Andrew’s forthcoming paper, “Turns En Manège: Balletic Strategies of Meter and Tempo in Tchaikovsky’s Closing Sections,” will be presented at the Society for Music Theory’s annual meeting, which takes place in Jacksonville, Florida in November 2024. This paper includes analyses of video recordings from performances of Tchaikovsky’s three ballets, Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, and Sleeping Beauty, which all bear the artistic imprint of choreographer Marius Petipa. Andrew analyzes the reconstructed choreography from the variation codas of these works using the “choreomusical notation” developed by Kara Yoo Leaman (2022), showing that the accompanying music accelerates to match the pace of the dancer’s feet in conventional turn sequences where the dancer establishes a strong duple emphasis: right, left, right, left. This shows that Tchaikovsky was aware of what types of steps would appear in the choreography to his music, and shaped his compositions accordingly. Previous studies of dances choreographed to Tchaikovsky’s music have emphasized how the choreographer responds to musical ideas—but here, it is the other way around: Tchaikovsky is responding to choreographical ideas.

This observation seems plain enough, but it opens up new ways of listening to music composed for dance. If there is an optimal tempo and meter for a series of turns en manège, are there optimal types of music for other dance steps? Dancers speak of dancing with musicality: can we describe a ballet dancer’s musicality in a way a musician or composer can recognize? This paper suggests yes on both counts.

The subject of Tchaikovsky and Petipa’s ballet collaborations is especially exciting because it addresses questions that dancers have already been answering, albeit without words. What is the artistic difference between a passage where the dancer feels rhythmic accents with their supporting leg on the floor, and a passage where the accent is marked by the active leg in the air, on the other? (What different musical ideas can be reflected in each of these interpretations?) Can the famous thirty-two fouettés from Swan Lake be anything other than a rote display of technique?—can they be musical? Is a ballerina who opts out of the fouettés any less accomplished or less artistic?

Find the details for Andrew’s presentation on SMT’s website.