It’s well known that the Shrovetide Fair bit of Petrushka has many imitations of accordeon sounds and techniques in it, but this amazing performance on the accordeon by Boban Bjelić demonstrates just how much.
Posts Tagged ‘ballet’
Petrushka shrovetide fair on the accordeon
Wednesday, September 7th, 2011Jacob’s Pillow Dance Interactive
Monday, March 28th, 2011
It’s not often that I get really excited about a dance website, but this is one HUGE mother of an exception. Launched today (I think) the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Interactive site has excerpts of dance performances going back to the 1930s, catalogued by artist/genre/era. This is the most wonderful guide to all kinds of stuff you thought you might never see, including clips of Ted Shawn dancers from the 30s, and dances of all styles from around the world right up to 2010. It’s beautifully presented and fascinatingly, joyfully diverse. Phenomenal.
Francophone music criticism online
Sunday, March 27th, 2011
FMC 1789-1914 site
Francophone Music Criticism is an online collection of just that, from the period 1789-1914. Lots of stuff very well organized and all searchable and browsable. Because of the period and the country, it means that there is a significant amount about ballet. Oh – and it’s free, at least until the present government pull the rug on the humanities.
Pavillon d’Armide
Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011Interesting short blog about the history of Pavillon d’Armide (music by Tcherepnin) from Artifact Suite.
Dance rhythms fight back: the 9/8 hornpipe
Monday, January 24th, 2011
The Serag's Hornpipe, from 1721 (17th edition) Playford
A while back I started collecting examples of ‘dance rhythms to annoy your music teacher with’. Nothing makes me more frustrated than the term ‘dance rhythms’. There are several generations of dance teachers who’ve been told somewhere along the line that a hornpipe goes like this, a waltz goes like that, and a tango goes like that. One of the reasons that music for ballet classes is so often as terrible as it is, is because pianists try to recreate music based on these formulas, and then this music becomes the model by which the theory is ‘proved’ and exemplified. For some reason, whoever started this decided to ignore all kinds of uncomfortable truths about dances that were really danced, as opposed to being clapping exercises.
For this reason, one of my favourites pastimes is to collect examples from the real world of dances that buggers up the theory. Here’s a nice one from the 17th (1721) edition of Playford’s Dancing Master, a hornpipe in 9/8. Stick that in your hornpipe and smoke it.
New Czerny upload at the IMSLP
Sunday, January 16th, 2011It might seem such a small thing, but I’m thrilled to see that someone has recently uploaded Czerny’s School of Legato and Staccato Op. 335 to the IMSLP. The interest in Op. 335 for ballet people is that it has several of the exercises that feature in Riisager’s ballet Etudes, including the silhouette barre and the adage, plus several other great bouncy pieces suitable for allegro. For my taste, one of the most underrated dance music composers of the 19th century.
I’ve already posted about my joy at finally tracking this down at the University of London Library (The Joy of Libraries & My Czech mate Czerny) but it’s so frustrating that unless you do that kind of sleuthing, you’re left with the same few sets of exercises circulated by publishers. The IMSLP is probably one of the greatest resources in the world for music, because it helps to bring such perfectly preserved, rare and usable materials to a worldwide audience, all free of charge.
Despite my enthusiasm for new technology, nothing beats my enthusiasm for books and libraries when it comes to materials. The other day at the RAD library, I had in my hands the orchestral parts for a variation from Giselle that belonged to Karsavina, all written by hand, perfectly preserved, and making as much sense to me as music as they did to the orchestras that would have played them nearly a hundred years ago. I could give them to an orchestra now, and we could recreate the music at a moment’s notice.
Wot not books?
It frightens me when libraries are threatened with closure (see the Wot No Books campaign for a wonderful protest). Who fills the gap and controls the information flow and culture when they go? Rupert Murdoch? A political party? Wikipedia? Microsoft? And if access to books is no longer free and shareable (welcome to Kindleworld), what does this say about who may learn?
Change deafness, multi-tasking and ballet teaching
Monday, July 19th, 2010I was talking to a friend recently about scams and conmen. Our conclusion was that anyone who says ‘it would never happen to me’ is deluding themselves. The thing with conmen is that they know how to deflect your attention from what they’re up to, and so this idea that you’ll always be as alert as you think you are now to the trouble looming round the corner is wishful thinking. Our conversation was just idle banter and comparing experiences and half-remembered things about psychology.
But it turns out there’s a whole field here in psychology called ‘change blindness’ – the phenomenon whereby people are seemingly unable under certain conditions to detect even large changes in what they’re looking at. The experiment in the video shows just how extreme this effect can be – and that’s under relatively normal circumstances. What happens is so absurd, I burst out laughing – yet 75% of people didn’t notice, and I bet I’d be in that 75%.
What interests me is the related phenomenon of ‘change deafness’ – the likelihood that we won’t notice major changes in sound. An article in Current Biology in 2005 (Directed Attention Eliminates ‘Change Deafness’ in Complex Auditory Scene) suggests that in a complex auditory setting (i.e. where there are lots of sounds and sound sources) we only overcome ‘change deafness’ by directing attention to one source at a time. The concluding sentence goes like this: “Whatever the mechanisms, our results indicate that auditory perception is limited by attention and that our experience of a rich and detailed auditory world may be largely illusory.”
As I’m fond of saying, so much for multitasking. Next time someone says to you ‘I am listening’ while they’re doing something or trying to hold another conversation with someone on the phone, you can more even more justified in disbelieving them. But what really interests me about this is the implications it might have for dance teaching. There’s a certain kind of teacher that manages to speak with the music, so that their voice becomes part of the music, another line. In doing so, they draw attention to the music. Even if there’s residual noise in the room, or from an adjacent studio, they’re still pulling the dancers towards the music and vice versa: if they don’t do this, then teacher’s voice & the music become competing signals, and it will be hard for dancers to take much notice of either.
