A Primer on Choreomusical Notation
To examine Balanchine’s choreography, this project uses choreomusical notation, a method for transcribing dance in a music-based notation system.
HOW CHOREOMUSICAL NOTATION WORKS
UP AND DOWN
For most analyses of Balanchine’s choreography, the dance staff is drawn with three lines:
- the top line represents full or demi-pointe (on the tips of the toes or the balls of the feet),
- the middle line represents standing or walking (with straight legs), and
- the bottom line represents demi-plié (bending at the knees).
In addition, jumps and lifts can be notated in the space above the staff, and kneeling (or other low positions) can be notated in the space below the staff.
LEFT AND RIGHT
The left leg is represented with a stem to the left of the notehead, and the right leg with a stem to the right. The legs in unison (in the same position) can have two stems on a single notehead. These are weight-bearing legs only, which are prioritized also in Labanotation (along the central axis).
FEELING THE MOVEMENTS IN YOUR OWN BODY
The directions—up, down, left, and right—mirror the reader (and analyst). This orientation helps the reader to quickly try feeling the movements of the choreography in the reader’s own body. (But, when looking at an image of dancer, left and right need to be flipped.)
Stephanie Jordan recommends sketch dancing (embodying or imitating some of the movements of a dance) for music-dance analysis: “I remain convinced that this kind of experience can inform choreomusical analysis, seeing it as comparable to the practice of many music analysts… [Sketch dancing helps us to discover] points of relationship between what we do and what we hear that we might never have experienced from watching a performance.”[1]
Pitch, Rhythm, and Changes of Weight: A View of Dance as Music
PITCH AND RHYTHM
Western music notation graphs pitch height on the vertical axis and rhythm on the horizontal axis. Similarly, choreomusical notation maps spatial height on the vertical axis and choreographic rhythm on the horizontal axis of a modified musical staff. Duration (rhythm) symbols represent the intervals between arrivals at prescribed dance positions (body shapes), because dance movements are more continuous than music notation can depict. On a choreomusical score, the notations for dance and music align both horizontally (with respect to rhythm along the x-axis) and vertically (with respect to spatial or pitch “height” along the y-axis).
Because choreomusical notation makes the representations of dance and music isomorphic, patterns in the music can be compared easily with patterns in Balanchine’s musical-score-based choreography. Moreover, tools that were developed for music-only analysis can be applied to the analysis of dance with music.
CHANGES OF WEIGHT
Shifts of weight—up, down, left, and right—are usually the greatest contributors to the sense of choreographic rhythm in classical ballet. Weight placement (left or right foot), rhythm, and vertical position are the parameters that dancers often mark with their hands when teaching or learning new steps. They are also the parameters represented in the two columns adjacent to the center line in Labanotation. When non-weight-bearing gestures, such as arm movements and kicks, are rhythmically salient, choreomusical notation can be adapted to graph different parameters. (Similarly, other dance styles can be transcribed by adapting choreomusical notation to capture rhythmically salient parameters in those styles.)[1]
A VIEW OF DANCE AS MUSIC
Other dance notations, including Labanotation—and even other music-based dance notations, such as Stepanov notation—are not isomorphic with Western music notation. Choreomusical notation is unique among dance notations in that it both adopts the rhythmic notation of Western music and preserves the verticality image schema among musical pitch, a dancer’s physical space, and the visual representations (transcriptions) of music and dance.[2] Because of this design, the choreomusical score can be used as a mnemonic tool for simultaneously auralizing the music and visualizing the dance, and it can be used as an analytical tool for quickly sighting relationships between the media. When multiple streams of choreography are being analyzed, additional staves can be added to a score, just as additional staves are added to orchestral scores for different instruments’ parts. Just like musical scores, the choreomusical score frees the analyst from being restricted to in-time observations, as one would be when viewing a filmed or live performance. As a result, choreomusical notation not only relates dance to music but also offers a view of dance as music.
For more on choreomusical notation, please see Chapter 2 of Kara Yoo Leaman’s dissertation. Chapter 5 includes analyses of dances in different styles.
[1] Jordan, Mark Morris: Musician-Choreographer (Binsted, UK: Dance Books, 2015), 122.
[2] For examples of analyses of other dance styles, see Chapter 5 of my dissertation. For more on choreomusical notation, see Chapter 2. Kara Yoo Leaman, “Analyzing Music and Dance: Balanchine’s Choreography to Tchaikovsky and The Choreomusical Score” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2016).
[3] For a survey of dance notation systems, see Ann Hutchinson Guest, Choreo-graphics: A Comparison of Dance Notation Systems from the Fifteenth Century to the Present (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1998). In contrast to these, choreomusical notation is intended for analysis rather than dance preservation.
