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’]
