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Musicians of the Movement:

The "Composer-Accompanist" in the Formative Years of Modern Dance

Introduction

"Arguments occupying half the night and getting nowhere, fights lasting half the rehearsal time and still getting nowhere, comments from all sides in the dance press: these frequent happenings are but symptoms of the puzzling problems presented today in the relation of music to dance." This was the situation in New York in the 1930's and early 40's among the dancers and musicians who were grappling with the task of forming of an aesthetic basis for "modern dance." They were attempting to firmly establish the young art form by making it independent of personality, with its own goals, guidelines, and credo. An important issue to be determined was the role of music. What kind of music would be suitable for the new dance? How should such music be made? In answering these questions these artists formed new theories about the relation of music to modern dance. This paper examines these philosophical notions and the music that was written to fulfill them, and asks in addition, who were the people who wrote and played this music?

Dance and music have been partners since earliest times. At first, they were inseparable, as is true in some non-western societies even today. As western civilization grew more refined, court and concert began to separate the two arts, in the process divorcing dance from meaning in the collective psychology. The composer Henry Cowell blamed this loss on the church:

Among ancient peoples . . . music and the dance were not separated. . . . [Music then] began to develop independently, . . . largely because the Christian church adopted music as part of its method of worship, and fostered its study and development; while . . . it abandoned the dance as a means of worship, relegating it to paganism. . . . [Being] disassociated with religion, it was not cultivated as a fine art and made into a composition, in the sense of a concert dance, nor in the sense of a ritual. The art-dance almost died out in the Western world.

The highest aim of the these modern choreographers and composers, even though they differed as to how to go about it, was to make dance again play a vital expressive role in society. The composer Lehman Engel proudly proclaimed that "the present age as no other age before it has made of the dance a vital art." The moderns were attempting to remake dance in terms of ritual and psychological necessity.

The seriousness with which the tenets of this new art were debated can best be understood in the light of such an important mission. To investigate these formative years of modern dance, roughly, from 1930 to 1945, several sources are essential. Foremost among these is The Dance Observer, a magazine devoted to the modern dance published from 1934 to 1964 mainly through the inspiration and hard work of the composer Louis Horst. In its pages are reviews, editorials, and articles that provide a contemporary account of the developing aesthetic philosophy of the modern dance movement. Founded and edited by the musical guiding light of this movement, it often contained important writings on the subject of music and dance. Second, films and scores in the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center document some of the seminal works of American dance. Often, however, music for the dance at this period was not composed to stand alone as concert music, and thus usually was not printed or recorded. Films were made of only the most important dances, as it was expensive and impractical to produce them. Thankfully, a growing number of commercially available recordings supplement the Lincoln Center collection to allow more prolonged study outside of New York.

The Role of Music in Modern Dance: The Great Debate

As an adolescent rebels against its parents to find its own way, so did modern dance break from the musical conventions of its direct ancestor, the romantic ballet. Formerly music had served to motivate choreography and frequently became more important than the dance itself. The moderns, however, were intent upon liberating dance from its dependence upon music. The most extreme example of this is the creation of dances to be performed in silence, such as Doris Humphrey's Water Study (1928). At a symposium in 1938, Louis Horst surveyed the changes that had occurred in the 1920's in the relation between dancer and composer.

At the beginning of this period the dancer began with a piece of music in terms of which the dance was conceived. That there might be a better way to go about it did not occur to the dancer until under the impulse of a re-born dance consciousness, ideas began to spring out of itself, independent of music. At first, the obvious recourse was to hunt for music which seemed to fit the idea, and then to adapt the music to its pattern. . . . The post-romantic ballet was closer to the right track when it began to commission the composer to write music with some new dance in mind. But it wasn't until the dancer began to compose directly in the medium [of movement] itself that music was able to discover its rightful role in dance art, the furnishing of an appropriate auditory setting for the dance.
Clearly, disassociation from music was dance's first step to finding meaning in its own language.

Yet a redefined role for music in this context was not clear, nor had there evolved a new method for composing music for the dance. Did music for the dance exist merely to support the choreography, or could it be strong enough to stand on its own as concert music? Was it best to compose the dance first and the music later, or was it most desirable to compose both at the same time, or was it acceptable still to have the music come first and then the dance? These two questions occupied center stage in the 1930's and early 40's.

On one side of the first question posed above --what might be called the "functional music" side--were aligned composers such as Lehman Engel and Henry Cowell, following the vision of Louis Horst. Horst was a leading thinker in the modern dance movement, and was Martha Graham's music director, choreographic advisor, and mentor. In the Bennington College summer sessions (1934-42) he passed down his influential ideas to musicians in workshops on composing music for the dance, and to dancers who studied his "Pre-classic Forms." To Horst, music served merely as a backdrop for the dance. "Dance has obtained its liberty as a creative form," he taught. "It doesn't need music, just as a painting doesn't need a frame. A frame, however, serves a painting well, if it isn't badly constructed." Horst contended that

the important factor is the creation of the dance from the stuff of dance movement, built into a clear and rhythmic form. This independence achieved, the music-less dance exists. If the dancer then elects to have a tonal frame written to the dance, . . . it in no way compromises the dancer's achieved freedom. . . . [This makes] the musician, in a sense, the interpreter of the dance.


When asked about the role of music for dance, Horst responded,

the only legitimate question is--is the music good for the dance? Is it suitable to the choreography, etc.? In Germany such compositions go under the general heading of gebrauchsmusik, functional music. In the composing of music for dance, it should be specific music for a specific choreography, to begin and end with it.


The extent to which Horst the composer was successful in achieving results in line with his philosophy is borne out by numerous reviews of this type: [Horst's 1931 score for] "Primitive Mysteries . . . [was] sufficiently unpretentious musically to serve as ideal background for modern choreographic purposes. . . . "
In an interview in The Dance Observer , Engel seconded Horst's contention. He stated:

dance composition should . . . lack as much as the accompaniment of a song but in different ways. Whereas the . . . song accompaniment may be complete rhythmically but lacking in melody of any distinction, the dance music is frequently complete melodically and incomplete rhythmically. . . . Above all, no element of [the] music must be so abundantly present that it can possibly absorb too much attention and become foreground instead of background.
Henry Cowell's view was that "music which is complete in itself is very unsatisfactory as dance accompaniment." He felt that "anyone who is aware of niceties must feel a sense of something being wrong when he hears a perfectly fine piece of music, with complete musical values, used with the dance. It has never worked well yet, in any single case that I can think of. The more complete the music, the less suited for association with the dance." Composer Harvey Pond summed up this position succinctly when he asked, "If music can stand alone, . . . why have dance? And vice versa."

The other side--what I call the "complete music" side--championed by Wallingford Riegger and including composers like Paul Creston, and later Norman Cazden (and later still by eminent composers like Aaron Copland and Samuel Barber), had other ideas about the problem of how to relate music and concert dance. "I was convinced that the correct solution lay in regarding both the music and the dance as being of equal importance," Riegger wrote, "both interwoven to form an organic unit which was neither pure choreography nor pure music, not their sum, but a fusion into something else for which we have no name." Therefore, he asserted, "It is up to the composer to conceive music of which the dance, already composed, could be a possible interpretation, to write music that is on an equal footing, creatively speaking, with the dance, in other words, complete in all its elements." Paul Creston believed that "movement is the most important element of music, . . . and music for dance should be able to stand alone, if it is composed aptly." This side believed that a score having a complete musical meaning unto itself would serve to enrich the dance. After a while, with the proliferation of important musical works to accompany dance, such as Copland's Appalachian Spring , or Barber's Cave of the Heart (Medea ), this view won favor and lasting approbation over functional music.

What was the correct way in which choreographer and composer should collaborate on a dance? This question involved an examination of the effect that music could have on a fledgling dance, or vice-versa. Some believed that the dance must be composed first and the music afterwards, so that the choreographer would not be swayed by the music in choice of movement or emotional content. Horst, for example, did not think it healthy for music to influence the development of choreography in any way. "It was a . . . great step to the goal [of a new, meaningful dance when] the dancer began with movement plus idea, and fashioned the entire structure of his composition without the aid of a note of music." Engel insisted that "the choreography should come at least before if not simultaneously with the music. . . . The practice of [sic] the modern generation of dancers of creating their compositions in advance of the music or simultaneously with it is the most important single step in the development of the dance as a major art." This working method would insure that the dance could remain free from music's influence to find its own form and meaning.

The "complete music" side desired more cooperation between dancer and musician. Paul Creston preferred to "work directly with the dancer, composing as the choreography progresse[d]." George Antheil held that "it should be more difficult, and perhaps rather impractical to call in the composer after the choreography has been completed. There should be some leeway for the composer." As a matter of practice, dances at this time often were composed first, and musicians were brought in afterwards to set music to them. Riegger's experience with Martha Graham probably was not unusual: she asked him to write music to fit into a time structure of "five bars of four-quarter time, two bars of three-quarter time, with the accent on the second beat of the measure, four bars of five-quarter time with an accelerando, etc." Though they may have been restrictive, he found such challenges stimulating, as did many other composers who were eager to be partners in the development of a new art form.

Click here to go to part 2: http://www.atc.missouri.edu/staff/ccjohnt/Mus_Mov2.html