Dancing Notes
Music theorist Kara Yoo Leaman examines George Balanchine’s use of music by Bach, Bizet, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky to explore Balanchine’s expression of musical artistry through choreography. Tracing connections between the movement patterns in Balanchine’s ballets and their musical scores, the analyses provide evidence to support long-held thinking regarding Balanchine’s music-based choreographic process and suggests new ways to understand music-dance interactions. Along with her own music-based movement notation, Leaman applies the latest tools of music analysis and digital video editing to illustrate how in his choreography Balanchine both replicated patterns from musical scores and constructed other patterns to complement the music.
Dancing Notes has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom.
Analyzing Balanchine's Musicality
Balanchine & Music
FROM THE MUSICAL SCORE…
George Balanchine was one of the most prolific and influential choreographers of the twentieth century. He was also a skilled musician, trained at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. It is evident from his ballets as well as countless testimonies that the musical score was central to his conceptualization of music. Balanchine himself claimed on many occasions that the first step in his choreographic process was a thorough study of the musical score. In one article, he wrote that, before going into a studio to meet with dancers for a new ballet, he would become “at least as intimately acquainted [with the music] as a conductor of a symphony with his score.” 1
Elsewhere, he described his preparation as follows:
To familiarize myself thoroughly with a piece of music, I study the score and listen to it. If a piano transcription of the score exists, I play the piece over and over on the piano; if it does not exist, I make a transcription myself. Often I spend much more time learning a score than I do working out a ballet. 2
Learning the score also meant analyzing it. In a television interview, he emphasized the importance of music analysis: “You have to analyze in advance what this music is all about, what kind of a sound it is, why it’s written this way, what it represents. Somebody has to analyze this; in this case, I did.” 3 In all of these statements, Balanchine emphasizes his musical literacy, referring many times to “the score,” questioning why the music is “written” a certain way, and mentioning that he could write a piano transcription of a score. 4 As Balanchine worked with a score to analyze it, transcribe it, and sometimes rearrange it to suit his needs, he engaged music both aurally and visually before choreographing his ballets.
… TO THE DANCE
After studying and analyzing musical scores, Balanchine choreographed ballets to express musical ideas. He is quoted as saying, “Making a ballet is a choreographer’s way of showing how he understands a piece of music, not in words, not in narrative form … but in dancing.” 5 His ballets were, therefore, vehicles for expressing ideas about music, not only for personal expression. It is no wonder that the ballets continue to be celebrated for their musicality by prominent dancers and musicians alike.
Dancers have noted that steps seem to fit the music like lyrics to a song, and musicians have compared the choreography to musical counterpoint. While such observations are intriguing, they are usually vague, favoring poetry over precision when speaking of how the dance relates to the music. Responding in part to the vagueness of the discourse, scholars and critics began publishing analyses of Balanchine ballets approximately ten years after his death, starting in the early 1990s. Scholarly interest in Balanchine has been accelerating in recent years.
DANCING NOTES
Motivated by Balanchine’s own creative process, this project studies his ballets from a music-theoretic perspective. I examine the music through the lens of his conservatory training and then examine the choreography against the music. My analyses trace connections between music and movement using choreomusical notation, a method of dance transcription that I developed to facilitate the comparison of musical and choreographic patterns across both time and media. Adapting Western staff notation to represent dance, I designed choreomusical notation to take advantage of higher literacy rates in music notation than exists for any dance notation system. For even broader accessibility, especially to dance practitioners and interdisciplinary scholars, I illustrate my analyses in an audiovisual format using a variety of digital video editing techniques. 6
Through a series of ten- to fifteen-minute video lectures, Dancing Notes aims to strengthen the impact of choreomusical research by facilitating cross-disciplinary conversations and communications that bridge theory with practice. Analyses of specific music-dance relationships in Balanchine ballets can supply case studies for research in musical multimedia, multimedia perception, and music embodiment. Moreover, the methodologies demonstrated in this project provide tools for music theorists and dance scholars to cross over their disciplinary boundaries more easily, expanding Dance Studies into greater acceptance of observer studies (in addition to the more traditional expert-practitioner studies) and expanding Music Theory into greater acceptance of dance as expressions of musical artistry. For The George Balanchine Foundation’s audience of choreographers, dancers, musicians, critics, scholars, and interested members of the public, Dancing Notes offers discussions of Balanchine’s musicianship in a format that will be easier to access and consume than prose scholarship.
EXPLORE BALANCHINE’S MUSICALITY WITH ME
Balanchine’s use of music as a source for choreographic ideas went well beyond easily audible sonic events. What I have found is that Balanchine’s choreography often reflects a score-based study of music, engaging not only the music as heard, but also musical techniques, patterns, expectations, and ideas. When music-movement connections are subtle, viewers (and dancers) may sense a relationship but struggle to identify what is causing that feeling. Analysis, like the kind offered in Dancing Notes, offers the opportunity to make intuitions explicit.
The key to appreciating Balanchine’s musicality, then, is to look beyond the obvious relationships between the dance you see and the music you hear. But, unless you have the kind of musical training Balanchine had, it would be difficult to figure out what exactly about the music the dance is pointing to or playing with, because the way he understood music was shaped by the Western European traditions and practices he absorbed and also learned formally at the Conservatory. My musical training was similar in many ways to Balanchine’s; we are both classical pianists whose written-theory studies followed a curriculum that endured throughout most of the twentieth century. 7 Using my experience as a music theorist, I will guide you through some of Balanchine’s more technical musical musings, as they seem to be expressed in his choreography. Trust me. These ballets reward studies that go deeper than what one might see and hear by viewing alone.
About Kara Yoo Leaman
Kara Yoo Leaman is an independent music theorist, visiting scholar at Mannes School of Music (The New School), and co-founder of the Dance and Movement Interest Group of the Society for Music Theory. An alumna fellow at The Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University (’20 and ’23), Leaman is also a former assistant professor of music theory and aural skills at Oberlin Conservatory of Music and currently serves on the editorial staff of Music Theory Online. She holds degrees from Harvard University (AB, Economics), CUNY Queens College (MA, Music Theory), and Yale University (M.Phil. and Ph.D., Music Theory).
Leaman’s research in music-dance relationships has been awarded a 2022 Outstanding Publication Award by the Society for Music Theory, a 2023 NEH-Mellon Fellowship for Digital Publication, and the Theron Rockwell Field Prize by Yale University. Her research can be seen in Music Theory Spectrum, the Journal of Music Theory, and SMT-V: The Society for Music Theory Videocast Journal.
As a pianist, Leaman studied with Ick-Choo Moon, Bruce Sutherland, and Stephan Möller. Her ballet training, which was always (supposed to be) a recreational activity (though it became, at times, an obsession), began in Southern California with Lois Ellyn and continued with open classes at the Boston Ballet School, New Haven Ballet, Broadway Dance Center, and Steps on Broadway, among other schools. Her appreciation of Balanchine was probably shaped by early opportunities to choreograph on her peers.
Acknowledgements & Footnotes
It is an absolute privilege to share my thoughts on a subject that brings together my life’s experiences, training, and research. To be able to work in the arts during troubled times on earth is humbling. But I believe that the arts are essential especially in these times, because they remind us of what it is to be human. Arts can lift our eyes heavenward to the life that is more real than this one. This is what I find in Balanchine’s ballets and why I feel so passionate about them.
“The real life, [what we call] the real reality… it’s not on earth. It’s what we cannot explain with words.… You would never abandon things on earth. So that’s why you don’t get anywhere. The portals are open for you, but the passage is narrow.”
(George Balanchine in audio recordings used in Connie Hochman’s documentary, In Balanchine’s Classroom, around 36:30 and 1:03:30)
With much gratitude, I would like to acknowledge the following people and institutions.
For their support of my research: The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH-Mellon Fellowship for Digital Publication); The Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University, including Jennifer Homans, Andrea Salvatore, and especially the Fall 2019 Fellows cohort; Mannes School of Music, The New School, including Lynne Rogers and Robert Cuckson; The George Balanchine Foundation, including Lauren King and Meryl Rosofsky; and The George Balanchine Trust. For their mentorship: Richard Cohn, Stephanie Jordan, and Poundie Burstein. For their feedback on earlier drafts of this project: Lauren King, Meryl Rosofsky, Stephanie Jordan, Rebecca Moranis, and Amy Ming Wai Tai. Any errors and deficiencies are mine alone. For making it possible for me to work on this project: my dedicated team of babysitters, including my friend, Tricia Bare Stoltzfus. And for their constant support in life: my beloved husband, Hans, and children Elliot, Teddy, and Anna; John and Nancy Leaman, the best parents- in-law on earth; and, most of all, my dear father Erick Yoo, sister Jinah Yoo Johnston, and late mother, Susan Yoo.
1 George Balanchine, “Marginal Notes on the Dance,” reprinted in ed. Robert Gottlieb, Reading Dance (New York: Pantheon Books, 2008), 82. Originally published in 1951. In general, books and articles attributed to Balanchine (as opposed to direct quotes and interviews) may reflect significant intervention by co-writers and ghost writers, not least because Balanchine’s English required it. However, Balanchine likely contributed through interviews and conversations. Moreover, those who admired Balanchine placed great value on the words he spoke—his analogies, his mottos, and the way he explained a concept, told a story, or characterized something or someone—in class, rehearsal, or conversation. This is evident in numerous memoirs and interviews of Balanchine dancers, who take care to remember accurately the things he said. Therefore, while I acknowledge that the written words attributed to Balanchine may not be his entirely, I consider that they likely testify to Balanchine’s ideas and opinions and represent something of his idiosyncratic ways of thinking. See Arlene Croce, “Balanchine Said,” The New Yorker, January 19, 2009, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/01/26/balanchine-said, and Patricia Fieldsteel, “Obituary: Francis Mason, 88, dance critic and society figure,” The Villager 79/20 (2009).
2 George Balanchine, Balanchine’s Complete Stories of the Great Ballets, ed. Francis Mason (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1954), 526.
3 Balanchine interview on WNET-TV (1964). Quoted in Nancy Reynolds, Repertory in Review: 40 Years of the New York City Ballet (New York: The Dial Press, 1977), 183.
4 Illustrating his intellectual attraction to written music, Barbara Horgan, Balanchine’s his long-time secretary, recalled that he created piano transcriptions not only out of necessity, when published transcriptions were not available for use in rehearsals, but also as a way to learn the music note-by-note and as a recreational exercise, like doing crossword puzzles. Charles M. Joseph, Stravinsky & Balanchine: A Journey of Invention (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 19.
5 Balanchine, Complete Stories, 332.
6 To date, even as the internet has become a significant repository of dance content, dance scholarship and criticism have remained largely in prose. A methodological aim of this project, therefore, is to demonstrate how digital video editing techniques, which have become much more accessible in recent years through basic software, might be used in dance and choreomusical scholarship to reach a wider audience. I present my analyses using annotated videoclips, where I illustrate analytical points through visual markings (including text, arrows, and spotlights) or voiceover commentary, and through other video manipulations. Recent scholarship increasingly appends simple video clips. However, I believe that advanced annotations and video manipulations can improve the precision and comprehension of arguments about audiovisual art forms and are not yet employed to their full advantage.
7 Joseph (2002, 19) discusses in detail the music-theory exercises that are preserved in Balanchine’s papers at the Harvard Theatre Collection. They cover the standard topics—such as intervals, nonharmonic tones, dissonance resolution, cadential progressions, four-part harmony, modulation, orchestration, and species counterpoint—that have constituted the core music theory curriculum at music conservatories in the Western European tradition throughout the twentieth century.
