Translating from Pitch to Plié: Music Theory for Dance Scholars and Close Movement Analysis for Music Scholars

Abstract

A major impediment to greater integration of music and dance scholarship is the lack of common terminology. This paper aims to give music and dance scholars some tools of analysis for exploring how each of these related arts interacts with the other. After presenting analogies between terminology in music theory and movement analysis, the authors demonstrate how these tools can be applied in choreomusical analysis. We discuss two broad categories of choreomusical relationships: amplification and emergence, whose effects can be analyzed, we propose, through three strategies: conformance, isolated dissonance, and reorchestration.

[Supplementary materials are available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Dance Chronicle for the following free supplemental resources: Three video excerpts from Shen Wei's choreography (2003) to Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, performed by Shen Wei Dance Arts at the Park Avenue Armory in New York in 2011.]

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

An earlier version of this paper was presented at “Moving Music/Sounding Dance: Intersections, Disconnections, and Alignments between Dance and Music,” a joint conference of the Congress on Research in Dance and the Society for Ethnomusicology, Philadelphia, November 19, 2011. The authors wish to thank the participants for their thoughtful feedback.

Notes

Descriptions and analysis of Shen Wei's Rite of Spring are based on a DVD generously loaned to us by Shen Wei Dance Arts. The DVD captures a live performance of the work in New York at LaGuardia Concert Hall during the Lincoln Center Festival in July 2003. One of us saw the company perform the piece live at Meany Hall in Seattle in January 2007.

The term “dance theory” usually refers to theories about the social, cultural, political, and economic production and consumption of dance, which in the field of music would be the domain of musicologists, music historians, or ethnomusicologists, not music theorists. This disparity in the basic terminology used to describe the subdisciplines within music and dance scholarship is one of the fundamental stumbling blocks to communication and cooperation between the two disciplines.

The Cage/Cunningham collaborative process has been well documented. See, for example, Richard Kostelanetz, John Cage (ex)plain(ed) (New York: Schirmer, 1996), 29–30.

Susan Leigh Foster, Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). Similar systems of movement analysis proposed by other scholars often draw on related concepts, although the terminology may vary. See, for example, Janet Adshead, ed., Dance Analysis: Theory and Practice (London: Dance Books, 1988); Irmgard Bartenieff, et al., “The Potential of Movement Analysis as a Research Tool: A Preliminary Analysis,” Dance Research Journal, vol. 16, no. 1 (1984): 3–26; Valerie Preston-Dunlop and Ana Sanchez-Colberg, Dance and the Performative: A Choreological Perspective, Laban and Beyond (London: Verve, 2002).

See the discussion of Laban's development of eukinetics as an analog to the study of rhythm and dynamics in music in Preston-Dunlop and Sanchez-Colberg, Dance and the Performative, 92–101.

Use of the term “syntax” to describe rules and principles that guide the ordering of dance vocabulary was proposed by Susan Foster in Reading Dancing, 92–97.

The concept of personal kinesphere, “the circumference of which can be reached by normally extended limbs without changing one's stance,” was developed by Rudolf Laban, Modern Educational Dance, 2nd ed., rev. Lisa Ullmann (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1978), 85.

This is actually the inference most commonly made by dancers performing in a sound-painting choir when they interpret a conductor's directive to make changes in volume. Helen Julia Minors, “Music-Movement Dialogues: Exploring Live Composition,” paper presented at Dance and Music: Moving Dialogues, conference, McGill University, February 16–19, 2011. Developed by Walter Thompson in the 1980s, sound painting enables a conductor, through the use of hand gestures, to shape an improvisation with a group of artists (musicians, dancers, and/or actors). See http://www.soundpainting.com. December 11, 2012 (accessed March 31, 2013).

For a discussion of how music is situated in its environment and how this compares to other art forms, such as painting, drama, and literature, see chapter 1 of Edward T. Cone's Musical Form and Musical Performance (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1968).

A blues scale is a common collection of pitches often heard in blues, jazz, and rock. A plagal cadence is a movement from the subdominant to tonic. A dominant 7th chord is a chord with a strong tendency to resolve toward the tonic. A flam is a gesture used in many drumming styles. A tumbao is a pattern from Afro-Cuban music.

Laban's effort theories have been further developed by many scholars, notably Irmgard Bartenieff. See Irmgard Bartenieff et al., “The Potential of Movement Analysis as a Research Tool: A Preliminary Analysis,” Dance Research Journal, vol. 16, no. 1 (1984): 3–26; Irmgard Bartenieff, Martha Davis, and Forrestine Paulay, Four Adaptations of Effort Theory in Research and Teaching (New York: Dance Notation Bureau, 1973).

These terms for rhythmical phrasing have been developed and used by scholars extending the work of Laban. See, for example, Jane Winearls, Modern Dance: The Jooss-Leeder Method (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1958), 78.

The term amplification is also used by Nicholas Cook to explain a common relationship between music and other media such as film, opera, and commercials when music is used “to enhance the meaning that is already present in a given medium through the conformance with it.” Nicholas Cook, Analysing Musical Multimedia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 112.

For a history of salsa music, see César Miguel Rondón, The Book of Salsa: A Chronicle of Urban Music from the Caribbean to New York City, trans. Frances R. Aparicio with Jackie White (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); for a history of salsa dancing, see Juliet McMains, Spinning Salsa into Mambo: Caribbean Dance in Global Commerce (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

For more on Shen Wei Dance Arts, see Ellen V. P. Gerdes, “Shen Wei Dance Arts: Chinese Philosophy in Body Calligraphy,” Dance Chronicle, vol. 33, no. 2 (2010): 231–50.

For more on Argentine tango and milonga, see Robert Farris Thompson, Tango: The Art History of Love (New York: Pantheon Books, 2005).

For more on Cuban rumba, see Yvonne Daniel, Rumba: Dance and Social Change in Contemporary Cuba (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).

Daniela Perazzo Domm notes a similar phenomenon in her analysis of Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion's choreography Both Sitting Duet. Choreographed to Morton Feldman's composition For John Cage but performed in silence, the piece transposes sound into movement. Domm writes, “The variations of rhythm, emphasis and colour of the ‘disappeared' musical accompaniment are recreated in the dance through the exploration of the various combinations of movements of different types, qualities, and intensities and by the interplay of simultaneous, alternate, and overlapping modes of gestural execution by the two artists.” “Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion's Both Sitting Duet (2002): A Discursive Choreomusical Collaboration,” in Decentering Dancing Texts: The Challenge of Interpreting Dancing, ed. Janet Lansdale (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), 238.

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5. Richard Kostelanetz, John Cage (ex)plain(ed) (New York: Schirmer, 1996), 30.

6. Nicholas Cook, Analysing Musical Multimedia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), ix.

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8. Dance and Music: Moving Dialogues, Conference, McGill University, Montreal, February 16–19, 2011.

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17. Susan Foster, Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 59–65.

18. Foster, Reading Dancing, 79.

19. Horacio Salgán, Tango Course, trans. Will Genz and Marisa Hurtado, 2nd ed. (2001), 87.

20. Hodgins, Relationships, 25.

21. Hermanos Macana, http://losmacanatango.com/curriculum_eng.htm (accessed October 9, 2012).

22. Peter Wollen, Singin' in the Rain (London: British Film Institute Publishing, 1992), 28–29.

23. Cook, Analysing Musical Multimedia, 84.

24. Sally Sommer, “Balletic Breakin',” Dance Magazine, vol. 86, n. 1 (January 2012): 90–94; Kina Poon, “25 to Watch: Lil Buck,” Dance Magazine, vol. 86, no. 1 (January 2012): 56; Grant Slater and Brian Watt, “Yo-Yo Ma performs for Inner City Arts Kids on Los Angeles' Skid Row,” Southern California Public Radio, http://www.scpr.org/news/2011/04/07/25666/yo-yo-inner/ (accessed March 31, 2013).

25. Ellen V. P. Gerdes, “Shen Wei Dance Arts: Chinese Philosophy in Body Calligraphy,” Dance Chronicle, vol. 33, no. 2 (2010): 232.

26. Shen Wei, interview with Dance Channel TV, 2008, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRnCGww3zA0 (accessed March 31, 2013).