Ballet and Dance

When you have a garden full of pretty flowers, you don’t demand of them, “What do you mean? What is your significance?” Dancers are just flowers, and flowers grow without any literal meaning, they are just beautiful. We’re like flowers. A flower doesn’t tell you a story. It’s in itself a beautiful thing. -George Balanchine, Choreographer

I’m not interested whether they understand or not. -Martha Graham, Choreographer

Some say that all music is either song or dance. Time for some dance.

Taken out of context, you might think to yourself, “I didn't know it was possible to fly and spin like that,” but you'd probably have no idea what was going on in the plot of these variations. ^📖

Ballet's narrative masterpieces take a unique position in classical music—more abstract than opera, but more programmatic than absolute music. There are no more words to tell us what is happening or how the characters are feeling. Plotless ballets would take this even further.

A simplified interpretation chain might look something like:

Scenario > Choreographer / Composer > Dancers / Musicians > Audience

Like the interpretation chains for opera and film, a real process is messier: there are a dozen other moving parts, and the arrows often double back on each other. No two ballets look alike.

A new set of interpretive questions arises—how does movement substitute for words and go beyond them, and how does it change our perception as listeners?

In this chapter we'll look at scenes expressed through gesture and rhythm. Then we'll scramble the chain and look at ballets that borrow from absolute music, and how its harmony builds the world.

Romeo and Juliet

Sergei Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet belongs to the handful of ballets that are performed frequently both in their ballet forms and as orchestral suites without dancers at all. The ballet has no words, but there is definitely a plot that is, it's safe to say, pretty familiar to audiences.

For the uninitiated, Romeo and Juliet are star-crossed lovers from the Montague and Capulet families, which, simply put, hate each other.

Cue the music:

But Romeo and Juliet fall in love at first sight, and Romeo ventures into the Capulet orchard under cover of night. Juliet appears on her balcony, unaware of Romeo's presence below. It's here that Juliet speaks the lines that inspired the Caroline Shaw song from the previous chapter (What's in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet). Reflecting on their forbidden love, she laments that only Romeo's last name—his family identity—stands in their way:

This is the so-called “balcony scene”, aptly named for its defining characteristic: Juliet is on a balcony. Romeo is not. And this distance is not just a matter of location, but also symbolic of their impossibility as a couple. The actress Dame Judi Dench says that the physical separation of the balcony makes their interaction “awkward and clumsy”, which “forces them to use language more.” This seems like it could be a problem for a language-less production.

Even with the words, there is room for disagreement. The Juliet we just watched may have leaned towards the dreamy and lyrical, but she can also be a frustrated, fiery adolescent, mature and self-assured, or have the girl-next-door vibes of a young Claire Danes with Leonardo DiCaprio.

How, then, can this language and symbolism survive in music and dance?

In these duets, the lovers are not only silent; they are not even separated by a balcony; their conversation happens via touch and embrace.

There's no denying that without Shakespeare's verse, the finer points might be missed. The verbal mismatch between the florid Romeo and the practical-but-enchanted Juliet is left to the imagination. Perhaps it will be replaced with something else, at least new if not deeper.

Below is Kenneth MacMillan's classic choreography alongside Matthew Bourne's more experimental one, set in an asylum.

If you take a look at different performances and choreographies, you might see where their interpretations diverge—where they're driven by an adult-like tension or a youthful naivete. Even in the music, the giant leaps are by turns weightless or effortful.

In all of them, we get some measure of Juliet's hesitation in her momentary retreats. But overwhelmingly, the Juliet in this segment is literally heels-over-head in love—the Juliet that proclaims, “My bounty is as boundless as the sea, / My love as deep; the more I give to thee, / The more I have, for both are infinite.”

Dench says that if the lovers were next to each other without the balcony, then she doesn't believe that Juliet is so bold as to be so effusive.

Whether or not you buy the ballet's balcony-less conversation is up to you. The most striking moment in both versions (especially the Bourne) is the kiss, something that should be impossible with a balcony in between them.^💬 It seems to break out from “art” and become purely human. Like the Scheherazade war cries a few chapters back, you might even think, “Is that allowed?”

What Prokofiev and his choreographers do show is connection at its purest—a connection that bypasses words and that the audience already understands even if the lovers themselves do not—that Romeo and Juliet are, in Dench's words, “smitten… past the point of no return.”

Love and Fighting: Rhythm and Abstraction

Prokofiev is, predictably, far from the only composer who has written music for Romeo and Juliet.

Let's look, as we have in past chapters, at a purely instrumental take on this story, not intended for the stage. Even absent an explicit plot, the “love theme” from Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture is unmistakable:

Tchaikovsky's music immediately tugs on the heartstrings in a way that Prokofiev's balcony scene does not—Tchaikovsky's energy is more smoldering than kinetic. The basic motions are similar—they both reach higher and higher—but Prokofiev's has a natural buoyancy compared to Tchaikovsky's smoother curves.

In Mats Ek's choreography for Juliet and Romeo, he actually chooses a similar-sounding theme from Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony to give us a more ecstatic love, bordering on euphoric. Despite Tchaikovsky's smoother contours, virtually all his music can be listened to with a balletic sensibility.

This smoothness is not just a smoothness of melody, but also of rhythm. There's no turbulence to the line. Each note transforms into the next without difficulty. If you tap your foot to the beat, every note would land with your foot.

But if we continue along with the Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture, we get this:

Faster music with notes running in perpetual motion will quicken a heartbeat—at least metaphorically, but often even literally; slower music with long-held notes as in Tchaikovsky's love theme might relax you—or the opposite if they are withholding the resolution you desire.

Atypical rhythms that disturb the pulse—syncopations—lie at odds with our desire for a regular heartbeat, and keep the listener on their toes.

You could try to hear this literally. If you just watched the fight scene choreography above, you might hear the cymbal crashes as the parrying of swords, the scurrying strings as the footwork of men fighting. If those cymbal crashes simply landed with the pulse rather than disturbing it, the scene would lose its effect, the fight feeling more choreographed than real—a device that Bernstein uses to the same effect for the Rumble scene in West Side Story.

But Tchaikovsky's piece is not a play, or a ballet; it is a fantasy. It is inspired by the Shakespeare, but there is no plot. You don't see characters on stage, and I have never once been nervous for the lives of the fighters.

Still, it is exhilarating, in a more abstract way. The denial of the steady heartbeat gives us chaos, and a sense of expectation that the conflict will have to come to a head.

Pulse vs. Breath, Heart vs. Lungs

The push and pull against our bodies' desire for a nice, stable pulse is the central question that rhythm poses. As much as we love a stable pulse, any human knows that our hearts aren't actually steady. Our heart rate is variable, even more so when the body is relaxed, and it is especially susceptible to the effects of the breath, which speeds up the pulse as we inhale and slows it down as we exhale.

A steady beat allows the body to move more efficiently—to swing an axe or march or run or otherwise move one's arms and legs in time. The flexibility of the breath allows us to sing and express ourselves through cadence and phrasing in our speech. When we speak, we don't give every syllable the same amount of time, lest we sound like a robot (from 20 years ago).

We can see both side-by-side in Frederic Rzewski's “Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues”, which takes the eponymous folk song sung by 1930s textile workers and places it next to the relentless churning of the cotton mill.

For the first few minutes, the hellish noise of the cotton mill builds up, at times requiring the pianist to use their entire forearm, turning the pianist into a machine themself, in perfect time—until it somehow coalesces into a bluesy accompaniment figure.

Then at its apex, the relentless machinery gives way to something quite its opposite:

Most music does not lie on these extremes, but somewhere both breath and pulse can live as one—neither completely free nor completely constrained. The heartbeat is regular, the expectation established, but occasionally withheld when the melody's lyricism demands it.

Dances like a Waltz or a Minuet must have a steady, danceable pulse when there are dancers trying to dance to them. But often these pieces are just inspired by the dances, and so a solo pianist—or a very good ensemble—can take liberties, moving at will along the continuum from song to dance and back again. If you tried to clap along at a steady rate you'd find yourself quite far off what the pianist does, but at the same time you also always know where the pianist is feeling the beat.

Take a look at two versions of a Chopin Waltz—one danced, one just played.

Ballet from Existing Music

We've seen music custom written for dance, but just as often, ballet takes existing classical music and adds dance—adding a new interpretation just like when music is used in film.

Usually, this means that the space of potential interpretations for a listener is narrowed. But a great choreography can also elucidate something that you never would have found by yourself.

During the COVID pandemic, I was fortunate enough to perform a Mozart concerto with the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra. For all the struggles with streaming video and sound quality, this short clip brought me joy—my six-year-old friend here was able to watch the performance from across the country and immediately understand how the piece's protagonist feels.

I agree with my friend Amory's interpretation—it's so sad. A version of this character from The Magic Flute would sing a lament to the same lilting rhythm of a Sicilienne dance. There are many types of sad, of course. But I would not have gone to the sensual interpretation that choreographer Angelin Preljocaj gives us in his ballet, Le Parc, set to the same piano concerto.

Pianist and author Charles Rosen wrote:

In all of Mozart's supreme expressions of suffering and terror … there is something shockingly voluptuous… the grief and the sensuality strengthen each other, and end by becoming indivisible.

I never quite understood this interpretation until I saw Le Parc. Now I can't see Mozart any other way, and I see it in plenty of other composers as well.

Le Parc is a much more abstract ballet than Romeo and Juliet. Like the previous choreography we saw, this is again about a pair of lovers, and again centers around a kiss. But this time there is no accompanying text or staging to tell us the story of this couple. That does not mean it is devoid of storytelling. Instead, like much abstract music, it bypasses our desire to interpret it literally and forces us to engage with the emotions directly. It's true that this ballet does preclude the viewer from hearing the music as fully mournful—but it suggests its own interpretation in such a convincing way that I don't really mind.

In Harmony

In contemporary works, you'll often see ballet set to sparser, more minimalistic works, which give the dancers even more space to fill in interpretation.

Christopher Wheeldon's “After the Rain”, set to Arvo Pärt's Spiegel im Spiegel (Mirror in Mirror), gives us yet again a more abstract depiction of a relationship. ^💬

In both interpretations, it is the purity and innocence of Pärt's music that draw the listener in: an “escape into voluntary poverty, filled with humility,” per the Arvo Pärt Center.

How do we achieve such simplicity, and what do dancers and choreographers even have to latch on to? Harmony.

Pärt's style, called “tintinnabuli” from the Latin for “bell”, typically involves just two voices—a melodic line (the violin in the previous example) and an accompaniment line (the piano). When two notes are played at the same time, the result is a harmony.^💬

In a casually poetic masterclass on his piece Für Alina, sitting at an electric keyboard with students standing behind him, Pärt says,

It's not so much the tune that matters here. It's the combination [with the accompaniment]. It makes such a heart-rending union. The soul yearns to sing it endlessly.

He asks us to meditate on each union of sound, one at a time—the harmony, not the melody. When we do, “every blade of grass would be as important as a flower.” For all the complexity that harmony can have, this is the heart of it.

Visions of Spring

Let's hear the harmonies of a couple portrayals of spring in ballet—for some reason, a particularly fruitful topic.

Often, harmonies will get boxed into being called consonant, “pleasant”, or dissonant, “harsh and unpleasant.”. But how two notes sound is a matter of context and interpretation.

Kids are often taught about “happy” major harmonies and “sad” minor harmonies—but this rule is broken regularly. Schubert's saddest moments are in major keys. When we listen to harmonies in unfamiliar music, we should go back to first principles and instead just meditate on the union of sound and think, “How do these notes sound together?”

Stravinsky's Rite of Spring is essentially composed of dissonances. In many parts, the notes crunch so hard that we almost stop processing them and just hear the rhythms instead. In this section, the listener can really bask in the soupiness of notes as the texture thickens:

All the elements of music are at play here. The theme builds in intensity as it repeats. The rhythm and melody are regularly irregular, like waves lapping ashore.

But it's the juiciness of the harmony that makes me want to take a crisp bite out of the tension. When I breathe, the air is heavy and dense. As the violins and violas pull their bows across the strings, I myself am stretched, wanting the sound to resolve to something easier to listen to—but just as much wanting it to be drawn out as much as possible. When I played this in the piano duo version, I couldn't help but play those chords over and over again, savoring them.

Now, let's hear some of Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring, written 30 years after Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. The harmony is just a bit more consonant.

Once again, we hear a theme that builds in intensity as it repeats. The melody gently undulates. The rhythm adds energy by doubling or halving the speed of the melody.^📖

But what makes this music comforting, heard next to the Stravinsky, is the harmony. If the Stravinsky feels like being pulled apart, the Copland puts you back together. The tension falls out of you; with each phrase you can breathe a pure, clear air.

Both pieces have spring-related plots—Copland about a young couple celebrating their wedding in the Pennsylvania hills, Stravinsky about a virgin sacrificed to the gods of fertility who dances herself to death. So, kind of different.

But without knowing the stories at all, the harmonies drop you into fully different worlds.

So lastly, let's look at a plotless depiction of spring, and ask what kind of world its harmony builds for us.

Here is Rang de Basant (रंग दे बसंत) by Reena Esmail:

Today, both pieces are better known in their concert hall versions than their ballet versions. Yes, the Stravinsky is more dissonant and the Copland is more consonant. But those terms hardly scratch the surface. Harmony gives us color, taste, and smell that create a whole world and drop us in the center. Later in the guide, we'll also discuss how harmony can even build tension and resolution.

Romeo and Juliet

To put everything together let's come back around to the final scene of the ballet, Romeo and Juliet.

Romeo finds Juliet's lifeless body, not knowing that she has faked her death to be with him.

We hear the same themes and even see them attempt some of the same choreography as in the balcony scene, but, devastatingly, Romeo is essentially dancing by himself.

We can now watch and listen with a few different angles—the texture and harmonies, once lucid and hopeful in the same themes, now pull apart the viewer in angst. The rhythms are infused with the same kind of funereal heaviness.

I first read Romeo and Juliet in middle school, and the focus was mainly on figuring out what Shakespeare's English meant in the first place. In the years since then, Romeo and Juliet was for me like the Mona Lisa—a cultural touchstone that I knew about only in a cold, factual way. It was the ballet that unlocked for me its full emotional potential—it was only then that my heart actually broke for the two star-crossed lovers.

And just as there are a number of ways for actors to do the ending of Romeo and Juliet, there are just as many for dancers. In the dropdown, you can see the two parts of the scene from different productions.

So concludes Part II on music written to be seen and heard. ^💬 As a taste of what's to come, I'll leave you with Beethoven's depiction of this same scene for String Quartet.

If you read the program notes about this string quartet, you'll find out about his Romeo and Juliet inspiration, which he told to his friend, but in the score Beethoven only wrote “passionate and affectionate,” choosing to leave the interpretation of the music—plodding heaviness, outbursts, and silences—up to his performers and audiences entirely.