by Allan Greene

Cue the strings.  Prepare yourself for something big.  I’ve got a lot of explaining to do.

Opus 4 is going to be big project.  It’s going to synthesize several streams of thought that I’ve been carrying around with me for a while, one going back 36 years to when I was a senior at Carleton College.  I’ve been intending to do something with these ideas for a few years, since George de la Peña, who was Artistic Director of the Joffrey Ballet School at the time, suggested I give a talk to the faculty and students on music and dance.

In order to get paid for such a talk, George had me submit a proposal to the school’s executive director.  Unfortunately, George and the executive director parted ways before my proposal was ever processed.  I had proposed doing five lecture/demonstrations on various topics, including the use both Stravinsky and Balanchine made of French Baroque poetry in Apollo, and the how the Ivanov/Legat choreography of the White Swan Pas de Deux in Swan Lake and Tchaikovsky’s music for it are interlaced to create a masterpiece.  Long story short, no money, no revelations.

When the editor of this blog, Catherine, asked me to write about music and dance, and gave me carte blanche to write what was on my mind, the first thing that popped into my head was that long-delayed White Swan project.  I had intended originally to recruit two dancers to demonstrate various parts of the dance while I played at the piano and did my Leonard Bernstein routine.  In cyberspace, however, my audio-visual aids will be a little different.  But it will get to the same place.

The more I thought about how to do this, the more I realized that my project rested on assumptions that, to be charitable, not everybody agrees with nor understands. [Read more…]