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.]