Baroque Dance Research Articles

Emoji

Abstract Online users devise different strategies and techniques to make up for the absence of physical bodies in online communications, one of which is using emojis. Emojis are a diverse set of small images, symbols, or icons, standardized by the Unicode Consortium for utilization in electronic communication platforms. Their primary role is to effectively convey the emotional attitude of the writer, succinctly provide information, and playfully communicate messages. This article posits that bodily emojis (emojis portraying a body gesture or facial expression) are a form of digital embodiment. Their usage, thus, creates a form of digital performance. Emojis appear as a screen body in a space that lacks the physical one. Furthermore, I suggest that this body could be described as aesthetically Baroque. My proposition is that emojis exhibit Baroque characteristics such as dynamic and exaggerated forms and decorate texts. Emojis share similarities with the appearance and function of the Baroque body both in Baroque visual art and Baroque dance.

M. RAVEL'S SPANISH RHAPSODY: TO THE QUESTION OF THE GENRE ORIGINALITY OF THE COMPOSITION

The subject of the study is Maurice Ravel's "Spanish Rhapsody" arranged for two pianos. The purpose of this article is to consider the genre features of the work, based on the refraction of the principles of rhapsody and suite. The performing means used by the composer in the implementation of the program idea of the work are also of research interest. The methodology of this study was made up of holistic and comparative approaches to the study of a musical composition. The novelty of the article lies in the fact that the study generalizes and concretizes the features of form formation in the work, which contributes to the study of the composer's creative method, the study of his peculiarities of working with cyclic forms. In the course of the study, the author comes to the conclusion that in M. Ravel's "Spanish Rhapsody" the features of directly rhapsody are reflected, expressed as a comparison of contrasting folklore layers in a single whole, features of suite, expressed in a generalized interpretation of Spanish imagery on the one hand and the composer's appeal to the genre models of a baroque dance suite, on the other. In addition, the suite principle in the structure of the form of the work is embodied in a specific impressionistic refraction of the genre features of Spanish dance folklore in each of the parts of the form. The obtained results of the work will contribute to the conscious interpretation of M. Ravel's "Spanish Rhapsody" arranged for two pianos from the point of view of the principles and laws of shaping and pianistic means of impressionistic expressiveness in the expression of Spanish images in music.

«НАДУВНАЯ ТЕРРИТОРИЯ» И «БАРОЧНЫЙ ПУЗЫРЬ»: ПРИДВОРНЫЕ ТАНЦЫ XVII ВЕКА В ТЕОРИИ ДЕЛЁЗА-ГВАТТАРИ И ПРАКТИКЕ ХОРЕОГРАФОВ-РЕСТАВРАТОРОВ

In Thousand Plateaus (1980), Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze draw on ethology (the study of animal behaviour) and biosemiotics to explain the continuity between animal and human rituals: how rituals are used to control and redirect aggression, mark and protect territory. The philosophers refer to the experiments of the German psychiatrist Wolfgang Blankenburg, who treated schizophrenic patients by teaching them Baroque dances in which the distance between dancers is particularly important. The article traces parallels between these theoretical conceptions of baroque dances and the practical methods of “The New York Baroque Dance Company”, which since the 1970s seeks to reconstruct dances and ballet techniques of the 17th and 18th centuries.

Baroque Dance in British Communities

Baroque dance is an important cultural and artistic treasure of France, serving the French upper class and nobles during the Louis XIV period. It was later introduced to Europe and the British court by Charles II. Today, baroque dances are still visible in London's community dance. This essay introduces the cultural background of French baroque dance in British community dance through field survey in two community centers in London, and combs the risk assessment, method application and guidance of dance anthropology in this field survey brought thinking.

After Care

After Care

Golden Era of Baroque Dance

"The reign of Louis XIV marks an important milestone in the development of dance and art. Convinced that visual arts and music would significantly contribute to a monarch’s authority, image, and glory, the “Sun King” coordinated artistic activities through establishing a significant number of royal academies. Through the Académie Royale de Danse the art of dancing was given a proper language and notation system for the first time in history. On the other hand, the Académie Royale de Musique was tied to the birth of a national operatic style. Opera was the perfect tool for an idealistic and majestic projection of a nation’s monarch. Keywords: baroque dance, Louis XIV, dance notation systems, ballet de cour, royal academies, Jean-Baptiste Lully, music, opera. "

Minuet - The Reminiscence of the Individual Dance Form in Maurice Ravel’s Piano Works

"The minuet is one of the most representative dance forms of the Baroque era. Thanks to its popularity, it becomes part of stage works like operas and ballets, instrumental suites, later (in the Classical and Romantic era) movements of symphonies, sonatas, string quartets, and trios. Ravel had a special interest in old dance forms. Among his musical works there are several dance-movements like Pavane, Rigaudon, Forlane, or Menuet. The use of these in individual works is limited, having only three minuets written for piano solo: the Menuet antique (1895), the Menuet in C sharp minor (1904), and the Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn (1909). Keywords: Ravel, Baroque, Reminiscence, Baroque dance forms, Piano, Minuet, Neoclassicism. "

Metrical Dissonances in the Baroque Minuet: Theory and Practice

The present paper serves a theoretical as well as a musicological purpose in addressing metrical dissonances in the multifaceted act of Baroque dance music. In identifying the centrality of the minuet in eighteenth-century repertoire as a capital example of the aesthetic style of the time, this article discusses its complex metrical structure in the integrative art of music and dance. By way of established analytical tools designed by contemporary theorists (KREBS, 1999; LERDAHL; JACKENDOFF, 1983; LITTLE; JENNE, 2001) the minuet’s metrical dissonances are systematically analyzed. The complex metrical structure of the minuet is then discussed in light of its practical implications for today’s performance scene. Such a discussion illuminates the need for mutuality between theory and practice in an intentional endeavour to reconcile and, therefore, better understand the historically segregated arts of music and dance in the performance of Baroque repertoire.

Maurice Ravel : Le Tombeau De Couperin – Part II. The Reminiscence of Baroque Dance Forms

"According to Alfred Cortot, the suite Le tombeau de Couperin could be divided into two main units. The first part presented in the previous volume of this journal, analyses the structural arch of the suite: the first two and the last part, which uses specific compositional technics of the Baroque era. This second part presents the middle section of the suite, the reminiscence of baroque dance forms, through the three contrasting dances: Forlane, Rigaudon, and Menuet. The fusion between the elements of the French baroque keyboard music and the characteristics of the modern piano music transforms this suite into a real and unique masterpiece. By analyzing the Forlane, the Rigaudon, and the Menuet of the suite we can understand the view of twentieth-century artists on the music of the Baroque era. Keywords: Ravel, Suite, Baroque, Reminiscence, Baroque dance forms, Piano, Forlane, Rigaudon, Menuet"

La Courante Françoise. Historically Informed Performance of the French Courante For Harpsichord During the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century Following the Criteria Obtained From the Baroque Dance

Research Question: How can the knowledge and practice of Baroque Dance improve our performances of Courantes in the Harpsichord?

Review: Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera: A History, by Rebecca Harris-Warrick

Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera: A History , by Rebecca Harris-Warrick. Cambridge Studies in Opera. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016. xx, 484 pp. In the mid-1700s, notorious rake Giacomo Casanova attended a performance of Andre Campra's Les fetes venitiennes (1710) at the Paris Opera. His reactions varied from amusement (the backdrop placed the bell tower and the ducal palace on the wrong side of Saint Mark's Square) to boredom induced by Campra's music. Most noteworthy to him, however, was the enthusiastic response of the audience to the dancer Louis Dupre, marked by total silence during his appearance and vigorous applause upon its conclusion. According to Casanova, his French companion explained this reverence by stating, “Such is the power of beauty and goodness, of the sublime and the truth to nature which penetrate the soul. … This is true dance.”1 Although the French passion for dance has long been acknowledged by scholars, histories of French Baroque opera have primarily pursued an ideological or evolutionary approach to the development of the genre. No previous work on French Baroque opera has fully addressed the tutued elephant in the room—the pervasiveness of dance within these genres. Rebecca Harris-Warrick's Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera seeks to redress this omission, tracing developments from 1672 (the premiere of Jean-Baptiste Lully's Cadmus et Hermione ) to 1735. Harris-Warrick's thesis is that dance, far from being a supplemental or incidental aspect of French Baroque musical theater, is in fact fundamental to its dramaturgy, and that those parts of a …

Music into Fiction: Composers Writing, Compositions Imitated

Music into Fiction: Composers Writing, Compositions Imitated

The Accompaniment in “Unaccompanied” Bach: Interpreting the Sonatas and Partitas for Violin by Stanley Ritchie

Reviewed by: The Accompaniment in “Unaccompanied” Bach: Interpreting the Sonatas and Partitas for Violin by Stanley Ritchie Peter Sheppard Skærved The Accompaniment in “Unaccompanied” Bach: Interpreting the Sonatas and Partitas for Violin. By Stanley Ritchie. [End Page 188] Bloomington; Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2016. (Publications of the Early Music Institute.) [xiii, 120 p. ISBN 978-0-253-02198-4. $33] For any violinist, this book is a practical delight. It deserves to join the great works by Leopold Mozart, Editha Knocker, Leopold Auer, Pierre Baillot, Joseph Szigeti, and their peers, which are on every serious player’s shelf. The fact that Stanley Ritchie confines his narrative to the consideration of the six solo violin works by J. S. Bach is incidental. As he says in his peroration “Last Words”: “There is so much to be gleaned from their careful study that can be applied to other repertoire – truths that can be applied to all music – thereby supporting one’s growth as a musician”. (p. 117) Unlike the majority of similar works, the presentation and layout of this publication are useful to the player. The softback format ensures that it can be opened on a music stand, and the paper takes pencil and pen well. A performer will want to write all over this book and (from experience), this works well! “How to” books are fascinating. Whether they are Victorian “popular educators”, Taekwondo manuals, or pedagogical works, they tell us as much about their authors and the times in which they are written, as they do of their intended audiences. Stanley Ritchie’s fascinating work does not escape from this, nor does it try to. Indeed, one of its fascinations is the author’s engagement with the time-specific, if not time-limited, nature of his dialogue with his readers. He is aware that this book stands as a personal cadenza to radical change, to which he has been contributor and witness: “[. . .] the revolution has been successful beyond any prediction. [. . .]” (p. 116) The book is very carefully structured; there is a sense that its author was keen to reflect the six-part form of the Sonatas & Partitas (it has twelve chapters). Unlike modern technical works, it begins with first “Principles of Interpretation”, from notation to ornamentation, in the way that one would expect to find in a historical work by Ludwig Spohr or Michel Woldemar. This is followed by a chapter entitled “Dance Forms”. Here one cannot get away from the fact that the author is frustrated by the modern lack of physical understanding of what it is to dance at all: ‘”I recommend to my students that they at least watch videos, if not live performances of Baroque dances [. . .], better still, that they avail themselves of any opportunity to experience Baroque dance personally in a workshop setting”. (p. 10) I cannot be alone in feeling that what he really wanted to say was, “learn to dance, and then dance!” Next comes “Analytical Methods and Exercises”. Fundamental to this is a statement with which I agree, although for very different reasons: “There is no such thing as ‘unaccompanied Bach’ ”. (p. 16) I found myself at odds with many of the suggestions in this third Chapter. Ritchie’s insistence on extracting melodic material from the simplification of figuration results in weakened readings of the music. His hierarchical approach to this “breaking down” has the dreaded “murder to dissect” effect. (p. 21) I believe that it is a mistake to pronounce, as he does, that voice-leading should emphasise the primary voice at any given time. The missing resolution in the opening of the A minor “prelude” is a powerful example of how Bach toyed with this, and made invisible voices tangible, even audible, through misdirection and suggestion. But I appreciate that mine is a personal reaction: his work is all the better for the bold stance taken on this subject. The book is full of gem-like insights; the kind of things which any player will seize on, try out, wrestle with, and never forget: “In Bach’s manuscript, many slurs are quickly and imprecisely drawn, as if to say: ‘It’s obvious what I mean – I don’t need to...

From the Page to the Floor: Baroque Dance Notation and Kellom Tomlinson’s The Art of Dancing Explained

The late seventeenth century gave rise to a powerful innovation in Western European social and theatrical dance, the art of dance notation. The new representational technology of dance notation provided a means to broadcast fashionable dances emerging from the French court as well as new compositions from dancing masters operating in London and elsewhere. In the first three decades of the eighteenth century, dance notation quickly reached faddish heights, with published dance manuals in high demand among upper levels of English society. One publication from the era, Kellom Tomlinson’s The Art of Dancing Explained by Reading and Figures, provides a window onto the descriptive tool of dance notation, its function in society, and its eventual decline. While providing a previously unimagined communicational technology, the completeness and specificity of the dominant form of dance notation ultimately spelled its demise.

Formal Differences

Formal Differences

Zum Spielen und zum Tantzen

This exposition presents the artistic research project 'Zum Spielen und zum Tantzen: A Kinaesthetic Exploration of the Bach Cello Suites through Studies in Baroque Choreography’, undertaken at the Norwegian Academy of Music between 2009 and 2012. I offer a historical background, discuss the method used, and present the artistic results in the form of video and audio files. The dance titles of J. S. Bach's cello suites, derived from French court dance, clearly meant more to the composer than just abstract references. In Bach's time, dance practice permeated social life, and an intimate knowledge of fashionable dance forms was indispensable for a musician. The movements and gestures of these dances inevitably had a profound influence on performance style. I have investigated how the practice of Baroque dance could influence my interpretation of the Bach suites. Learning the essentials of this style and its original choreographies and frequently accompanying dancing, I also explored the dance aspect of the cello suites by way of experiments with historical tempos as well as melodic and rhythmic reductions of the musical material. Through this project, I hope to make a worthy contribution to the development of performance practice studies, offering a recontextualisation of Bach’s work that emphasises the close links between the expressive gestures of music and dance. The results have both artistic and pedagogic potential as tools to discover essential aspects of dance character in Baroque music.

Dance on its Own Terms: Histories and Methodologies ed. by Melanie Bales and Karen Eliot (review)

Reviewed by: Dance on its Own Terms: Histories and Methodologies ed. by Melanie Bales and Karen Eliot Ariel Nereson DANCE ON ITS OWN TERMS: HISTORIES AND METHODOLOGIES. Edited by Melanie Bales and Karen Eliot. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013; pp. 456. Since the mid-1990s, dance studies has integrated with other disciplines, including performance studies, visual studies, cultural studies, and others. The 1997 volume Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance set a standard for this kind of interdisciplinary work, and others—Moving History/Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader (2001) and The Routledge Dance Studies Reader (2010)—have sprung up in response to the field’s increased visibility in academia. In their new collection, editors Melanie Bales and Karen Eliot aim to re-center dance studies onto dance itself: onto movement and its phenomenal and material qualities. They argue that dance studies’ interdisciplinary forays, while rich and provocative, have compromised the study of dance on its own terms: “[i]n their eagerness to adopt theoretical language from other disciplines, dance scholars have lost fluency in their own language” (4). This language emphasizes familiarity with particular schools of movement analysis and notation, allowing for scholarship that springs from dancing itself rather than beginning with external concerns about the body as a site or sign. Dance on Its Own Terms provides great depth in terms of modeling strong, dance-centered scholarship, but represents a fairly narrow range of dance itself. The editors divide the volume’s sixteen chapters into three sections that emphasize, respectively, spectatorship and reconstruction, physical/kinesthetic dance histories of particular figures, and methods of dance notation. Section 1 begins with Karen Eliot’s analysis of canon formation in British ballet circa World War II, including her timely reminder that “the mechanics and politics of canon formation … do not operate uniformly across the disciplines” (13). Ann Dils’s reflective chapter on restaging the challenging Jean Cocteau/Darius Milhaud farce Le Boeuf sur le Toit (1920) for a contemporary college audience provides a clear analysis of race and gender issues within the work, and also a model for imagining our pedagogical practices alongside our artistic ones. Deborah Friedes Galili offers the highly useful notion culture of reconstruction, terminology that frames her investigation of the “institutional structures and artistic and scholarly discourses” that determine reconstruction practices across geographies (67). Betsy Cooper convincingly demonstrates that the Production Code Administration’s censorship assessments about the “decency” of a dance in Golden Age Hollywood films were linked to a high art/popular entertainment binary that reified balletic movement, even if those choreographies [End Page 586] technically violated the code. Harmony Bench reads Beyoncé’s viral “Single Ladies” choreography (2008) as a negotiation of gender and sexuality within internet culture, offering an exemplary integration of a dance-centered perspective (movement analysis of the choreography itself and its lineage) with contemporary theoretical concerns (kinesthetic transfer through digital media). In section 2, Catherine Turocy’s strong essay on how dancers (and scholars) in the present might enter into the spatial world of Baroque dance includes an invaluable series of exercises for readers and dancers that demonstrates the Baroque understanding of space, physicality, and aesthetics. Bales’s own excellent chapter in this section, a comparative movement analysis across three different interpretations of pas de deux (Marius Petipa, George Balanchine, and William Forsythe), connects movement itself across the three dances and to disciplinary questions in dance criticism and history in rich and compelling ways. Carrie Gaiser Casey examines the shape of maternal relationships between Anna Pavlova and her ballerinas through a feminist lens, arguing that we acknowledge the contradictions inherent in these relationships “as an integral part of dancer experience” (226). Geraldine Morris carefully parses the collaborative strands of Frederick Ashton’s 1937 ballet A Wedding Bouquet (music by Gerald Berners, text by Gertrude Stein) to argue for an integrated analysis of movement, music, and literature. In her Laban-based analysis of Anna Sokolow’s 1945 solo Kaddish, Hannah Kosstrin performs vital recovery work, tracing the evolution and adaptation of the choreography through several dancers, including Sokolow herself. Finally, Jessica Zeller focuses on the uniquely American pedagogy of ballerina Rochelle Zide-Booth to provide a useful overview...

Musical topics, historical styles and narrative in Carl Davis’s score for Pride and Prejudice (1995)

Abstract In critical commentary on Jane Austen film adaptations, Carl Davis’s musical score for the British Broadcasting Corporation’s television series Pride and Prejudice has been hailed as ‘historically accurate’. However, its use of ‘period’ instruments actually reflects the modern ‘early music’ movement, and its selections of diegetic music by canonic composers serve to create the cultural prestige associated with heritage productions. The nondiegetic portions of the score, which imitate a century of musical topics, styles and genres, are central to the novel’s adaptation to film. A musico-historical continuum – from Baroque dance to classical sonata form to a Romantic leitmotif – provides its own meanings, and in some instances the musical score becomes the primary transmitter of the film’s narrative. The ‘original’ time period referenced by a musical cue signals information about a character’s class status, personality, and actions, and the musical ‘historicism’ of Davis’s score sometimes provides the ironic commentary characteristic of Austen’s writing.

Tempo in Baroque music and dance

Growing interest in studies on the relationship between music and movement has given rise to many paradigms and theories, including embodied approaches that provide interesting methodologies in studies on music and dance. Insight into the relation between dance and music is particularly important for the Baroque period, as a direct connection between music and dance was omnipresent, even if music was not used to dance to. Many types of Baroque dances existed, each of them with particular dance steps and a specific character, requiring a specific tempo. However, in music performance practice today, the link with the original dance movement is often lost and the tempo variation can be very large. The aim of this study is to compare the interpretations of dancers and musicians regarding Baroque music and dance in an experimental setting. First, we investigate the influence of dance movement on the musical interpretation of a series of Baroque dances. The pieces were recorded both with and without dance accompaniment and the tempo and timing in the different versions were compared. In the second part, dancers performed a particular choreography to music that varied in tempo. Video analysis and questionnaire data were used to evaluate the different performances. The results were compared with the tempi of music recordings of the same dance types, showing a clear difference between music and dance performance. Musicians adapt their interpretation when performing together with the dancers, and the optimal tempo range found for certain Baroque dances coincides only partly with the tempi commonly found in music recordings. The direct link between music and movement and its mutual influence illustrates the importance of an embodied approach in music performance, where in this case dance movement gives concrete information for a “historically informed” performance.

Ideological Background Indicated by Language and Expression for Explaining Body Movement in Baroque Dance Literature and a Biomechanics Research in 17-18 Century Europe

Ideological Background Indicated by Language and Expression for Explaining Body Movement in Baroque Dance Literature and a Biomechanics Research in 17-18 Century Europe