Analyzing Balanchine's Ballets and Their Music
Kara Yoo Leaman explains the premise of Dancing Notes & how analyzing Balanchine’s ballets and their music can help us understand what makes them special.
Why analyze Balanchine's ballets?
The short answer is because Balanchine analyzed the music he used, and his ballets were the expression of what he understood about the music—not all of his ballets, but many of them. So, the key to understanding Balanchine’s ballets is often, in my opinion, found in the musical score. Now, some people might say, well, Balanchine didn’t want people to analyze or theorize about his ballets.
He compared them to butterflies and flowers—here today, gone tomorrow. Yes, I understand that. But I say, there has always been a lot of interest in analyzing butterflies and flowers, too. Many people, including dancers, choreographers, musicians, critics have intuited and tried to express the sense of musicality they find in Balanchine’s choreography. So, analysis offers the opportunity to make these intuitions explicit, to explain why, what are the details that make us sense that something special is going on musically in a ballet.
How do you analyze the ballets?
I start with the music first, as Balanchine did. And he analyzed the music. He once said in an interview, “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, and what it represents.” So, first I try to understand what the music is about. When composers write music—at least the composers I study here—when they compose their music, they usually had some kind of musical statement or purpose or problem to solve that drove them to create. So, I explore that, and then I look at what Balanchine did because he said, “Making a ballet is a choreographer’s way of showing how he understands a piece of music.”
I look at many different aspects of the dance and the music, both large-scale patterns and close-up. But when I was getting started years ago, I realized I needed a way to track patterns in the dance in relation to patterns in the music. So, I devised a system I call choreomusical notation. It’s based on Western music notation, which graphs pitch height on the vertical axis and rhythm on the horizontal axis.
So, like Western music notation, choreomusical notation tracks a dancer’s position in vertical space on a staff. Here, I use just three lines. Steps or positions on full or demi-pointe are recorded on the top line, those at standing or walking level on the middle line, and those in demi-plié on the lowest line. Jumps and lifts are recorded in the space above the staff, and low positions like kneeling in the space below the staff.
In addition, steps on the left leg have stems to the left of the notehead, and steps on the right have stems to the right. Steps on both legs have both stems. The notation is oriented to mirror the reader or viewer’s left and right, as well as up and down, so that you, the reader, can use it to quickly try out the feelings of the weight shifts of the dance in your own body, because changes of weight play a significant role in the feeling of rhythm in ballet.
Placed together on a choreomusical score, dance and music are aligned both horizontally with respect to rhythm and vertically with respect to height or pitch height. And then, dance can be analyzed using tools that were designed for music analysis. In other words, dance can be analyzed not only in relation to music, but also as music.
The choreomusical score helps track minute details in music-dance patterns, but my analyses don’t stay on that level of small detail. The details help me to make interpretations of larger-scale topics like expectations, techniques, form, and other ideas.
What do you show in Dancing Notes?
In almost any discussion of Balanchine, one can expect that music or musicality will be discussed. In this video series called Dancing Notes, I explore the question, what is behind Balanchine’s choreographic musicality, or the musicality of his choreography? I try to explain some of the musical techniques Balanchine used, what he seems to be responding to, or how he seems to be playing with the music through choreography.
The ways that a choreographer tends to work with music in their dances, is what I call a choreomusical style. So what I’m trying to understand and explain are aspects of Balanchine’s choreomusical style.
At the time of this recording, the earliest ballets of George Balanchine are nearing their 100-year anniversaries, and many have passed their 75th and 50th anniversaries. Yet their popularity on the stage does not seem to diminish, and Balanchine’s legacy still seems to have a significant influence on contemporary choreographers. What the Balanchine Foundation and I, as a music scholar and admirer, want to do is to help preserve as much of Balanchine’s ballets as possible, as accurately as possible, for future generations. And many people know that is not just a matter of video recording performances. What I focus on is his very special way of designing choreographic musicality.
Why are you the person to do this, and why now?
Here, in the first half of the 21st century, more than 100 years after Balanchine was born, musical culture and music composition styles are changing—as they always are. But I find myself as a music theorist at a crossroads in my field, where the type of training Balanchine received at the St. Petersburg Conservatory had endured for all of the 20th century.
But now, that type of education in the Western European musical traditions is changing significantly. My own training as a music theorist was very similar to what it appears Balanchine had, from what we can see in his papers and what we know of the conservatory. But in five, ten years or even right now, depending on what school they’re in, students studying music theory or analysis in higher education will be coming out with very different training than what Balanchine had.
So, I’m taking advantage of the similarity in my musical training to Balanchine’s to look at the music he used, to try to understand the music like he did, and see things in the music that he might have seen. And then I look at the ballets and try to trace where choreographic ideas might have come from in the music.
I also have a bit of ballet training. Nothing close to professional level. But it helps with understanding the feeling of things. When I was growing up in Southern California, my teacher, Lois Ellyn, would tell us stories about Mr. Balanchine and teach us things she said she learned from him. So, that piqued my interest in Balanchine. And I also had some opportunities during high school to choreograph on friends in dance class. So, that also helped me to appreciate Balanchine, I think.
