[Dixielandjazz] Live Music and Dance

[Stephen G Barbone]

Marek Boym, bless him, often signs off posts with "Support Live Jazz "  
or something similar. And many times, we have discussed the visual  
aspects of music. Below is an article that discusses live music and  
dance, as opposed to canned music and dance. Perhaps not OKOM, but the  
message is similar.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone
December 14, 2008 - NY TIMES - by Alastair Macaulay
Consequences of Going to the Tape

FOR several months the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater has been  
announcing that many evenings of its current 50th-anniversary season  
at New York City Center will have live music, and which ones. There’s  
no question that live music makes a difference. If you watch Ailey’s  
classic “Revelations” from upstairs, there are moments when it’s  
almost as good to look at the singers as it is to watch the dancing.  
Nothing about the season’s opening gala was more terrific than the  
guests who sang, above all Jessye Norman, onstage amid shadow to  
deliver “Fix Me, Jesus.” But the other live-music performances — for  
“Revelations” and other ballets — have been sensational too; in Hope  
Boykin’s new work “Go in Grace,” the musicians are the main event.

A few of us, though, have been living in such privileged conditions  
that it is still a shock to realize that live music is negotiable.  
This shock, I know, is illogical. The 1948 movie “The Red Shoes” shows  
the old Ballet Rambert dancing “Swan Lake” to 78 r.p.m. records at the  
Mercury Theater; Ailey has frequently presented “Revelations” to taped  
music, from its 1960 premiere on; and it has been 35 years since Twyla  
Tharp had a smash hit with “Deuce Coupe,” to Beach Boys recordings.

But for many of us live music has remained the norm. I never guessed,  
when I first watched the Martha Graham Dance Company in the 1970s, or  
when I first watched the Paul Taylor Dance Company in the 1980s, that  
the time would come when they would perform to recordings.

That time came some years ago. And it came in New York, where live  
musicians cost more. When I watched a 1988 season by the Taylor  
company at City Center, I saw that the difference between one  
performance of “Mercuric Tidings” and the next was because the  
conductor Donald York took an even more exciting tempo; when I  
reviewed the same company’s 2008 season in the same theater, just one  
performance of one dance — at the season’s gala — had live music. The  
Graham company performed with live music this month at the Kennedy  
Center in Washington, but its two-week 2007 season at the Joyce  
Theater had all taped music.

In 2005 the Graham company was able to give a two-week season with a  
live orchestra of 28 players, but the cost — as Joan Acocella,  
reviewing in The New Yorker, reported at the time — was $184,000. The  
same month a Mark Morris season with six instrumentalists and eight  
singers cost, for four performances, $35,000. Ms. Acocella (also  
reviewing the excellent Nrityagram Dance Ensemble, which had three  
instrumentalists and a vocalist) remarked: “In these days of near-zero  
public funding for dance, one assumes that the companies more or less  
killed themselves to raise that money, and the result made all the  
difference in the world. Dance audiences, I believe, have now got used  
to taped music, and you can get used to it, the same way you can learn  
to eat Spam instead of ham, or breathe smog instead of air. Your life  
is just diminished, and you don’t realize it until you see concerts  
such as we saw last month.”

As the economic climate deteriorates steadily, dance audiences are  
likely to be asked to eat ever more Spam, in and out of New York.  
Miami City Ballet expects to have a live orchestra when it visits City  
Center for five performances in January, but the company’s latest  
press release announces that it is canceling a live orchestra for its  
current South Florida season’s Programs 3 and 4. “Live music for  
programs this season would cost the company $480,000, and as of Dec.  
4, 2008, $188,281.83 had been raised,” the release says. The company’s  
board, it says, determined that “the goal would not be met.” Such  
stories have occurred elsewhere; more will follow.

The general practice of companies using taped music is to pay a fee to  
the recording artists for each performance. But several companies,  
perhaps many, cut corners by not doing so. Few companies declare in  
the program what recording of the music is being used, and regrettably  
few people in the audience ask. (I am sometimes one of those few. And  
I intend to keep asking.)

And we are likely to start hearing more taped performances of “The  
Nutcracker” and “The Sleeping Beauty.” This prospect depresses me  
beyond measure. You need to be a regular dancegoer to know quite how  
much difference a conductor and orchestra can create between the same  
cast’s performances of the same ballet on Wednesday and on Thursday.  
Where there is taped music, sooner or later you’re likely to see taped  
dancing.

Recordings do have their advantages. I have known ballet conductors to  
ruin performances, and American Ballet Theater’s largely excellent  
October-November season at City Center would have been twice as good  
if the orchestral playing had been better. The choreographer Matthew  
Bourne remarked in 2006 that while a good performance of live music  
was still his ideal accompaniment for his choreography, he had often  
found himself longing for a recording after hearing some severely  
flawed performances. Replacement conductors or players had wrecked  
crucial details, he said, and made sections of the choreography  
ineffective while giving the dancers problems.

But let me give you an example of the ideal. Fifty years after the  
legendary “Sleeping Beauty” of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet’s first  
American season in 1949, dancers were still telling me how the  
conductor, Constant Lambert, suddenly slowed the tempo in one passage  
of the Rose Adagio so that Margot Fonteyn, a dancer revelatory in her  
musical responsiveness, spontaneously made an unprecedented,  
electrifying effect. And this wasn’t one of the choreography’s  
spectacular moments; it was just a wonderfully dancey one. In that  
passage the ballerina, on both points, slowly circles on one spot; her  
upper body stretches up and down; her arms make sweeping changes of  
position; and her feet and legs richly vibrate to the score. Fonteyn  
at that moment was so incandescent that she won waves of applause  
through the music; her colleagues had never known the like. It all  
happened, apparently, because Lambert, a man of long theatrical  
experience, knew on impulse how to pluck the moment and propel her to  
new heights.

That opening night changed the history of ballet in America. Such  
moments, however, won’t happen with recordings.

In one sense it’s odd that live music should matter to so many of us.  
I grew up listening to records; they remain a large and intimate part  
of my life; I’m an obsessive audio collector. Like most people I went  
to dances where recordings were played; live music was rarely  
encountered at the parties where I danced.

Specific recordings have special resonance, and a few dance works have  
shown why. Ms. Tharp’s “Deuce Coupe” is one; her several Frank Sinatra  
ballets are others; and Mr. Taylor’s “Company B” (set to songs by the  
Andrews Sisters and recently seen with American Ballet Theater) is  
another. These have great choreography, and they very seldom receive  
stale performances. Part of their spell is that they catch some fresh  
essence of how those familiar recordings made us want to move ourselves.

One work in the current Ailey repertory, Robert Battle’s “Unfold,”  
uses Leontyne Price’s recording of “Depuis le jour” from Charpentier’s  
“Louise.” I think that this recording represents Ms. Price better than  
it does that aria (of which I have 10 better recordings), but at least  
it’s always interesting at each performance to listen to the  
particular qualities she brought to this music. And though this isn’t  
remotely important choreography, it seems to respond more to the  
lushness of her vocalization than to what the aria is saying or to its  
musical style.

Better that than, say, Emanuel Gat Dance’s ballet to Mozart’s Requiem,  
in March at the Joyce Theater. The differences between one version of  
Mozart’s Requiem and another are much more profound than with  
Charpentier’s “Depuis le jour,” and yet the Gat company did not name  
which recording it was using in the Joyce program. (I was much more  
interested in trying to identify that recording than I was in watching  
the choreography.) Examples of this indifference to musicians are  
commonplace.

I’d rather see smaller companies in smaller theaters, where dance  
still feels like music making. In August I went to see one of this  
year’s final Noche Flamenca performances at Theater 80; since the  
season’s first night Soledad Barrio had developed her great solo with  
her musicians, and it ended with them following her into a corner of  
the stage like huntsmen.

A flamenco dancer at a Dance Critics Association conference once  
stated this rule: If you see flamenco to taped music, it’s not real  
flamenco. The rule should apply outside flamenco, too. When you’re  
hearing taped music, don’t be too sure you’re seeing real dance. As we  
enter dark financial days, this battle must be fought and fought again.