Episodes from Balanchine’s “Episodes”

This past Sunday, when I decided to write about George Balanchine’s ballet “Ivesiana,” I realized that I ran the risk of painting myself into a corner. I suggested that, in deciding to work with the music of Charles Ives, Balanchine took the first of three steps that involved departing from the conventions of tonal music, conventions that were still honored by many twentieth-century composers. Indeed, the second of those steps, “Agon,” marked Igor Stravinsky’s first venture into working with atonality. In that context the third of the steps was the most adventurous, since it involved all of the orchestral compositions by Anton Webern, music that probably perplexes many listeners today as much as it did during Webern’s lifetime in the first half of the twentieth century.

To “review” the bidding, Balanchine and Martha Graham divided their repertoire into two approximately equal portions for a two-part full-evening composition entitled Episodes. Graham selected the earliest compositions, which were also the longest, the Opus 1 passacaglia and the six pieces for full orchestra collected in Opus 6. She also presented the first of the two parts, a narrative based on the tense relationship between Mary, Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I, the Queen of England, counting on Webern’s “tense” sonorities to account for that relationship and its fatal conclusion.

Of the compositions that remained for the second part of the program, Balanchine set aside the Opus 30 “Variations” to choreograph as a solo for Paul Taylor, then a featured dancer in Martha Graham’s company. That left four Webern compositions for the New York City Ballet (NYCB) dancers, the Opus 21 “Symphony,” the Opus 10 collection of five pieces, the Opus 24 “Concerto,” and Webern’s imaginative instrumentation of the six-voice fugue that was included in Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1079 collection entitled The Musical Offering. After Episodes was performed in its entirety, Graham’s portion was dropped from both her own repertoire and that of NYCB; and “Episodes” remained in repertoire as the four pieces that Balanchine had created for his own dancers.

I saw this version exactly once as part of the only NYCB subscription I ever purchased. I was majoring in mathematics at the time and was one of many of my ilk that was fascinated by the different approaches to permutation found in serial composition. Nevertheless, I suspect that, like everyone else (I do not think I need to quality “everyone” with “just about”), I came away most satisfied with the orchestrated Bach fugue. For that matter, my guess is that Balanchine was in the same boat with the rest of us. He understood Bach fugues well enough to set them to choreography, regardless of what instruments were playing the notes.

I had hoped that I would be able to take a deeper dive into Balanchine’s choreography for the other three movements, but this turned out to be more problematic than I anticipated. The best I was able to manage was to find three separate “Episodes” videos of the first (Opus 21), third (Opus 24), and fourth (Bach) movements. These were in color with black-and-white opening titles identifying the music and the NYCB soloists for each of the movements. The overall video quality was, at best, middling and practically intolerable for the Bach. (It would not surprise me if the Opus 10 movement was absent because it was even worse than the Bach movement.) No indication was given of where, when, or by whom these videos were made.

Of these three videos, Opus 21 probably provides the best evidence of how Balanchine approached analyzing the music before creating choreography for it. I would assume that his attempts to learn about Webern’s techniques included an awareness of the two primary ways in which a sequence of pitches could be permuted. One of them is the retrograde transform, which simply reorders the notes in reverse. The other is inversion, in which all note-to-note intervals are the same but rising and falling directions are reversed.

At this point I need to digress a bit on the issue of how transformations of marks on paper register with the ear. Inversion tends to be easy to recognize, particularly if the rhythm stays the same. (Think of how often Bach uses this device in his fugues.) Retrogression is far more difficult for mind to process. Indeed, it cannot be processed by a basic “finite-state machine” (the mathematical construct that serves as the foundation of any computer). It requires a more powerful abstract construct; and, without risking losing readers by going into too much detail, I shall say simply that the construct is called a “push-down automaton” (named after the ways plates are stacked in a cafeteria).

What all this means is that, because inversion registers with the ear far more readily than retrogression, I suspect that Balanchine was more aware of it in examining the scores of the music he was setting. Thus, towards the end of Opus 21, when he encountered an inversion he had his male soloist (Anthony Blum on this video) take his partner (Sarah Leland) firmly and flip her upside down:

from the YouTube video of the first movement of Balanchine’s “Episodes”

She then did a series of ronds de jambes in that position before getting flipped back upright and set down on the floor. This is but one instance of how Balanchine seems to have decided that any connection between Opus 21 and what anyone thinks a symphony is would be purely coincidental!

Opus 24 goes to an even further extreme. This is a “concerto” for nine solo instruments. The choreography involves only six dancers, a “leading couple” (Allegra Kent and Bart Cook on the video) and a “chorus” of four women. In this case what is most interesting is how these six dancers are deployed in a series of interconnecting configurations, which may or may not parallel the interconnections of the solo instruments. In order to capture some of the visual coherence of Balanchine’s designs, a few of the camera shots are taken above the dancers, rather than from the audience point of view. It would not surprise me to learn that Balanchine himself requested that those shots be incorporated in this video account of the geometric aspects of his choreography.

It would not surprise me to learn that, after having agreed to be part of this “Webern project,” Balanchine found himself in “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma” (as Winston Churchill put it when he was trying to describe Russia under the rule of Joseph Stalin). Balanchine’s “Episodes” is likely to appeal to puzzle-solvers. It is definitely not a “sit back and watch” ballet. However, just as there are dances created by Merce Cunningham that appeal to an appreciation of abstract art, Balanchine seemed willing to work with the abstractions that figured in Webern’s music (including his Bach orchestration). The viewer willing to let those abstractions be abstract, so to speak, should have no trouble getting drawn into Balanchine’s choreography; and I suspect that such attraction would be even more powerful if there were a better video account of that choreography.