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This is day 20 in my 2007 Advent Calendar. This year, I’m giving the story behind some of the music that I’ve collected for ballet classes. All the pieces are on Studio Series Vol. 4 published by RAD.

Medium jumps are, for my taste, the most difficult things to accompany in class. While a medium sized jump for a dancer requires considerable effort, skill & preparation, ‘medium’ in music is a potentially deadening adjective. Moderato, moderation, moderate, it’s like someone saying ‘I think we’ll just order a small glass each, shall we?’ when you’re ready for at least a bottle.

Worse still, when it comes to things in triple metre, a ‘medium’ waltz is just about the worst thing you could play for allegro. It will, quite literally, never get off the ground, and why should it? Waltzes are about turning and gliding, not jumping.

Look in the opera-ballet repertoire of the 19th century, and you find what we were looking for all the time – a nice, bouncy dance in triple metre, at a moderate tempo, but with the same kind of strength & elevation as the jumps that it accompanies.  It’s a combination of a lot of factors. Look at this one from I Vespri Siciliani and you see, for example:

• A solid floor (pedal note in the bass) for the melody to bounce off, rather than the 2-bar shuffle between tonic & dominant you get in a waltz
• A leaping melodic contour with a large tessitura & and an anacrusis that has considerable welly
• Occasional implied or real accents on the second or third beats of the bar, which prevents the bass from ‘walking’
• Lots of little acciaccaturas to spice up the melody line

The second half (which no-one ever seems to play) is very ingenious too – the ‘cadence’ of the first part becomes the beginning of the second tune, so that you feel as if you’ve suddenly lost a beat, but it all gets paid back in the end, and once you’ve heard the whole piece, that bar becomes a kind of trompe l’oreille – you can never say whether it’s the beginning of something or the end of something – and as it happens, the piece never ends, because it goes straight into

This is day 19 in my 2007 Advent Calendar. This year, I’m giving the
story behind some of the music that I’ve collected for ballet classes.
All the pieces are on Studio Series Vol. 4 published by RAD.

Tentação by F.L. da Silveira is one of many terrific musical discoveries that happened through force of circumstance. The circumstance here was that I originally wanted to record one of my favourite tangos ever, El Firulete, by Jose Basso in the place now occupied by Tentação. I first heard El Firulete on the The Story of Tango (it’s fantastic – still one of my favourite tango CDs), and spent a long time, as always, taking it down by dictation from the CD ( in Prague, summer of 2004 – mid-dictation I noticed the sun setting on the church outside my window, and took the picture you see on the left) and working out a version on the piano, trying it out in class, until I was happy.  It works brilliantly for the kind of batterie that needs what Chris calls ‘hot potato’ music – in other words, everything just off the beat, or barely touching it; edge of the beat, edge of your chair.

When it comes to a recording, although there are variations according to genre, you need a score, otherwise you run into problems of potential copyright infringement. Weeks before the recording, I located a shop in Buenos Aires that had the sheet music, and ordered it over the internet. It didn’t come. I emailed them, they apologised, said they’d send it again, it still didn’t come.  Tragic – one of the only internet transactions I’ve ever known that didn’t work out. 

So only days before the recording, I needed to replace this wonderful piece with something similar. But where from? The whole point about El Firulete is that it’s got a tempo and a character all of its own, and I’d chosen it out of hundreds.  But then, as I described under Herminia, I found this book of Brazilian Tangos, and a whole world opened up that I didn’t know existed. As it happened, it was a world full of pieces like El Firulete to the point where it was difficult to choose at first, though Tentação soon became a favourite.

I’d never quite got the connection between ragtime, tango & quadrilles until I saw this book, and nor had I (to my shame) encountered the terms cinquillo & tresillo until I read them in the introduction; and that opened up yet another wonderful avenue of research.  I still love El Firulete to bits, and will keep trying to get the score in time for the next recording, but I have to be grateful to the postal service for failing to deliver this time, because Brazilian Tangos was such a fantastic find.

This is day 18 in my 2007 Advent Calendar. This year, I’m giving the
story behind some of the music that I’ve collected for ballet classes.
All the pieces are on Studio Series Vol. 4 published by RAD

Riisager’s Etudes, a gorgeous, colourful orchestral score based on Czerny studies, and composed for Harald Lander’s ballet of the same name, has come to be one of my favourite ballet scores.  I don’t think I know a single dancer who doesn’t love this music, and I think I’m probably right in saying that if there were such a thing as the perfect music for class, this would probably be it. Hearing dancers talk about why Etudes works, and why they like it has been one of the most instructive experiences as a ballet accompanist.

It’s also helped me to appreciate Czerny as someone who’s a lot more fun than I used to give him credit for. That’s the genius of Riisager’s score. He unveils Czerny as someone with a sense of humour, with dance and fun bubbling through his musical veins even in the most gruelling technical exercises. 

One of the reasons that Czerny works so well for class is that once he’s started a rhythmic pattern, he’s like a child on a spacehopper, lurching around the place bumping into things and setting off in another direction, gaining dangerous momentum until he comes to some crashing finish.  As good as other music might be for class, most composers think that there’s a virtue in avoiding repetition, and hence go off in new directions which might be interesting musically but doesn’t help for a dance exercise.

The Etude Op. 335 Book 1 No. 19 (E major) is a perfect example. It does in music what feet do in little jumps, and so you get a hundred little landings on the piano keyboard just as you do on the studio floor. I don’t know any other music that works quite like this. The glorious thing is that Czerny wrote enough of this stuff to make another 100 ballets like Etudes, as I discovered when I dug out four volumes of studies I’d never seen before at the University of London a few years ago [see previous entry  'The joy of libraries & My mate Czerny']

This is day 17 in my 2007 Advent Calendar. This year, I’m giving the
story behind some of the music that I’ve collected for ballet classes.
All the pieces are on Studio Series Vol. 4 published by RAD

Some enchaînements, particularly pointe ones, seem to need music which is potentially rather dull -  carefully articulated, restrained and with a constant feeling of being ‘under tempo’. This little mandolin number from Prokofiev’s Romeo  & Juliet saves the day, because all those qualities are part of what makes it special.  Hot and sour Thai chicken soup is delicious; a hot and sour milkshake is a catastrophe.

There’s something endlessly satisfying and engaging about playing music like this. It’s so simple that any minor carelessness – lapses of timing, articulation or dynamics – show up immediately, like trying to eat spaghetti bolognese in a wedding dress. In fact it’s a lesson in the value of simplicity and understatement, and
waiting for the right moment to slip in something unusual; in having
the courage to write E major chords if E major chords are what works
(rather than thinking ‘E major’s so last year’). There is such clear, pure, cool air in this music that you can feel yourself creating the atmosphere Prokofiev wanted after only half a bar of the introduction.

That’s what perhaps makes this music most effective for class – it has the capacity to create instant magic and atmosphere, like stepping outside on a winter’s day and taking your first intake of bracing cold air.  So much in class conspires against that happening, that when you find a key to that door, you use it.

This is day 15 in my 2007 Advent Calendar. This year, I’m giving the
story behind some of the music that I’ve collected for ballet classes.
All the pieces are on Studio Series Vol. 4 published by RAD

For another story behind this piece, see a previous entry.

At first glance, this is just another Victorian salon piece, plucked from obscurity when it was used as an alternate variation in the Corsaire pas de deux (for a history of how it got there, see Mr Lopez’s wikipedia page on the subject).

But only at first glance. Either I’m suggestible, or this piece really does do what the title says.  The simple three-note rising melody is one that appears as a countermelody, rising or falling, in probably thousands of waltzes. Nearly every Piaf waltz-song has one, the waltz from Tchaikovsky’s Evgenii Onegin has one, Marlene Dietrich songs are full of them.

So when that generic countermelody becomes the tune, it might remind us of any number of half-remembered waltz fragments without necessarily remembering what the actual tune was, which is just what a ‘souvenir de bal’ should do.  It’s also stated in a harmonically unstable form, beginning on a 2nd inversion of the dominant, quietly, and with a long anacrusis. It quite literally drifts in to our consciousness.  And that first chord is rather lovely, isn’t it? If any chord said ‘warm, wistful smile’, that’s the one.  Add all this to the fact that hearing the music will bring back memories of the Corsaire variation done by someone you admire at a performance that you really enjoyed, and the whole souvenir de bal(let) thing becomes even stronger.

Beyond that, it’s also a waltz that bears playing slowly, because it’s supposed to be a memory of something rather than the thing itself.  It’s also just very, very simple in construction, and leaves space for dancing, which is one of the biggest compliments you can pay dance music.