Musical Techniques in Balanchine's Jazzy Bach Ballet

2021 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-169
Author(s):  
Kara Yoo Leaman
Keyword(s):  
George Balanchine

Abstract The choreography of George Balanchine has long been described as “musical.” By applying music-analytic tools to patterns in dance, this essay analyzes relationships between dance and music in Balanchine's Concerto Barocco, set to J. S. Bach's Concerto for Two Violins (BWV 1043). Choreomusical notation and annotated videos offer readers the chance to sketch-dance, to feel in their own bodies the movements in relation to the music. Balanchine's choreography maps both specific patterns of pitch and rhythm from Bach's score—sometimes synchronized to the music and sometimes displaced temporally—and general patterns of motivic development and metric manipulation. Balanchine's use of funky rhythms resonates with his characteristic on-top-of-the-beat step timing, offbeat visual accentuation, and jazz-dance-inspired movements, attesting to the adoption of both Africanist and Europeanist musical techniques in the formation of an American neoclassical ballet.

Making Ballet 3

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Harris
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Movement Analysis ◽  
Story Line ◽  
George Balanchine ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Ballet History ◽  
Choreographic Analysis

Making Ballet 3 provides a choreographic analysis of the ballet Western Symphony, produced by the New York City Ballet in 1954 with choreography by George Balanchine, music by Hershy Kay, scenery by John Boyt, and costumes by Karinska. It brings to light the multitude of intertextual allusions that occur throughout the ballet, playfully intermingling references of “America” with an entire lineage of nineteenth-century European classicism. Although Western Symphony has no story line, it crafts a deliberate message: a long, transatlantic genealogy of Western classicism that, in the twentieth century, has come to rest in America. Drawing on archival sources and movement analysis, this interchapter argues that Western Symphony incorporates parody to present a revisionist ballet history in which the high cultural lineages of Europe and America are intimately entwined. Ultimately, this message reinforced the Atlanticist politics of private and state anticommunist groups in the cultural Cold War, the historical setting for its production and performance.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Harris
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
George Balanchine ◽  
Current State ◽  
The Arts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Lincoln Center

The Conclusion briefly examines the current state of the New York City Ballet under the auspices of industrial billionaire David H. Koch at Lincoln Center. In so doing, it to introduces a series of questions, warranting still more exploration, about the rapid and profound evolution of the structure, funding, and role of the arts in America through the course of the twentieth century. It revisits the historiographical problem that drives Making Ballet American: the narrative that George Balanchine was the sole creative genius who finally created an “American” ballet. In contrast to that hagiography, the Conclusion reiterates the book’s major contribution: illuminating the historical construction of our received idea of American neoclassical ballet within a specific set of social, political, and cultural circumstances. The Conclusion stresses that the history of American neoclassicism must be seen as a complex narrative involving several authors and discourses and crossing national and disciplinary borders: a history in which Balanchine was not the driving force, but rather the outcome.

Musical Theater Dance Training and Choreography in the 1920–1930s

2021 ◽  
pp. 9-29
Author(s):  
Liza Gennaro
Keyword(s):  
Essential Role ◽  
Musical Theater ◽  
Black Dance ◽  
George Balanchine ◽  
Musical Play ◽  
Radical Innovations ◽  
Dance Teachers ◽  
Dance Training ◽  
The Common ◽  
Historical Basis

This chapter provides an examination of how Broadway dancers were trained, the introduction of jazz dance to Broadway, the 1920s gradual move away from unison line dancing in favor of the individuated chorus, and how a few dance directors began to consider dance in musicals in relation to the libretto as an integrated and meaningful addition to the musical play. The common practice of Black choreographers being pushed aside while white choreographers claimed credit for their work and the essential role Black dance teachers and coaches played in training white dancers for Broadway is discussed here. Examinations of choreographic works by dance directors Buddy Bradley, Charlie Davis, Seymour Felix, Sammy Lee, Albertina Rasch, and George Balanchine establish a historical basis in preparation for the radical innovations to be discussed in subsequent chapters.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Kevin Winkler
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Special Effects ◽  
George Balanchine ◽  
Equal Importance ◽  
History Of ◽  
Bob Fosse ◽  
The Way

The Introduction juxtaposes the musicals of Tommy Tune during the 1980s with the large-scale British extravaganzas that dominated Broadway in the same decade. These imported “megamusicals,” featured lavish spectacle, special effects, cookie-cutter casting, and booming, pop-rock soundscapes. By contrast, Tune’s shows were simple, elegant, and filled with unique personalities (including Tune himself). The special effects in a Tommy Tune show were ingeniously staged singing and dancing. Tune coined the term “guzzintahs” to refer to the seamless melding of song, dance, and story, as in “this goes into that, and that goes into this.” The Introduction also offers a brief history of the director-choreographer, including George Balanchine, who integrated ballet into Broadway dance and Agnes de Mille, who established her choreographic authorship as of equal importance alongside a show’s book, score, and direction. The creative use of “guzzintahs” by later figures such as Jerome Robbins, Bob Fosse, Gower Champion, and Michael Bennett is explored, pointing the way toward Tune’s especially unified staging concepts.

“Ballet Is a Flower”

2020 ◽  
pp. 97-128
Author(s):  
Anne Searcy
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
York City ◽  
Soviet Government ◽  
George Balanchine ◽  
The Soviet Union

Chapter 4 analyzes New York City Ballet’s (NYCB’s) 1962 tour of the Soviet Union and the Soviet reception of NYCB choreographer George Balanchine. Previous scholarly accounts have claimed the Soviet reviews of Balanchine’s works were heavily censored, and that, as a result, the tour undermined the authority of the Soviet government with the intelligentsia. Chapter 4 re-examines this tour, using transliteration as a way of modeling the Soviet response to Balanchine. This re-examination shows that Soviet cultural authorities were not at all hostile to the choreographer or his company. The Soviet critics mostly accepted Balanchine’s ballets, but they reframed his accomplishments within their own debates about drambalet and choreographic symphonism. According to Balanchine’s Soviet critics, his works were successful precisely because they reaffirmed the value of the Russian systems of training, artistry, and meaning.

Apollon Musagète

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Reynolds
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Igor Stravinsky ◽  
String Orchestra ◽  
George Balanchine ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
Look Back ◽  
The One ◽  
New Phase

Apollon Musagète, premiered by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1928, and most widely known since the 1950s as Apollo, is the oldest work by choreographer George Balanchine still in active repertoire. For its age alone the ballet is significant, but it also marked a new phase in the development of Balanchine’s artistic philosophy. In 1945 he wrote, "Apollo I look back on as a turning point. In its discipline and restraint … the score was a revelation. It seemed to tell me that I could dare not to use everything, that I too could eliminate. I began to see how I could clarify … by reducing what seemed to be multiple possibilities to the one which is inevitable" (Balanchine qtd in Lederman 1975: 81). Such was Balanchine’s influence that what was a turning point for him was also a turning point for ballet in the twentieth century. The score that so influenced Balanchine was composed, by Igor Stravinsky, for a small string orchestra. Diaghilev described it as "an amazing work, extraordinarily calm, and with greater clarity than anything he has so far done, [with] filigree counterpoint [a]round transparent, clear-cut themes, all in the major key; [it is] somehow music not of this world, but from somewhere above" (Diaghilev qtd in White 1979: 342).

Balanchine, George (1904–1983)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Reynolds
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
York City ◽  
Violin Concerto ◽  
Classical Dance ◽  
George Balanchine ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Classical Ballet

George Balanchine (Georgii Melitonovich Balanchivadze), arguably the greatest ballet choreographer of the twentieth century, was at once both modernist and traditionalist. Unlike many radical innovators, in charting new ground he did not reject the past. Virtually all of his major works make reference, even if obliquely, to the classical ballet technique in which he was trained. Although born in Russia and active in Europe in the early part of his career, it was in America that he made his greatest impact, directing the New York City Ballet, which he co-founded with Lincoln Kirstein, from its inception in 1948 until his death in 1983. During this time, the company grew from modest beginnings to become one of the most important ballet troupes in the world. Balanchine is credited with creating a particularly American style of classical dance, one that is characterized by speed, precision, energy, daring, and a rough grace more associated with athletes than with sylphs. His more than 400 dance works include Apollo (1928), Serenade (1934), Concerto Barocco (1941), Le Palais de cristal (later renamed Symphony in C) (1948), Orpheus (1948), The Nutcracker (1954), Agon (1957), Symphony in Three Movements (1972), Stravinsky Violin Concerto (1972), Vienna Waltzes (1977), Ballo della Regina (1978), and Mozartiana (1981).

Can Dance Reflect the Structural and Expressive Qualities of Music? A Perceptual Experiment on Balanchine's Choreography of Mozart's Divertimento No. 15

1997 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol L. Krumhansl ◽  
Diana Lynn Schenck
Keyword(s):  
Emotional Response ◽  
Temporal Organization ◽  
Materials Analysis ◽  
George Balanchine ◽  
Bodily Movement ◽  
Interactive Relationship ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
On Line ◽  
General Schema ◽  
Stimulus Materials

A perceptual experiment investigated the structural and expressive mappings between music and dance. The Stimulus materials were based on the Minuetto from W. A. Mozart's Divertimento No. 15 choreographed by George Balanchine. Participants were assigned to one of three conditions: Music Only, Dance Only, and Both Music and Dance. They performed four on-line tasks: indicating the occurrence of section ends and new ideas, and judging the amount of tension and emotion expressed. Each of the tasks showed strong similarity across the three conditions, including the Music Only and the Dance Only conditions which contained none of the same Stimulus materials. Analysis of the music and dance uncovered a large variety of elements that define mappings between music and dance. These operate on different hierarchical levels and suggest non-accidental relationships between music and bodily movement. The Both Music and Dance condition could be predicted as a combination of the Music Only and Dance Only conditions, with a stronger contribution of the former. The findings for this excerpt suggest an additive, non-interactive relationship between the music and dance. All three conditions exhibited the same temporal pattern among the tasks. New ideas were introduced at section beginnings when levels of tension and emotion expressed were low. These levels tended to increase within sections, reaching a peak just before section ends. These results suggest that a general Schema of temporal Organization operates in both music and dance. Finally, the three conditions produced very similar judgments of the type of emotional response, supporting the idea that both music and dance can engage similar representations of emotions.

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