Music-Dance

Sound and Motion in Contemporary Discourse

Patrizia Veroli, Gianfranco Vinay, Patrizia Veroli, Gianfranco Vinay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351986748
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Music-Dance explores the identity of choreomusical work, its complex authorship and its modes of reception as well as the cognitive processes involved in the reception of dance performance. Scholars of dance and music analyse the ways in which a musical score changes its prescriptive status when it becomes part of a choreographic project, the encounter between sound and motion on stage, and the intersection of listening and seeing. As well as being of interest to musicologists and choreologists considering issues such as notation, multimedia and the analysis of performance, this volume will appeal to scholars interested in applied research in the fields of cognition and neuroscience. The line-up of authors comprises representative figures of today's choreomusicology, dance historians, scholars of twentieth-century composition and specialists in cognitive science and performance studies. Among the topics covered are multimedia and the analysis of performance; the notational practice of choreographers and the parallel attempts of composers to find a graphic representation for musical gestures; and the experience of dance as a paradigm for a multimodal perception, which is investigated in terms of how the association of sound and movement triggers emotions and specific forms of cognition.

Part I
The choreomusical work

Towards a theoretical foundation

1 Identifying ‘choreomusical research’

Inger Damsholt

Choreomusicology¹ is a portmanteau word joining the words choreology and musicology. As a discipline, choreomusicology emerged at the end of the twentieth century as a field of study concerned with the relationship between music and dance. More precisely, choreomusicology grew out of Euro-American performance traditions that considered musical composition and dance choreography as separate specialties. Not all performance genres separate music and dance into separate theoretical categories. The directionality of the relationship between sound and movement is not always fixed. Choreomusicologists hold that studying the variable relationships between sound and movement in diverse performance arts can provide insight into perceptual sensibilities, cultural processes, and interpersonal dynamics. Famous artists whose works exhibit rich choreomusical relationships include: John Cage and Merce Cunningham, Igor Stravinsky and George Balanchine, and Louis Horst and Martha Graham. Interesting choreomusical relationships also exist in West Sumatran Tari Piring, West Javanese Pencak Silat, and Afro-Brazilian Capoiera to name but a few examples.²

What is ‘choreomusical research’? A quick Google search of the phrase ‘choreomusical research’ produces a number of links, the first three of which are the following: a link to an online version of Stephanie Jordan’s article ‘Choreomusical conversations: Facing a double challenge’ (2011), a link to an online pdf version of my unpublished PhD Dissertation, Choreomusical Discourse: The Relationship between Dance and Music (Damsholt 1999)³ and a link to a Wikipedia page on ‘Choreomusicology’, quoted in full above. The latter page suggests three titles for further reading: Paul Hodgins’s Relationships between Score and Choreography in Twentieth-Century Dance (1992), Jordan’s ‘Choreomusical Conversations’ and Paul H. Mason’s article ‘Music, dance and the total art work: Choreomusicology in theory and practice’ (2012).⁴ So what is ‘choreomusical research’? Obviously, many questions cannot be answered by means of a Google search, thus the device often produces complicated and conflicting answers. But as it is evident from the Google search, this particular question is related to me as a researcher, and therefore, it seems obvious that I might attempt to provide an answer.

This chapter is intended to contribute to the present volume by examining particular definitions of ‘choreomusical research’ located in particular discursive statements. More specifically, I discuss the notion of ‘choreomusical analysis’ that is presented in Hodgins (1992) as well as more contemporary definitions of ‘choreomusical research’ and/or ‘choreomusicology’ that are presented in Jordan (2011) and Mason (2012). Departing from these texts, this chapter highlights the epistemological implications or consequences of such definitions as performative actions, partly intended to update research criteria for academic scholarship in the study of choreomusical relationships. The examination focuses on three issues that are highly interrelated. The first of these concerns the tension between the notion of ‘academic research’ and ‘artistic practice’. The second issue concerns the tension between the notion of ‘the art studies tradition’ and ‘the ethnographic tradition’. The third issue concerns the tension between the notion of ‘choreomusical research’ as a core discipline or as a multifaceted area in which a plurality of disciplines and methodologies are interconnected. Cutting across these issues, the following two research questions are addressed: How are choreomusical relationships understood from formalist perspectives as well as more contextual perspectives? And how do constructivist understandings of the choreomusical interplay blend with more essentialist understandings of the body as a connection between music and dance?⁵

‘Academic research’ or ‘artistic practice’?

What is ‘choreomusical research’? The neologism ‘choreomusical’, which has eagerly been adopted by myself as well as other scholars, became known in an international research context when the American musician and composer Paul Hodgins proposed a theoretical framework entitled ‘A Paradigm for Choreomusical Analysis’ in 1992.⁶

Here, he lists nine categories of choreomusical relationships: six categories of intrinsic relationships (rhythmic, dynamic, textural, structural, qualitative and mimetic) and three categories of extrinsic relationships (the score and choreography reflecting archetypal characters or themes, the emotional and/or psychological state of an individual character or group, and an important element or event of the plotline) (Hodgins 1992: 26–7). Considering the interrelatedness of ‘academic research’ and ‘artistic practice’, it seems important to note that around 1992, Hodgins was appointed to the School of the Arts at the University of California, Irvine, where he served as the music director of the dance department and specialised in interdisciplinary courses that examined music-dance relations.⁷ At the time of Hodgins’s book, it seems there is a general intensification of interest in choreomusical matters among dance musicians in Euro-American theatrical dance. In 1990, the International Guild of Musicians in Dance (IGMID) was formed to foster collaborative relationships between dancers and musicians and address the particular concerns of musicians working in the field of art-dance.⁸ More important, however, around 1990, a wave of publications seems to come out on these choreomusical matters among accompanists, music directors and composers.

An IGMID member who published extensively around this time is Katherine Teck (1989; 1990; 1994). Based on her experience as a dance studio musician, and in interviews with dancers and musicians, she addressed a number of issues, including how choreographers choose music for their dances, how composers know what to write for a ballet, how conductors accommodate the dancers’ needs and what musicality is in a dancer. Listing a number of the same formal parameters as Hodgins, Teck reflects on questions for dancers, such as the following: ‘To which aspect of the music am I relating?’ and ‘How am I to dance with it or in contrast to it?’ (see also Teck 2011). Another studio musician who published around that time is Elisabeth Sawyer, who based her book on her years of experience as a studio pianist with the American Ballet Theatre. In the context of this chapter, Sawyer’s book (1985) is of particular interest as it indicates a theoretical framework for analysing dance-music relationships. Sawyer suggests that all ballets can be classified within three major categories according to their choreomusical techniques: Synchronisation, Opposition and Assimilation (Sawyer 1985: 26). And like Hodgins, she presents her categories on the basis of formal parameters: metre, tempo, quality, rise and fall of phrase, accents, rhythms, dynamics, form, technical structure, texture and style (similar to Hodgins’s intrinsic parameters) plus a more contextual (or ‘extrinsic’) parameter entitled ‘mood’.⁹ Not all parameters are listed in Sawyer’s three categories, nor are they necessarily listed in the same order, and she humbly describes her model ‘as an informal tally in which clearcut distinctions as listed may not be absolute’ (Sawyer 1985: 26).

The framework presented by Hodgins’s book (1992) inscribes itself in a flow of practice-based publications on choreomusical matters around the end of the twentieth century. Needless to say, before that time, many dancers and choreographers had produced frameworks similar to the ones presented here. The Swiss musician Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, who influenced many choreographers more or less directly, operated with a notion of ‘the elements common to music and moving plastic’ (Jaques-Dalcroze 1919, in Jaques-Dalcroze 1967: 150). Dalcroze lists a number of temporal concepts that are recognised in both music and movement (duration, time and rhythm) as well as pairs or couplings of parameters that are not based on any linguistic logic (e.g. ‘volume’ coupled with ‘muscular dynamics’ and ‘timbre’ coupled with ‘diversity in corporal forms [the sexes]’) (Jaques-Dalcroze 1919, in Jaques-Dalcroze 1967: 150). Hodgins refers directly to the theories of Dalcroze but underlines that ‘the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic choreomusical affinities remains blurred, their important differences unacknowledged’ (Hodgins 1992: 25). Thus, Hodgins’s own framework distinguishes between formal and more contextual aspects of the music-dance relationships in its overall categorisation of relationships. Intrinsic relationships ‘do not depend upon context…a shared cultural ethos between artists and audience, or other preconceptions’ (1992: 25). Extrinsic relationships, on the other hand, ‘depend largely upon narrative and cultural content – the shared knowledge of the ballet’s characters and plot (if any), as well as the audience’s pre-knowledge of pertinent sociological, psychological and mythological information’ (Hodgins 1992: 25).

The Hodgins paradigm represents an analytical model that contains formal aspects as well as contextual aspects, at least insofar as these are intended by the choreographer and/or composer. An examination of the content of Hodgins’s own choreomusical analyses of particular works reinforces this notion, particularly in the context of dance works that contain a plotline.¹⁰ Thus, from his analyses of works that have traditionally been characterised as abstract, it seems that the notion of the extrinsic relationship does not apply.¹¹ More important, however, the paradigm represents an understanding of the music-dance relationship as something which is either essential (the intrinsic relationships) or culturally constructed (the extrinsic relationships).¹² Hodgins’s paradigm, as well as the other practice-based frameworks mentioned above, suggests that some relationships are based in embodied experience as a human being and reflect spontaneous bodily reactions to musical accompaniment, whereas other relationships are culturally based in cultural conventions. Hodgins even stresses that ‘regardless of the music-making technologies available to a society, the affinities between music and movement are often left “to form at an instinctive level, their potential completely unexplored”’ (Hodgins 1992: v).

A similar notion can be found in the canonical article on ‘Music Visualization’ (1925) in which the choreographer Ruth St. Denis explicitly defined a number of parameters similar to those located by Hodgins and Sawyer (St. Denis 1925, in Cohen 1974). St. Denis’s artistic practice, which was related to the ideas of Dalcroze, clearly favoured the formal over the expressive elements of dance and music. Reflecting an essentialist perspective, she highlights one form of visualisation as the ‘scientific translation into bodily action of the rhythmic, melodic and harmonic structure of a musical composition without intention to in any way “interpret” or reveal any hidden meaning apprehended by the dancer’ (St. Denis 1925, in Cohen 1974). However, St. Denis also practiced ‘a secondary form of visualization [...] wherein we definitely superimpose dramatic ideas or arbitrary dance forms’ (St. Denis 1925, in Cohen 1974: 130) – as such recognising extrinsic references as cultural constructions.

The key point under this subheading has been that the publication of Hodgins’s theoretical framework occurs in a context in which reflections on choreomusical matters are deeply embedded in actual hands-on ‘artistic practices’ involving dancers, musicians, choreographers, composers, accompanists and teachers. And yet Hodgins also writes within the context of the University of California and produces a text that in many ways represents a product of ‘academic research’, referencing canonical texts in musicology and philosophical aesthetics. As opposed to Jordan (2011) and Mason (2012), Hodgins’s text is not a peer-reviewed publication, measuring up to our more contemporary criteria for the international standard of academic research. But this is further complicated by the fact that both Jordan and Mason more or less explicitly base their research on their experience and knowledge developed in their own experiences with artistic practices – including musicising, dancing and choreographing.¹³ In our time, the notion of artistic research makes it even more complicated to evaluate whether it is plausible to define Hodgins’s (1992) as ‘choreomusical research’. Thus, artistic research, defined as an investigation carried out with the purpose of gaining knowledge within and for artistic disciplines, most often departs from the notion of intersubjectivity and methods of qualitative research similar to the ones applied by Jordan and Mason.¹⁴

‘The art studies tradition’ or ‘the ethnographic tradition’?

What is ‘choreomusical research’? In ‘Music, Dance and the Total Art Work: Choreomusicology in theory and practice’ from 2012, the Australian anthropologist and creative artist Mason defines ‘choreomusicology’ as ‘the study of the relationship between sound and movement within any performance genre’ (Ma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures, tables and music examples
• Preface
• List of contributors
• Introduction: Choreomusicology between interdisciplinarity and ‘complexity’
• PART I The choreomusical work: Towards a theoretical foundation
• PART II Musical notation and choreo-graphy
• PART III Blending music and dance: Challenges and negotiations
• PART IV Sentient bodies
• Index