My ongoing interest in John Clifford’s uploads to YouTube of past films of the choreography of George Balanchine led me this morning to another film for Canadian television. This one is a performance of “Concerto Barocco” filmed in 1966, which provides an opportunity to see the likes of Suzanne Farrell, Marnee Morris, and Conrad Ludlow at the beginnings of their respective careers. As a student I was fascinated with this ballet, primarily because this was a time when I was wrestling with syntactic questions of how the underlying structure of a piece of music could be informatively represented.
One result was that I was as interested in watching the ballet as I was in what George Balanchine had written for its entry in Balanchine’s New Complete Stories of the Great Ballets. He had me hooked on this first paragraph:
The only preparation possible for this ballet is a knowledge of its music, for Concerto Barocco has no “subject matter” beyond the score to which it is danced and the particular dancers who execute it. Set to Bach’s Concerto in D Minor for Two Violins, the ballet tries to interest the audience only by its dancing, its treatment of the music, just as Baroque art and architecture interested people not because of their subjects but because of the decorative treatment that embellished those subjects.
Two paragraphs later Balanchine continues as follows:
A choreographer disinterested in classical dancing will not care to use scores by Bach and Mozart except for theatrical sensational reasons; he will select music more to his immediate purpose. But if the dance designer sees in the development of classical dancing a counterpart in the development of music and has studied them both, be will derive continual inspiration from great scores. He will also be careful, as he acts on this inspiration, not to interpret the music beyond its proper limits, not to stretch the music to accommodate a literary idea, for instance. If the score is a truly great one, suitable for dancing, he will not have need of such devices and can present his impression in terms of pure dance.
These observations were then expanded when I read Bernard Taper’s account of how Balanchine would prepare for the rehearsal of a new work. According to Taper, Balanchine would begin by reading the full score and then writing for himself a piano reduction of the music he was studying. That was all the preparation he required before he began working with his dancers.
All of this was very appealing to a doctoral candidate in applied mathematics specializing in algorithms. However, as they say, “That was then!” As I have built up my writing chops, I realized that providing a useful account of how a piece of music was performed rarely involved digging into the score pages to find the necessary background. To the contrary, performance was so dynamic that the very act of performing involved setting foot in the same river twice. The marks on the score pages would always be static; but making music would always be verb-based, rather than noun-based.
Thus, as I watched the film of “Concerto Barocco” that Clifford had uploaded, I realized that almost all of my attention was being driven to shapes and the different classes of symmetry that would unfold from those shapes. On the other hand, from my vantage point as one that has listened to any number of historically-informed performances of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, including many of his instrumental concertos, I was struck by the extent to which shape had receded into a background I had not considered very much. The background that was more relevant to my listening experience was that of the Collegium Musicum in Leipzig that would convene to give weekly concerts at Gottfried Zimmermann’s coffee house and had more to do with the spirit of a jam session than with simply playing the marks on paper. Balanchine’s Bach selection (BWV 1043 in D minor) was less about the symmetry of structures that one might find in just about any concerto composed during the first half of the eighteenth century and more about the opportunity it afforded for two talented violinists to trade off their talents in a spirit not that different from the exchanges between Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie during the second quarter of the twentieth century.
Now, to be fair, a performance with that kind of spontaneity is not going to work very well in the orchestra pit of an ensemble providing music for a ballet, particularly one with all the meticulous details that Balanchine packed into “Concerto Barocco.” Nevertheless, however rich those details might have been, my own viewing experience took be back to my score-following days and my joy at discovering a previously-overlooked motif migrating from one instrument to another. The mechanics of Balanchine’s choreography may have been jaw-dropping; but, at the end of the day, they were “just mechanics.”
I suppose that the more I cultivated an in-the-moment approach to listening, the more I moved away from Balanchine’s approach to “Concerto Barocco,” which amounted to “architecture in motion.” To be fair, “Concerto Barocco” was first performed in 1940. By the time Balanchine was working with Mozart in 1952, the keen observer could readily grasp the “humanity of interplay” among the dancers. The difference was that of night and day, and by 1957 Balanchine knew how to mine some of his most passionate choreography from the bare-bones abstractions of Igor Stravinsky’s “Agon.” Perhaps Balanchine had to make his own journey from mechanics to expressive interpretation as I had done in the decades between writing a doctoral thesis in applied mathematics and writing regularly about the performance of music!
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