of movement when first confronted by the demands of ballet class, by making melodic contours that in some way mimic visual shape. Muscular flexibility in dance reflects musical harmony and skeletal shape and form corresponds vitally with musical form and shape.

The learning of an instrument is a slow process, just as the learning of ballet technique. Matching the two takes yet another stretch of time and imagination before they function together as one. And so, the musicians’ journey learning the textural changes and chordal tensions for class accompaniment is a long but ultimately fruitful one.

One more thought. If I think back to all I learned writing for film, there is one odd and unique aspect to film music that differs slightly from dance music. On the surface, both share the need for music’s psychological undercurrent which says so much more than the spoken word. Imagine the famed Underground train scene in Fatal Attraction when Glenn Close tells a handsome Michael Douglas that she truly loves him. Do you recall the music screaming “she’s mad!!!!” Probably not. Why? A good filmscore acts as an unnoticed dramatic colourwash to the action. Rightly so. That’s where its power lies.

However in dance, the presence of music is never ‘inferior’ to the visual impact of dance. It is the support and context in which movement comes alive. In return the music seems to acquire a unique luminosity that, once heard in context of dance, seems to sparkle just that little bit more.

In conclusion. A toast. Long may the marriage of music and dance stay in love!

*have a listen whilst you read the article!

Karen lectures at Scottish Ballet/Royal Conservatoire of Scotland on the Postgraduate Masters Piano in Dance Course.

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