The Opera Quarterly

The Opera Quarterly Advance Access originally published online on December 20, 2006
The Opera Quarterly 2006 22(1):65-89; doi:10.1093/oq/kbi108

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"As if they didn’t hear the music," Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Mickey Mouse

Barbara White

Shade said to Shadow, "A little while ago, you were moving, and now you are standing still. A little while ago, you were sitting down, and now you are getting up. Why all this indecision?"

Shadow replied, "Don’t I have to depend on others to be what I am? Don’t others also have to depend on something else to be what they are? My dependence is like that of the snake on his skin or of the cicada on his wings. How can I tell why I do this, or why I do that?"

—Chuang Tsu¹

	OVERHEARING

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Recently I told a composer that I was putting the final touches on the score to accompany a film, and he immediately asked, with some urgency, "You’re not mickey-mousing, are you?"² This question puzzled me, since I had not mentioned any particular relationship between my score and the film. A month or so later, when the work was premiered, I spoke to another composer who was included on the same program, and when I commented on certain aspects of his film score—again, not mentioning synchronization—he said, also somewhat urgently, "Well, I didn’t want to do hit points." I am not sure what a "hit point" is, but I understood him to mean that he hesitated to coordinate his music too closely with the film.

Choreographers resist synchronization too. Once, in the midst of a weeklong workshop, I stopped to ask the participants—all choreographers—to observe the relationship between sound and movement in an excerpt from Jirì Kyliàn’s choreography to Stravinsky’s Les Noces. They seemed stunned, and finally someone offered, emphatically, that the question seemed odd, since "we don’t care about the music." Given that the workshop was entitled "Music for Choreographers," this was perplexing. The speaker may have intended to articulate a postmodern avowal of heterogeneity and dispersal, but interestingly, once we turned to a video clip of "Broadway Rhythm" from Singin’ in the Rain, the group was enthralled by the syncopations in Gene Kelly’s dance and how they related to the rhythmic patterning of the score.³

In opening this discussion, I have taken certain liberties, first by speaking of music’s relationship to moving image and to choreographed movement in the same breath, for although the media are different, they raise similar interdisciplinary questions. I have also dived into the murky sea of anecdote, allowing my composer-self to speak informally, spontaneously, from personal experience and without the validation of citation. It is revealing to hear—or to overhear—what artists say in the moment, in the studio, when, rather than formulating what is expected to be a coherent, scholarly, public argument, they offer casual, intimate reflections on the day’s work. As the stories above show, composers often seem eager to distance themselves, reflexively and perhaps hastily, from any sort of close coordination with a visual or kinetic element, and choreographers, too, can be fervent, almost militant, in their insistence that movement remain independent of sound.

Such offhand statements as "You’re not mickey-mousing, are you?" or "I didn’t want to do hit points" may seem careless or unthinking. But if we examine artists’ casual revelations with a bit more receptivity and curiosity, we may begin to see that there is more substance here than at first appears—a defense, perhaps, against the profligacy and promiscuity of interdisciplinary artworks. For example, there are numerous practical and aesthetic reasons why composers and choreographers may avoid music visualization, one of which is the very real language barrier between the ways we conceive, create, and communicate. Another is that the collaborative process rarely affords the sort of close interactive work that leads to genuine interdependence. In addition—and this is what is most interesting to me here—the high degree of stimulation engendered by the meeting of music and movement may foster an understandable dread at the prospect of sorting out the impact of one upon the other. Thus it is not surprising that a choreographer would respond by declaring, "We don’t care about the music." What at first reads as disavowal starts to seem less about the resistance to music per se than resistance to the sensations generated by the meeting of music and dance. It is resistance, perhaps, to another sort of overhearing—the loudness and intensity we experience when sound and movement join together in glorious excess.

While critics’ and practitioners’ published discussions of music/movement relationships tend to be more carefully wrought than these workaday reflections, there is still a fair amount of opposition, in print as in practice, to the notion that music and dance might relate to each other, rather than—like Frost’s good neighbors separated by their good fences—simply agreeing to coexist.⁴ Note, for example, Doris Humphrey’s assertion that "The dance must have something to say of its own, and a mere visualization of the music is not sufficient justification for bringing it to birth."⁵

In what follows, I weave together insights from my experience creating and analyzing interdisciplinary works. I begin by dismantling some of the assumptions about "mere visualization" that circulate and re-circulate, sometimes without question, both in the studio and on the page. My sense is that the concerted but often unconsidered effort to dispel the shadow of Mickey Mouse stems in part from fear about what happens when dance and music partner each other, whether or not Mr. Mouse’s corporeal self is present. If we are to understand more fully what happens when music and dance meet, we must examine these reflexes and reinvigorate our understanding of interdisciplinary signification. In the spirit of contributing to an ongoing discussion and honoring the inscrutability of the creative process, I alternate between untangling some of the familiar metaphors that both inform and hinder our understanding of choreomusical works and tangling things up again by offering my own, sometimes outlandish, metaphors.

	DENYING MICKEY MOUSE, MENDING THE WALL

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Mickey-mousing, mirroring, music visualization: a negative valence adheres to these terms. Alwin Nikolais says, "I don’t consider the Mickey Mouse quality of the music," and Martha Bremser, commenting on Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s work, notes that the choreographer is "not mirroring" Steve Reich’s music.⁶ But these observations only tell us what is not, not what is. In fact, Mickey Mouse is usually invoked as an absence rather than a presence—even, somewhat curiously, in the case of that visionary music visualizer, Mark Morris. Recent accounts of Morris’s work often begin by noting other critics’ preoccupation with his practice of music visualization, as in Karen Campbell’s review of a performance in July 2005, which begins as follows: "Critics sometimes hurl the charge of ‘Mickey Mousing’ at the music visualization in much of Mark Morris’s choreography."⁷ In March 2006, John Rockwell noted, "he is frequently praised and castigated for his sometimes slavish mimesis to music."⁸ And in the realm of film-music relationships, there is also a revealing and humorous exchange in Donald Sosin’s interview of Timothy Brock regarding Brock’s preparation of the scores to Charlie Chaplin films. Discussing the formidable challenge of correctly executing the cues, which are many and are carefully synchronized to the film, Brock notes, "But it’s not just getting from one point to another. He meant for the music to mirror the action exactly." Sosin replies, "Without Mickey-Mousing it?" Brock says, "No, kind of with Mickey-Mousing it."⁹

It is curious: mickey-mousing is invoked as if it were a normative practice against which artists have suddenly chosen to rebel, but that norm is elusive and, perhaps, nonexistent. The effort to distance oneself from synchronization starts to seem compulsive, desperate, to the point where even a comment about close mirroring between moving image and sound, as in Sosin’s interview of Brock, inspires the reflexive response "without Mickey-Mousing it?" Indeed, the presumption that "not-Mickey-Mousing" somehow constitutes an aesthetic stance or an interdisciplinary methodology is puzzling. At worst, such an attitude claims the righteous aesthetic high ground of subtlety while shallowly evading the question of the relationship between music and movement.¹⁰ But as Frost puts it in "Mending Wall": "Before I built a wall I’d ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out, / And to whom I was like to give offense."

Thus, what is interesting in this renunciation of synchronization is not the value being espoused, but the failure to espouse any value at all—the refusal to identify what is being walled in, or out. Synchronization becomes an absent, reviled other; we seem to rely on it to define ourselves through denial and opposition, as if not-ness itself constituted a state of being. We seem so conditioned to fear close coordination that we conjure it up as a specter: through no fault of his own, Mickey Mouse fades to a mere phantom, a convenient but unreal object of negation. However, in Jungian fashion, the denial of the shadow ultimately serves to enlarge its power, and indeed, I begin to imagine the silhouette of those two bulbous ears looming, unacknowledged, over any discussion of the movement/music nexus.

Mickey-mousing is more strictly understood, as many scholars of dance and film point out, as a particular form of coordination on the gestural level.¹¹ But the lackadaisical use of the term also points out that the anxiety about cartoonishness is not limited to its most cartoonish manifestations but instead extends to any sense of congruence, as if an artist who can be accused of such has merely realized a preordained product, in the spirit of painting by numbers. The vilification of synchronization, then, traffics in a binary fallacy, assuming that coordination will lead inevitably to one result and uncoordination to another.¹² The more interesting questions, though, concern the different ways things can go together and the different ways they can not go together—and, I would suggest, the ways both may happen in close succession or even at once.

A complete overview of theories and positions about the music/dance relationship lies outside the scope of this discussion, but most commentators agree that recent years have seen the ascendance of independence in place of intimacy.¹³ Lopukhov’s precept that musical and choreographic climaxes must coincide seems naïve, even foolish, today, and we now seem to be more receptive to Merce Cunningham and John Cage’s practice of divorcing music and movement, as well as to the "condition of contingency, multiplicity, and polyvocality which dominates the postmodern scene."¹⁴

Yes, an automatic congruence between sound and movement can be naïve and unsatisfying, but an automatic incongruence can be equally naïve and unsatisfying. Even if the sex appeal of Lopukhov’s coordinated climaxes has given way to other fantasies, a superficial embrace of uncoordination offers no guarantee of profundity or satisfaction. It is important to remember that Cage and Cunningham enjoyed their asynchrony within the framework of a mindful and disciplined practice: it wasn’t only that the musical and choreographic climaxes did not coincide, but that climaxes were avoided altogether.¹⁵ This is rather different from a contemporary choreographer setting a dance to, say, a Brahms piano concerto and failing to consider carefully the stream of musical stimuli, then relying on what I term the "Cage-Cunningham crutch" (the de facto justification of asynchrony in and for itself) to valorize his or her unwillingness to listen. Such a display lives neither here nor there, and the climaxes—simultaneous or otherwise, but certainly unconsidered—become nettlesome rather than pleasurable.

If sound and movement take place at once, then there is by definition a relationship between them. In his discussion of the use of music in what he calls dance "masterworks," Paul Hodgins’s claim that "a complex and all-pervading network of choreomusical constructs can be uncovered and few, if any, moments of choreography are completely unconnected to the score" misses the point, for the relationship is not determined by the artists’ intentions, but by the simple coincidence of music and movement in the same space and time.¹⁶ Cage and Cunningham’s innovation, then, was less in divorcing sound and movement than in finding a way to create new, unpredictable, refreshing relationships between them. The dialogue between partners during the creative process is minimized, but the two strands—along with other features such as costumes and staging—encounter each other in the moment of performance, like the annual meeting of Frost’s neighbors, who come together to mend the wall that marks out the boundary between their properties.¹⁷ The resulting relationships may be limited, temporary, or achieved by chance, but they are relationships nevertheless. Ultimately, a choreographer may be thoughtful in working with music (Mark Morris) or against it (Merce Cunningham), just as one may be thoughtless in working with or against it. One may enter into a marriage mindlessly or mindfully, just as one may enter into divorce constructively or destructively. Attachment may or may not engender harmony; detachment may or may not lead to disengagement.

	THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TWO AND TEN, AND FEAR OF FUSING

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To be sure, many choreographers are thoughtful in their relationship to sound, whether it be relatively intimate or relatively distant. Lucinda Childs’s desire to match the accents of her movement to musical accents may at first seem especially "musical," but equally so is Yvonne Rainer’s hatred of music. Stressing the appeal of integration, Lynne Anne Blom and L. Tarin Chaplin propose that, "ideally, the sound score for the dance is the sound of the movement—what the dancer-choreographer hears as she creates her dance."¹⁸ But as the notion of "the sound of the movement" suggests, there also exists the possibility of harnessing the dancer’s body as a sound source, with or without a separate, musical or not-so-musical score.¹⁹ Moreover, a number of choreographers contribute fluid and flexible ways of thinking about the relationship. David Gordon recalls his introduction to the notion that choreography could be made either "on" or "off" the music, and his subsequent use of music as an "atmosphere" rather than a "map," and Agnes de Mille refers to dance’s mutable relationship to the score: "A fine dance never mimics the musical plan exactly; it sometimes joins; it sometimes departs. Music and dance should supply two separate designs with form and life of their own which, when experienced together, create an impression that neither could possibly achieve alone."²⁰

But collaborative work presents considerable challenges, and these certainly contribute to the habitual emphasis on the dissimilarity between music and dance. In the realm of physiological reality, there is what Paul Hodgins calls "the fundamental incompatibility of music’s and dance’s gestural tempi," citing Cage’s maxim: "Fingers don’t use the same time-lengths legs do. It’s the difference between two and ten."²¹ And in the studio, concerted synchronization requires time and attention: making one adjustment to meet at a given spot throws off coordination elsewhere. Further, whatever their intuitive sensitivity to other disciplines, artists often lack the complementary metalanguages to communicate reliably and meaningfully with one another. Indeed, the plurality of aesthetic viewpoints in circulation nowadays virtually guarantees that artists within a single discipline will encounter "language barriers" when they communicate; needless to say, when crossing disciplines, this becomes even more pronounced.

The language barrier can also be fortified by the form that "music" takes in the collaborative process. Most tellingly, the near-ubiquitous use of sound recordings is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, the proliferation of recordings means that choreographers may obtain and use a dizzying assortment of music, but the wide variety of material available, and our culture’s lack of a lingua franca, almost guarantees that the understanding of that music will be limited. In addition, learning music from recordings rather than from live performance may anesthetize the choreographer’s response to the material, for there is no breathing musical body present to embody the sound, to play faster and slower, even to make an error. Perhaps most insidiously, the intractability of sound recordings may have an ill effect on a choreographer’s ability to make requests of the music: since the music is fixed, it may seem to dominate, to determine the dance more than one might like.²² Digital edits and collages notwithstanding, choreographers must adapt to their chosen recordings.²³ What ensues is a denial of the inevitable relationship between sound and movement: while collaborating with another artist requires grappling with that person’s preferences and ego, the practice of working with ossified digital encodings may undermine a choreographer’s sensitivity to music. One may possess almost any sound, but the sounds are frozen, unyielding, like perfectly presentable but utterly inhuman Stepford wives,²⁴ or Keats’s perpetually "unravish’d" bride.²⁵ Faced with a musical "collaborator" offering all the warmth and responsiveness of an inflatable sex doll, choreographers may well decide that they "don’t care" about the sound.

Wives, brides, dolls: might the relationship between music and dance bear some correspondence to the relationships between musicians and dancers? In their preface to the proceedings of the conference for which this essay was originally written, Stephanie Jordan and Simon Morrison applaud the disappearance of stale "romantic metaphors"—Edwin Denby’s fantasy of a "happy marriage" between music and choreography, for example—from the discussion.²⁶ But those apparently tired formulations may still be of some use, for relationships between art forms do of course issue from relationships between people, replete with very human complications, titillations, delights, and misunderstandings. Certainly when discussing the rapport between the artists who are in turn responsible for the rapport between elements, the notion of a relationship of some sort is useful, as evidenced by choreographer Bill T. Jones’s musings on the act of collaboration: "When I worked with Arnie we didn’t even know we were collaborating, our lives and work were so intertwined. As for other collaborations, some of them were like hot and fast romances that were wonderful, wonderful, and then they just sort of fizzled. A one-shot deal. Some of them were slow getting started but I realized, if I looked around after some years, that I was still working with the same person."²⁷

Jones’s acknowledgment of his experience with Arnie Zane—admittedly, a collaborator within the field of dance, not in music, and, not coincidentally, Jones’s life partner at the time—attests to the two artists’ mutual dependence. Similarly, when Erick Hawkins discusses his collaborator (and, again, life partner) Lucia Dlugoszewski’s willingness to compose music to fit his choreography, he implicitly acknowledges the importance of give and take: most other composers, he asserts, are "not humble enough" to work in collaborative contexts, "and they are not aesthetically interested enough to really see the relationship of the music to the dance."²⁸ In rhapsodizing over the "polygamy of motion, shape, color, and sound," Alwin Nikolais recognizes that many music-movement "marriages" involve more than two individuals, and accordingly, offer all the exuberance, abundance, and chaos that one would expect to ensue from polyamorous endeavors.²⁹

But onstage as well as off, the prospect of merging in relationship that very exuberance, abundance, and chaos raises anxieties, perhaps out of proportion to any actual threat. Considerations of interdependence, mutuality, and cooperation give way to struggles for primacy, or even paranoid fantasies of domination and destruction. In her "theory of interdependence and interaction between music and dance," Jordan acknowledges the need to begin by "consider[ing] power relationships, how the relative strengths of visual and aural perception have been viewed."³⁰ Indeed, many commentators insist on privileging one medium over the other, as when Norman Dello Joio claims that "dance has no life of its own disassociated from music," or when Lopukhov suggests that the final stage of dance’s evolution consists of dance "in the image of music."³¹ Yvonne Rainer puts it bluntly: "I love dancing and I am jealous of encroachment upon it by any other element. I want my dancing to be the superstar and refuse to share the limelight with any form of collaboration or co-existence."³² It is not always the case that individuals seek priority for their own craft—Louis Horst, a musician, asserts that "dance should be the center of interest."³³ But underlying the disagreement about who’s the boss is the unquestioned agreement that there is a boss.

Captivity is commonly invoked by both composers and choreographers when they discuss sound-sight relationships. As Deborah Jowitt points out, La Monte Young "cautioned composers against ‘enslaving’ sounds"; and, in an account of an American Ballet Theatre commission using a Mozart score, David Gordon says, "This guy doesn’t need me to make anything. The only thing I can do is chase him. How can I not be slavish to the music but understand and respect it?"³⁴ Constant Lambert likewise expresses nervousness about too close, too intimate a relationship: "The dance should not be a translation of the music but an interpretation of it. It should not slavishly imitate the musical texture but should add a counter-subject of its own."³⁵ For Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, "the essential thing is to penetrate the musical thought to its depths," and Paul Hodgins notes that Susanne Langer views the struggle for dominance in collaboration as a form of sexualized violence: "There are no happy marriages in art: only successful rape."³⁶

One wonders whether these metaphors reveal more about what we think of offstage intimacy than the sort occurring on the proscenium, or at least whether some not entirely professional "issues" are bleeding into our workday. Why would listening and responding be construed as a willingness to "submit to tyranny," to enslave or abase oneself?³⁷ One starts to imagine an infernal conversation where everyone talks incessantly and no one listens. It is orgy attended only by dominant figures; there are no submissives in sight. The sense that tending a relationship is necessarily a form of submission, and that submission, in turn, is necessarily a form of self-abnegation, bodes ill for models of collaborative relationships, as well as for other sorts of relationships. The virtual exclusion of words like "cooperation," "compromise," "mutuality," and "flexibility" from the discussion speaks volumes.

The fixation on dominance and submission—the underbelly of Denby’s "happy marriage"—reveals anxieties about inviolability and connection, about sovereignty and vulnerability. Perhaps this is because there is no safe sex in the interdisciplinary arena: once music and dance meet, there is penetration, there is risk, and fluids are exchanged. This is especially true in the case of music, where, given the lack of "lids" for the ear such as we have for the eyes, we cannot so easily block the stimulus from entering our consciousness. Music is sneaky, stealthy, invisible, and manipulative.³⁸ I wonder whether those who advocate "penetrating the musical thought to its depths" are intuitively offering a defense against the way music penetrates us. We do not want to admit how influential the music can be, so we try to remain unaware of the way music adheres to what we see, changing our impression of movement. David Gordon tells an interesting story about setting one choreographic work on two different scores: one of Klezmer music and one of music by the Irish composer John Field. He presented the choreography with one score and then immediately with the other, and remarked: "I wanted to see if anyone would say anything. No one did."³⁹ I suspect that the music not only informed the movement, but infused it to the extent that the movement seemed different when repeated.

The paradox before us is that music remains invisible and transient while subtly, even diabolically, reshaping what we see, and yet it is often discounted in choreographers’ and critics’ accounts. One is reminded of Erick Hawkins’s lament on the illiteracy of audiences: "And there are many of our audiences who are too obtuse—including critics. They act as if they didn’t hear the music. Here I have these fine composers, and they don’t even mention the music! They don’t even know whether it’s Bach or Podunk!"⁴⁰

. . . as if they didn’t hear the music. Yes, that’s right: just as Mickey Mouse becomes present in his absence, music disappears even as it appears before us. The very initiation of a sound ushers in its decay and death.⁴¹ Movement, like music, is fleeting, but the body is less so; we can track the path of movements as the dancer’s body travels through space. The musician’s body, however, is hidden, as it were, behind the curtain of the dance. The sound envelops us . . . but from where? Our attention is elsewhere; we do not recognize the source.⁴² We hear the music, but we do not see it; perhaps that is part of why, afterward, we act as if we had not heard it at all. We overhear the music, and before we know it, we unhear it.

	THERE IS NO COUNTERPOINT

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A cluster of paradoxes seems to emerge: by separating movement and sound, we may end up forging a new relationship between them, and the overheard, painfully loud music ultimately, and astonishingly quickly, fades into silence. Perhaps this can encourage us to look past the binary fallacy of whether the elements are coordinated to observing where it is that they inevitably meet—whether the point of contact falls at the level of gesture, texture, rhythm, phrasing, formal design, register, contour, melody, or harmony, and so on—and to consider more fully what happens in that fleeting moment where music and movement reflect each other.⁴³ And there are more paradoxes to uncover: the promiscuous, even reckless, bond between sound and movement risks obscuring their differences, for although music and movement will inevitably inform each other, their natures are nevertheless markedly divergent.

This idea is often misunderstood by artists and critics, who presume equivalence between the media, as if one could somehow substitute dance for music and still have the same experience. Humphrey writes that "the dance should be related to, but not identical with, the music, because this is redundant—why say in dance exactly what the composer has already stated in the music?—and because dance is an entirely different art, subject to physical and psychological laws of its own."⁴⁴ To state the obvious: dance cannot "say" what music "says," nor can music usurp dance’s particular expressive capacity. This is not unlike Lambert’s assertion, cited above, of dance’s prerogative to interpret rather than to translate music; yet there can be no translation, for the two arts express ideas in utterly different ways. Imagine viewing José Limón’s Moor’s Pavane in silence; would you hear the music, or even more absurdly, would you understand what the absent music might "state"?⁴⁵ And is not a choreographic work that takes its cues from the music, such as Mark Morris’s Falling Down Stairs, necessarily an interpretation?⁴⁶

Just as the notion of translation fails to acknowledge the gulf between sounds and movements, the application of the term "counterpoint" to the relationship between two different media proves problematic. As Michel Chion has written, film and music—and, by extension, dance and music—"fall into different sensory categories."⁴⁷ Even in dance, where the phenomenon of live performance and the relatively more abstract use of materials is much more "musical" than the succession of frames in a film, the notion of counterpoint remains awkward.⁴⁸ While there may be counterpoint within the dance or within the music, there can be no counterpoint between them, because counterpoint presumes voices or bodies interacting in the same plane. Indeed, the notion of a voice in music—not necessarily sung, but the continuity of one melody—cannot be simply extrapolated to the motions of one or more bodies: it’s that difference between two and ten, made even more complicated by the presence of numerous voices, numerous bodies. Adding two media together does not merely double the number of signifiers; it seems to multiply them almost beyond comprehension. Caught in such a hall of mirrors, facing the challenge of digesting this surfeit of signifiers, we seek out terminological bridges to domesticate, rather than illuminate, our experience.

Jordan, while acknowledging film scholar Claudia Gorbman’s avoidance of the term "counterpoint," continues to use the term, for example, in her discussion of Bronislava Nijinska’s choreography for Les Noces: "there is counterpoint as much as visualization, patterns that cross the musical accentuation as well as reinforce it."⁴⁹ While the term may serve in a general way to illustrate a relatively oppositional relationship between choreography and score, it also glosses over the subtleties of interdisciplinary signification. Interestingly, Jordan’s description supplies its own remedy to the problem, for the identification of "cross[ing] the musical accentuation" recognizes the coexistence of two related but distinct points of contact, allowing her to point at both similarity (of pulse, at times) and difference (of attack). What is exciting about a moment like this is that it is both with and against the music. The terms "homophony" and "counterpoint" cannot quite capture the relationship.

	MUTUAL ANIMATION IN LIFT AND REPETITION COMPULSION

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It is important, then, to note that simultaneity is tucked into every passing moment but that the simultaneity varies widely. The opposition between similarity and difference—between homophony and counterpoint—is too one-dimensional to describe the reality of interdisciplinary signification. This is evident in the case of Lift (2005), the first of two interdisciplinary works I will discuss briefly. Lift is a collaboration with visual artist, performer, and filmmaker Alison Crocetta, who created a video work for which I composed the music, scored for flute, viola, harp, and percussion.⁵⁰ Crocetta began the project by constructing a site-integrated installation on a rooftop that then became the setting for a filmed performance. She placed balloons, anchored by sandbags, on a grid, and her performance consisted of removing each balloon in turn from its tether and attaching it to her head. When she finished, a "bouquet" of dozens of balloons atop her head, the performance ended. Her filmed motions are a sort of choreographed, process-oriented pedestrian movement, and the performance is devoid of speech or other sound, making it rather dance-like. The filmic element also enables the choreographic aspect, for the performance proceeds in its "real-life" order, and very little is omitted.

The wind, an unanticipated interloper in the collaborative process, uncannily commented on Crocetta’s helium-filled balloons, and the interaction between the orderly, determined nature of Crocetta’s actions and their enactment in an unpredictable environment—might this offer a metaphor for the creative process itself?—led me to construct a score that tempers repetition with surprise. Personally, although I am interested in more independent as well as in more interdependent choreomusical relationships, I have never fully adopted the viewpoint that synchronization is somehow undesirable. On the contrary, I have found it stimulating and rewarding to adapt myself to constraints set up by interdisciplinary work, one of them being the challenge of making things fit. Yet I realize that "fitting" may still engender dissimilarity.

In making my score, I consciously emulated Chion’s theories. First, I deliberately sought points of synchronization, meeting the visual edits with sonic edits in order to emphasize those moments of fissure and joining. This was inspired by Crocetta’s recognition that film reduces to a succession of still images, a fact she reveals in her approach to shooting, especially in her use of an intervalometer—a device that triggers the camera to shoot less frequently than usual, resulting in a time-lapse effect. Intrigued by the flickering nature of the Super 8 mm film, and drawn to the point where each brief reel meets the next, I found myself wanting to emphasize the film’s edits, so in the real time of the live presentation, the viewer may be reminded of the "hidden time" of Crocetta’s filmed performance.

Folded into this similarity in synchronization is an avowal of difference: I also relied upon Chion’s notion of added value, which he describes as "the expressive and informative value with which a sound enriches a given image so as to create a definite impression, in the immediate or remembered experience one has of it, that this information or expression ‘naturally’ comes from what is seen, and is already contained in the image itself."⁵¹ Put more informally, this refers to the way in which the sound might covertly guide the viewer’s understanding of the image, and how as a result, the sound and moving image seem to adhere to each other.

Example 1 illustrates this briefly. (Please find this example and those that follow under the link "Supplemental Material," appended to this article on our website: www.oq.oxfordjournals.org.) First you will see the end of a prelude showing the proliferation of balloons in the performance space, where the musical accents underscore the film’s edits. After thirteen seconds, the music changes and the performer appears. Here I aimed to inflect the viewer’s sense of the visual by using two simple materials: the "labor" music, which corresponds to the activity of the performer, and the "floating" music, which corresponds to the activation of the balloons by the wind. More generally, the score alternates between relative movement and relative stillness; working with the film, I aimed to shine a spotlight first on one of these aspects, then on the other. Sometimes one sort of music is used to reflect either action or suspension especially prevalent in the frame; but my hope is that as the film proceeds, and the association is remembered and reenacted in the viewer’s experience, I can trick the eye to see what the ear hears.

The opposition between mickey-mousing and counterpoint is insufficient here. Certainly I matched the music closely to the film. I might, however, have coordinated them in a different way: I might have chosen to enact the process of the resituated balloons more closely, or to mirror the movements of the performer as she labors alternately closer to and farther from the camera. I might have focused instead on the intriguing shadows that dance and regroup as the performance continues. There is no single path to reflecting the film in the music, and such reflection need not be construed as "painting by numbers." Lift offers instead a form of "mutual animation": the filmic edits inspired the musical materials and the score’s edits, and the specific nature of the musical material attaches in turn to the succession of images, guiding the spectator’s response.⁵² In submitting to the film, I also exerted my influence over it.

Repetition Compulsion (2005), a collaboration with choreographer Terry Araujo, is a more familiar sort of choreomusical work, scored for a live performance by four dancers, two bass clarinetists, and two percussionists. As often happens, the music came first, but even my initial sketches were informed by my sense of Araujo’s vocabulary and aesthetic, especially by his highly rhythmic gestural language, his use of extremes of speed, and his sense of the uncanny. As I conceived of the score, I found myself musing over my complicated feelings about musical repetition and the ways in which it might underscore Araujo’s choreographic designs. The music explores musical reiteration at a variety of "resolutions." On the most local level, there is the fixation on a single note or gesture, or the trembling between two notes, as if the music were hovering, undecided, between two possible alternatives. There are also middle-ground repetitions in the form of "grooves," as well as more expansive, formal correspondences between sections.

In creating this score, I imagined myself weaving a musical carpet on top of which Araujo could place his movements.⁵³ Again after Chion, I liked the thought of Araujo calling attention to different aspects of that carpet with his movement, almost like a differently positioned or tinted light might allow the eye to notice a certain color in a real carpet. When I first saw the dance in rehearsal, I was impressed by the way he had taken the gestural world of the music and created choreography in response, but the positioning of the movement with the music perplexed me. Ultimately, this experience confirmed my impression that the two elements could reflect and inflect each other through mutual animation: even the composer may hear the music differently in response to the choreographic shaping. In fact, we might transpose the metaphor of the spotlight to the audio realm: it is as if the choreographer had gone into the recording studio and tinkered with the equalization settings and the volume levels to reshape what I thought I already knew. He taught me how to hear my own music.

Three brief examples from Repetition Compulsion, presented in split screen, show alternate ways of synchronizing music and movement and illustrate some of the ways in which the choreography may emphasize or deemphasize a certain aspect of the music.⁵⁴ These all concern coordination at the phrase level—the question of whether the dance highlights or obscures a point of arrival in the music. They come from two different performances (and rehearsals) completed several months apart, and the differences between the performances are, as far as I know, deliberate.

Example 2: This excerpt begins with the dying away of a musical phrase. In the upper part of the screen, the dance moves ahead, initiating a new phrase as the musical material winds down. In the performance on the lower half of the screen, which I prefer, the dance winds down along with the music and the ensuing initiation of a new musical phrase seems to inspire a new dance phrase as well.

Example 3: Here there is an emphatic gong sound that ushers in a new musical pattern. In the lower video, the dancers deemphasize that point of arrival as they begin to move forward slowly. In the upper (preferred) example, this moment initiates a movement downward by the two upstage dancers. The accent of the gong, low, loud, heavy, and resonant, seems to pull the dancers downward as it decays. This underscores my claim that the choreographer chooses not whether to meet the music, but how; Araujo might have responded to, say, rhythm or melody here, but he astutely focuses instead on the attack and, even more subtly, the low pitch and "gravity" of the gong.⁵⁵

Example 4: This occurs at a point where the bottom drops out of the music, leaving behind a high, fragile-sounding tremolo. In the upper example, one dancer leaps into another’s arms a bit before this spot, which seems to obscure or even impair the importance of this moment. In the bottom part of the screen, a video taken from rehearsal shows how the beginning of that tremolo seems to push the dancer into the air and into the arms of her partner, and the ensuing exhalation is more luxurious.

These examples show that the relationship between music and movement here is not so easily described as purely homophonic or contrapuntal. The points of synchrony, whether especially prominent or relatively elusive, create a network of relationships that are more abundant than the "mere" terms synchronous or asynchronous can describe.

A final, more continuous example, one that places these three moments in context, consists of the first six minutes or so of Repetition Compulsion (see Ex. 5). Throughout, the music is characterized by trembling motives and strong accents. So whether or not the choreography expresses the same gesture at the same time, its overall language incorporates these sensations, as evidenced by the heavy accents in the movement and most explicitly by the seated male dancer’s trembling at the outset and from time to time throughout. Also, the repeated grooves could have any number of valences, but what Araujo chooses to emphasize in this section is the sensation of confinement: the vivid movement vocabulary presents a constrained positioning of the dancers onstage, their restricted movements reflecting the limited register and melodic range of the music. In general, then, the music and the choreography share a sense of slow, confined movement inflected by quick fluttering accents and tics, although the coordination is not always obvious. I also appreciate the pacing of the choreography: the music gradually intensifies as the confined passages lead finally to an outburst (at about four minutes in), a cadence, and an outbreath: overall, Araujo retains these features through this opening passage.

As in Lift, we encounter the interpenetration of stillness and movement; in a way, the choreographer’s most insightful reading of the music is when he meets its busy quality with utter immobility or unusually slow movement, as in the motionlessness of the dancer in the red dress that takes place at about two minutes from the beginning (in the bottom portion of the screen). The music’s surface twitching belies its refusal to move gesturally, rhythmically, or harmonically, and Araujo chooses to underscore that. Is this choice one of congruence or incongruence? I like to think it is both, as he plays on the ambivalence, or polyvalence, encoded in the score.

The mutuality of the two media becomes apparent when I rehear the music through the lens of the choreography: while my first viewing of the choreography was perhaps hindered by my overly musical associations and expectations, I have now learned to hear the music anew as it is inflected, or even infected, by the choreography. One instance of this comes toward the end of the example (at about four minutes and thirty seconds in, on the bottom half of the screen), when one of the female dancers, costumed in yellow and burgundy, moves downstage and performs a brief and quirky solo that seems to enhance the lopsidedness of this musical moment. Having seen this moment brought to life through movement, I can no longer hear the music without envisioning it. The music has been contaminated, materialized, imprinted by the choreography.⁵⁶

	DANCE’S MUSIC, MUSIC’S DANCE

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The paradoxes and contradictions keep coming. How might we begin to untangle these inconsistencies to formulate a coherent model or argument? Perhaps it would be best to allow similarity and difference themselves to coexist, to play and to dance with each other, just as music and movement do onstage. And we might also consider the similarity concealed within difference, and vice versa. Each incorporates a dash of its complement, as do music and dance themselves.

In her account of postmodern dance, Sally Banes refers to choreographies performed "in silence" at the first Judson concert, as well as to Steve Paxton and Yvonne Rainer’s "silent duo" Word Words.⁵⁷ I imagine that by "silent" she means to indicate that these works lack any explicit musical component. We are so accustomed to the absence of, or our own lack of attention to, the sounds dancers make that it is possible to describe a music-less dance piece as being "silent." But it is worth probing this conceit. Consider Yvonne Rainer’s use of a contact microphone to amplify her breathing sounds in At My Body’s House.⁵⁸ This maneuver may seem to limit the sounds to the "natural" sounds of the body, and indeed, the embrace of causality—the advertisement of the relationship between a sound and its source—would appear to render the work music-free, but the simple act of amplification splits the awareness in two, creating a fused and distinct "score." The possibility of overstimulation, then, may be due less to the combination of dance and music per se than to the coexistence of movements and sounds, and the embrace of the more inclusive terms "sound" and "movement" in place of "music" and "dance" may better illuminate the interdisciplinary act. The difference is significant: I would say that different parts of one’s awareness are required to parse sound and movement, and that any time they are joined—whether through choreography and score, or less aggressively, through the amplification of the dancer’s body sounds, or even more innocently, through the mere presence of relative silence and relative stillness, as in Paul Taylor’s Duet—different parts of our consciousness are required to digest what we see and hear.⁵⁹ In her analysis of Nijinsky’s setting of angular movement to Debussy’s lushly sustained music, Jordan describes Faune as a "dual experience," but perhaps we should entertain the notion that any music-dance amalgam is a dual, or multiple, experience. Could it be that the reason we "act as if we didn’t hear the music" is because some of the music’s meaning, its very presence, is erased by the dance? Or could it be because we can’t hear the music and watch the dance at the same time?

Indeed, I suspect that some of the anxiety about mickey-mousing has to do with the fact that close coordination between movement and sound reminds us of the difficulty of ingesting dance and music at once, whereas, apparently paradoxically, simultaneous but relatively disconnected streams of information permit us to maintain the fiction that we can indeed attend to, or travel between, everything at once. Debussy’s complaints about Nijinsky’s "mathematical" choreography for the Rite of Spring—"this fellow adds up semiquavers with his feet," and so on—touch on the sensation of proliferation and imply that close coordination engenders not just added value but multiplied value; as the dance spotlights the music’s rhythmic aspect, the score becomes much too loud.⁶⁰ It is another kind of overhearing, one that makes it hard to take in the dance. So not hearing the music starts to seems less like an egregious insensitivity and more like a necessary coping mechanism, as a way to continue, despite much encouragement to the contrary, to "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain."

We have come a long way from Lopukhov’s demand that dance reflect and even emulate music, and yet, despite the emphasis on heterogeneity in more recent discussions, fantasies of unity and organicism still retain their allure. For example, in wisely turning our attention from conceits of counterpoint and independence to "figures of consonance," Daniel Albright proposes that "perhaps there are chords in which one note is a musical note, another element is a word, and a third element is a picture—chords that compose themselves out of different layers of sensuous reality."⁶¹ Acknowledging the prejudice against such "vertical phenomena," Albright suggests that the different strands of interdisciplinary works may somehow be taken in in a single gulp, "abolishing the distinctness of the media"; he notes that "if time and space are going to work together to achieve a single effect, then time must be spatialized and space temporalized."⁶² It may be that moments of contamination can be swallowed whole, but it is possible that even these "chords" tend to overtax our awareness, tugging us in several directions at the same time, as space remains spatialized and time temporalized. The twelve-tone term "simultaneity" might be more useful in recognizing the difference and diffusion that informs even the closest coincidence. In place of Albright’s "indivisible center," I see and hear a fusion that also ricochets outward—and, crucially, that moves right on to another equally rich moment.⁶³ An instant of ecstatic union does not a long-term relationship make. My awareness often flickers between the simultaneous media, focusing on the music at one moment and the movement at another, alternating between hearing and seeing.

Accounts of choreomusical reception frequently indulge in something like what Marjorie Garber calls "discipline envy": the desire to evade one’s familiar training and frolic on the other side of a disciplinary divide, much as one might fall for a new, exciting lover whose character flaws are not yet apparent.⁶⁴ In the interdisciplinary context, this usually takes the form of rhapsodizing about one discipline taking on the role of its counterpart, as in Balanchine’s exclamation, "I must show them the music."⁶⁵ In recounting her journey to developing her own vocal style as she had with her movement style, Meredith Monk asks, "What would a spiral be for the voice? Or jumping? Or falling?"⁶⁶ Scholars, too, wax poetic about the ways in which music and dance can shape-shift and mutate into each other, as when Jordan describes "hearing the dance, watching the music."⁶⁷ This notion is seductive, but I am not at all sure that this is what happens when we engage with a choreomusical work. Something equally magical does happen, though: the dance envoices the music as the music reveals the dance.⁶⁸ This, however, requires a sacrifice.

Dance has its music, and music has its dance. So while Blom and Chaplin claim that the "best sounds are sounds of the dancers," one might also argue that the best movements are the movements of the musicians.⁶⁹ Joining the two together, we risk losing dance’s music and music’s dance. In the process, we encounter, in rapid succession, instances of both centrifugal force, in which the two seem to pull apart—moments when we "don’t hear" or "don’t care about" the music—and centripetal events, where the movements and sounds seem to contaminate, to adhere, irrevocably. Might this account for the way the two aspects seem sometimes to support each other—as if when dance turns up the volume, music adjusts the lights?—and the way they sometimes seem to obscure each other—as if moving the controls in the opposite direction? In other words, there is the possibility of multiplication, as described above, but also of subtraction, cancellation, erasure.

So I come to one final paradox, one that has underlain this entire discussion: however disconnected we think the strands are, they forge a relationship by their very coexistence, and however unified they may seem to be, they pull apart, resisting each other by virtue of their disciplinary incongruity.⁷⁰ And there is no simple binary opposition, or even a clearly delineated "continuum from work that is extremely disjunctive to work that seduces us with its harmonious relationships."⁷¹ Incongruity is ever-present, as is relationship.⁷² And yet, there are distinctions to be enforced. Sympathy is not the same as synchrony. Either may lead to what Albright calls "figures of consonance," just as either may lead to figures of dissonance. Lopukhov’s simultaneous orgasms may ultimately point out that even when music and movement achieve ecstatic union, they come to the party with markedly different equipment. In short, to answer Albright’s question about "whether all media are one" or whether they remain distinct from one another, I would have to reply, simply, "yes."⁷³

Perhaps our notions of unity and disparity are too simple, too local, too unimaginative. We need a metalanguage that is precise but also fluid, flexible, and supple, one that honors the intertwining of similarity and difference, of attraction and repulsion, of joining and separating. Cage and Cunningham practiced the acceptance of multiple and disparate streams of stimuli. But in disparity we find unity, or relationship, if we believe that any unity comes in the spectator’s reading or that the witness’s "polyattentiveness" may lead to a more generous, expansive kind of wholeness.⁷⁴ Wholeness need not be agreement; it may be an "approximate state of wholeness that lacks perfection" but that embraces completion, presence, the "suspension of opposites," the integration of complements.⁷⁵ And just as incongruity may present a form of wholeness, congruence contains at least a speck of difference. It’s not about the choice of one possibility over the other, but about the interplay of these two omnipresent tendencies.

In unraveling interdisciplinary mysteries, we might try seeking unity in disparity and disunity in coherence. Music erases the sounds of the dance while allowing us to see the movement more clearly, and the dance, while drawing our eyes away from the orchestral pit toward the stage, highlights the sounds for us. Each offers something, and each offers something up. At certain moments they seem to meet, and at others they seem to be relatively disinterested. Like the individuals who bring the works to life, they support, challenge, and reshape each other, mutually. The skin gives shape to the snake while the snake gives the skin substance. The wings grant the cicada the freedom to take flight while the body’s heft allows those same wings to return, sooner or later, to solid ground.

	ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

 
This article is loosely based on a lecture/demonstration presented at "Sound Moves: An International Conference on Music and Dance" in November 2005. I am grateful to Simon Morrison for reading multiple drafts as well as for inviting me to compose Repetition Compulsion, which was premiered alongside Le Pas d’Acier at Princeton University’s Berlind Theater in April 2005. Special thanks are due to my colleagues and friends Terry Araujo and Alison Crocetta, who joined me in creating Repetition Compulsion and Lift, respectively, both of which are discussed here.

	NOTES

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Supplementary material is available at the Opera Quarterly online (www.oq.oxfordjournals.org).

^1. Chuang Tsu, Inner Chapters, trans. Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English (San Francisco: Amber Lotus, 2000).

^2. The term mickey-mousing is usually invoked to indicate close coordination of music and a visual or choreographic element. As I describe later in this article, it is rarely defined or discussed in depth.

^3. It is intriguing that these participants were more tolerant of close rhythmic relationships between choreography and music in vernacular contexts. One of my colleagues, choreographer Marcela Correa, confirmed my impression that the popular associations of such close rhythmic relationships—not only in the musical, but also in recreational dance and music video—may contribute to choreographers’ resistance to presenting them on the concert stage.

^4. The sentence "Good fences make good neighbors" appears in the Robert Frost poem "Mending Wall" (1914).

^5. Doris Humphrey, The Art of Making Dances (New York: Grove Press, 1959), p. 137, emphasis added. This comment is taken up by Paul Hodgins in Relationships Between Score and Choreography in Twentieth-Century Dance: Music, Movement, and Metaphor (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), pp. 12–13.

^6. Nikolais is cited in Katherine Teck, Music for the Dance: Reflections on a Collaborative Art (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), p. 25. Bremser’s commentary on Fase: Four Movements runs as follows: "Reich’s pulsing music phrasing was not mirrored in her movement, but rather was played against her own unique configurations" (Martha Bremser, Fifty Contemporary Choreographers [London: Routledge, 1999], p. 84).

^7. Campbell comments further on Morris’s use of music: "And in truth, his movement often mirrors the accompanying score quite literally—a crashing chord met by a vigorous kick, falling melodic lines that send the dancers to the floor. But Morris’s sophisticated understanding also enables him to bring out the music’s internal rhythms—underscoring, developing, even contributing additional contrapuntal elements that make us hear it differently. Inventive movement illumines music that reflects Morris’s extraordinarily eclectic tastes" (Karen Campbell, "Morris Group Knows the Score, and More," Boston Globe, online edition, July 30, 2005). Note the reliance on the opposition between "literal" reflection and "internal rhythms"; binaries of this sort are often invoked to valorize a supposedly "sophisticated" and knowledgeable approach, though the deeper understanding of the music’s secret passageways is rarely discussed in full. Laura Dean, too, proposes a penetration through the surface of melody to a deeper level: "Any good dancer is not dancing to the melodic quality; they dance to the structure first" (Teck, Music for the Dance, p. 64). The notion of such a deeper level would benefit from deeper analysis, especially considering that the referent in Dean’s proposition is Steve Reich’s music, in which the melody/structure opposition is especially problematic.

^8. John Rockwell, "Stomping, Flexing, and Some Vernal Romps, Too," The New York Times, March 10, 2006, E3. See also Joan Acocella, Mark Morris (New York: Noonday, 1993), pp. 159–82.

^9. Donald Sosin, Modern Times, Live Performance and Film Scoring: A Conversation with Timothy Brock. http://www.silent-film-music.com/brock.htm.

^10. As Paul Hodgins points out, Humphrey "offers no alternative to ‘mere visualization’; nor does [Louis] Horst explain what his ‘synthesis between dance and accompaniment’ might entail (his advice also hints of musical subservience)" (Hodgins, Relationships Between Score and Choreography, p. 13).

^11. Film scholars describe mickey-mousing rather generally as "a pejorative term obviously derived from music written for animated cartoons where nearly every movement onscreen is ‘caught’ by the music" (Roy M. Prendergast, Film Music: A Neglected Art, 2nd ed. [New York: Norton, 1992], p. 80), or "the split-second synchronizing of musical and visual action, so called because of its prevalent use in animated cartoons" (Royal S. Brown, Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994], p. 16). Michel Chion’s discussion is both more precise and subtle: he notes the possibilities of "following the visual action in synchrony with musical trajectories (rising, falling, zigzagging) and instrumental punctuations of action (blows, falls, doors closing)" (Audio-vision: Sound on Screen, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman [New York: Columbia University Press, 1994], pp. 121–22); unlike other writers, Chion discusses the relevance of mickey-mousing to film. Of particular interest is his discussion of "imitation" in The Informer (Audio-vision, pp. 49–54). Choreographers and dance scholars tend to use the term more or less interchangeably with "music visualization," "mirroring," and "music illustration"; Jordan traces the introduction of the term "music visualization," which she describes as "a useful term for expressing the technique of creating concurrence or imitation between music and dance," to Ruth St. Denis; she also outlines a number of possibilities for creating such a relationship (Moving Music: Dialogues with Music in Twentieth-Century Ballet [London: Dance Books, 2000], p. 74). In either context, the term mickey-mousing tends to be used derogatorily, or at least self-consciously, in a manner that calls attention to the precedent of derogation, as when Jordan notes that, thanks to choreographer Mark Morris, "the ‘rule’ against overdoing this device can be broken" (ibid.).

^12. "The reason music visualization is looked down on is that presumably it is a renunciation of the choreographic task: the score, not the choreographer, determines the steps. Actually it is hard to see how music could determine steps. If it could, then Liebeslieder Walzer and Love Song Waltzes/New Love Song Waltzes—dances created by two echt ‘visualizers,’ Balanchine and Morris, to the same score—should at least resemble each other instead of looking, as they do, as if they had flown in from different planets" (Acocella, Mark Morris, p. 177).

^13. In the first chapter of Moving Music, entitled "Liberation Movements: Musical Theory and Practice in Twentieth-Century Ballet," Jordan offers a cogent overview of the gradual alienation of choreography from score and the accompanying shift from values of wholeness and integration toward an emphasis on independence and dissimilarity. See also Sally Banes, "Dancing [with / to / before / on / in / over / after / against / away from / without] the Music: Vicissitudes of Collaboration in American Postmodern Choreography," in Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1994), pp. 310–26. Other scholars have observed this tension: Daniel Albright, for example, begins his discussion of modernism and interdisciplinarity—after a brief invocation of music-specific relationships—with this observation: "For a long time, most students of artistic projects involving several media have been contrapuntalists, tracing horizontal lines of development. An opera, for example, may be dissected into a libretto, a series of stage pictures, and a musical score; then the analyst can describe the patterns of reinforcement or weakening generated from the superposition of these three independent media—the words, the décor, the music." Albright proceeds to introduce his own "more vertical" treatment (Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts [Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2000], p. 5). Those who focus on recent developments in experimental performance and new media tend to acknowledge the recent trend toward separation while allowing for the possibility of relationship. Nicholas Cook suggests that "different media [often] relate . . . through mutual contrast rather than congruence" and goes on to distinguish three types of relationships: "conformance, complementation, and contest" (Cook, Analysing Musical Multimedia [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998], pp. vii, ix).

^14. Fedor Lopukhov, Writings on Ballet and Music, ed. Stephanie Jordan, trans. Dorinda Offord (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), p. 147; Henry Sayre, The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde Since 1970 (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. xiii.

^15. Cunningham’s belief that "the subject of dance is dancing itself" (Merce Cunningham in conversation with Jacqueline Lesschaeve, "Landscapes: 20th Century Dancing," in The Dancer and the Dance [New York: Marion Boyars, 1985], p. 139) involves the rigorous investigation of alternatives to the proscenium stage, avoidance of character and emotion, as well as the crucial embrace of chance procedures. This has a profound effect not only on the fusion—or simultaneous presentation—of movement and sound, but also on the shaping of time. As Deborah Jowitt writes, "Time for the Cunningham dancer is not the time we associate with traditional theater and music. Events do not develop over its passage, lead inexorably toward climaxes and die away. The causality of Newtonian physics has been abandoned for a more discontinuous reality" (Jowitt, Time and the Dancing Image [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988], p. 287). This effect is not duplicated in a merely casual use of music.

^16. Hodgins, Relationships Between Score and Choreography, p. 30.

^17. See Banes, n36 below.

^18. On Childs’s choreography to Philip Glass’s music, see Joyce Morgenroth, Speaking of Dance: Twelve Contemporary Choreographers on Their Craft (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 76–77. Sally Banes describes Rainer’s sound to Performance Demonstration as "a tape of Rainer’s voice delivering a jeremiad against the use of music at all, a diatribe that was ironic (since music was used in the piece) but at the same time offered a thoughtful critique" that began with the words "I would like to say that I am a music-hater. The only remaining meaningful role for muzeek in relation to dance is to be totally absent or to mock itself" (Banes, Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism [Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press/University Press of New England, 1994], pp. 317–18). Note that Banes does not acknowledge Rainer’s text as "music" or even as a "score." On the integrated creation of movement and sound, see Blom and Chaplin, The Intimate Act of Choreography (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982), p. 156. In this passage they are concerned less with the "incidental" sounds of dancing than with the choreographer who is also skilled at composing. In Music for the Dance, Teck cites Blom and Chaplin’s commentary to open a discussion on the work of Alwin Nikolais (p. 22), including his music-compositional activities. Less thoughtful is Trisha Brown’s failure to acknowledge the distinction between the plastic and performing arts, or that bodily movement produces sound: "There was a period as a young choreographer when I thought that dance alone was enough. My analogy was that when you look at a piece of sculpture or a painting you don’t need to hear music, do you?" (Morgenroth, Speaking of Dance, p. 62). Yvonne Rainer’s tape-recorded "score" to her Performance Demonstration states, "Muzak does not accompany paintings in a gallery" (Banes, "Dancing [with . . .] the Music," p. 318). Oddly revealing, too, is Elizabeth Streb’s decision to reincorporate music as a palliative after questioning its necessity and desirability for a number of years: "I’ve come to believe after twenty years that people who walk into a show will not be happy if you don’t give them a story and they do not hear music" (cited in Morgenroth, Speaking of Dance, p. 113).

^19. In her account of the experiments of the 1960s, Sally Banes documents "pieces in which the dancers sang (David Gordon’s Mannequin Dance), squeaked (Yvonne Rainer’s Dance for 3 People and 6 Arms), and talked (Rainer’s Ordinary Dance)," as well as Simone Forti’s practice of using the dancer’s voices ("Dancing [with . . .] the Music," pp. 314, 315). Since that time, of course, there have been many works in which dancers have provided some or all of the sound, or in which speaking was used as a sonic backdrop: Bill T. Jones’s Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin/The Promised Land is just one example. Clearly a more expansive notion of what a "score" might be would be helpful here: while some such activities certainly intend a binary between "music" and "non-music," the generous embrace of apparently non-musical sounds need not prevent a meaningful interaction between what we see and what we hear.

^20. Gordon is quoted in Morgenroth, Speaking of Dance, p. 52. De Mille’s comment comes from The Book of Dance (New York: Golden Press, 1963), p. 208; this passage is taken up by Teck in her preface to Music for the Dance (p. viii).

^21. Quoted in Hodgins, Relationships Between Score and Choreography, p. 13.

^22. In a 1985 interview with Katherine Teck, Agnes de Mille notes her own shift from playing music at the piano to using recorded music: "I was a pretty good pianist . . . so I could cut my own music, arrange my own music, and play through things to see what I wanted. But that’s really hard, because it takes attention to read the music and play it, and then attention was off the fantasy of the movement. Now, I can make tapes, play them back, and really just go to town and do anything I want" (Music for the Dance, p. 6 [emphasis added]). This commentary underscores the challenge of attending to both musical and choreographic concerns, hence the appeal of musical recordings; yet, although those tapes may assist the choreographer in focusing on the "fantasy of the movement," one wonders whether something is lost in de Mille’s move away from the physicality and immediacy of the piano. See also Humphrey on the challenges of choosing music and the limitations of recordings (The Art of Making Dances, pp. 133–35). Writing in 1959, Humphrey describes a less accepting attitude toward recordings than we encounter today: "Canned music is undeniably déclassé. Musicians will sniff and carp, and audiences, though not so ivory-towerish, certainly do react better to the immediacy of live music" (p. 134).

^23. In a 2004 analysis of Mark Morris and Yo-Yo Ma’s Falling Down Stairs, Morgan Galland, a student in my Music 211 course ("The Sound of Collaboration"), suggested that Ma adapted his solo cello performance to the choreography and, in a sense, read the dancers as a kinetic score. Another, humorous example shows how accustomed choreographers may become to musical fixity: in a rehearsal with composer Wynton Marsalis documented in Accent on the Offbeat (Sony, 1994), choreographer Peter Martins, possibly perplexed by the composer’s incorporation of improvisation into the score, asks, "Why can’t you just play it twice the same way?" Marsalis’s ensemble explodes in laughter. The documentary as a whole shows the flexibility not only of live performance, but of attentive collaborative partners. Throughout the rehearsal footage, Marsalis adapts tempos and adds sections to accommodate the choreography, and both artists acknowledge the challenges and obstacles they encounter in the process. In one clip, Martins asks to relax the tempo, and when Marsalis hesitates, Martins offers, "It’s a question." Even when live music is available for performance, the gradual adoption of MIDI mockups to substitute for acoustic instruments in the collaborative process is also a mixed blessing: the composer may be very precise in timing and offer the choreographer a rehearsal tape before the final live or recorded version, but the unchanging timing and synthetic sound quality of the synthesized instruments may mislead the choreographer. This recalls the problems raised by the use of piano reductions considered by Jordan, who notes that the "more percussive" sound of the piano reduction used in rehearsals to represent the orchestral score for Debussy’s Jeux "may have influenced Nijinsky even if he had already heard the music in concert" (Moving Music, p. 9). To be sure, the issue is not that recorded music is necessarily inflexible, but that as currently configured, the choreographic process encourages it to be: a composer working in the recorded medium may be willing to alter the score to fit the demands of the choreography. Paul Lansky, for example, made a minor adaptation to his electronic score Idle Chatter for Bill T. Jones’s Chatter (a work that also used Lansky’s just_more_idle_chatter) and collaborated intensively with Mark Haim on the recorded music for In the Moment: as Lansky notes, "his suggestions for the music resulted in some of the more interesting parts of the piece" (personal communication, April 2006). There is no guarantee that a composer of acoustic music would be equally flexible. Joan Acocella points out that Mark Morris, known for his keen understanding of music and contracting of live musicians, distinguishes between music intended to be presented live and that designed to be heard in a recorded format: "When he can’t count on live music, he would prefer to choreograph to a record—that is, not just a recording, but a piece of music that was made, and intended to be heard, as a recording." (Mark Morris, p. 176).

^24. It is probably no accident that the increasing availability and convenience of sound recordings coincided with experiments in what might constitute "music" and "dance," both separately and together. Summing up the innovations of the late 1960s and the 1970s, Sally Banes observes that "to dance in silence, to verbal texts, or even to sound collages that included music—that is, to refuse, one way or another, to ‘dance to the music’—was a way to clarify and focus on movement for its own sake" ("Dancing [with . . .] the Music," p. 319). In the 1980s, Banes writes, "It seems that, after a period of rinsing dance clean of visual and aural accoutrements, analytical postmodern choreographers were becoming interested in the increasing possibilities music and visual art could provide" ("Dancing [with . . .] the Music," p. 320). Yet when choreographers stopped refusing, when they again became interested in working with music, they only let the music in part way, engaging with it less fully, less collaboratively; the proliferation of sound recordings seems to have enabled them to work with the disembodied, depersonalized document, without engaging in a genuinely collaborative process.

^25. To be sure, even on a recording, music does take place in time, and the environment and equipment affect its sound, but it does not change considerably from one "performance," i.e., playing, to the next. The vagaries of different speaker systems and the possible deterioration of the CD are on a different order from the fading of each instantiation of live performance. Keats’s Grecian urn too will decay eventually, or it could be damaged, but until then, it presents a relatively static image.

^26. Jordan and Simon Morrison, Preface to Proceedings of "Sound Moves: An International Conference on Music and Dance," 2005. www.roehampton.ac.uk/soundmoves/proceedings.htm. In the opening chapter of Moving Music, Jordan cites Edwin Denby’s notion of a "happy marriage," pointing out that "the marriage is not always one of equal partnership" (p. 3).

^27. Morgenroth, Speaking of Dance, pp. 150–51.

^28. Teck, Music for the Dance, p. 20.

^29. Alwin Nikolais, "No Man From Mars," in The Modern Dance: Seven Statements of Belief, ed. Selma Jeanne Cohen (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1965), p. 63.

^30. Jordan, Moving Music, p. 63.

^31. Hodgins, Relationships Between Score and Choreography, p. 19. The Lopukhov comment is quoted in Jordan’s introduction to his Writings on Ballet and Music, p. 15.

^32. Text to Rainer’s Performance Demonstration, quoted in Banes, "Dancing [with . . .] the Music," p. 318.

^33. Quoted in Hodgins, Relationships Between Score and Choreography, p. 18.

^34. La Monte Young is quoted in Deborah Jowitt, Time and the Dancing Image (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 321. Gordon is quoted in Morgenroth, Speaking of Dance, p. 52.

^35. Constant Lambert, "Music and Action," in What Is Dance? Readings in Theory and Criticism, ed. Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 209. (This passage is quoted in Hodgins, Relationships Between Score and Choreography, p. 11.) Louis Horst also guards against "follow[ing] the music slavishly," and he is one of the rare commentators to offer an alternative: "a synthesis between dance and accompaniment" (Hodgins, Relationships Between Score and Choreography, p. 12). Also see Hodgins’s claim that Horst advocated "musical subservience" (n10 above) and Rockwell’s commentary on Mark Morris (n8 above). (Blom and Chaplin, too, avow that "dance should never be subservient to music" [Intimate Act of Choreography, p. 161].) It is curious that Lambert, a composer, uses musical terminology so casually, applying the notion of a "countersubject," which inheres in music, to the music-dance relationship; his focus on texture, the relationship in music between different lines or voices, would seem to emphasize the difficulty of positing a simple correspondence between musical lines and dancerly bodies.

^36. Jordan, Moving Music, p. 27; the Dalcroze quotation is from Rhythm, Music, and Education (1918, p. 228, emphasis added). Langer’s comment comes from "Deceptive Analogies: Specious and Real Relationships Among the Arts," in Problems of Art (New York: Scribner, 1957), p. 86. Langer, too, concerns herself with the struggle for primacy, but interestingly, she also acknowledges more precisely than others the erasure that may take place in multimedia works: "Dance normally swallows music, and music normally swallows words. The music that, perhaps, first inspires a dance, is none the less cancelled out as art in its own right, and is assimilated to the dance." (pp. 84–85). Langer’s notion of rape is discussed by Hodgins, Relationships Between Score and Choreography, p. 19. The strain of pessimism pervades many discussions, whatever their focus: Merce Cunningham notes, "The independence allowed for a sense of freedom. The dancers weren’t dependent on the music. John didn’t want the music to dictate the dance or the dance to dictate the music, which was the situation that had existed before. The separation was his idea" (Morgenroth, Speaking of Dance, p. 16). Sally Banes, too, describes Cage and Cunningham’s collaborative process as "a watershed moment in which dance wrenched itself free of music—although not from musical collaboration—for the first time" (Banes, "Dancing [with . . .] the Music," p. 312, emphasis added). There are also examples that acknowledge and challenge what is understood as music’s normative disempowerment in the face of dance, as in Simone Forti’s Accompaniment for La Monte’s "2 sounds" and La Monte’s "2 sounds," which underscores and reverses the familiar notion of accompaniment.

^37. "The moderns were unwilling to submit to tyranny, including that of music" (Jordan, Moving Music, p. 57).

^38. "The moment we consider to what degree music shapes our perception of a narrative, we can no longer consider it incidental or innocent." Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 11.

^39. Morgenroth, Speaking of Dance, p. 52.

^40. Teck, Music for the Dance, p. 21. Hawkins is absolutely correct that many dance critics have little to say about music. It is perhaps unsurprising that reviewers often note only the choice of music, and sometimes fail to do even that. Scholars’ willingness to present in-depth analyses of entire works with little or no discussion of sound, though, is more perplexing. See, for example, my review of Audible Traces: Gender, Identity, and Music, ed. Elaine Barkin and Lydia Hamessley (Zürich: Carciofoli Verlaghaus, 1999), in Open Space Magazine (Fall 2002): p. 68, n10. In her survey Ballet and Modern Dance (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988), Susan Au understandably writes in general terms, yet it is curious that even her references to Meredith Monk deemphasize music (pp. 170, 202), and her brief depiction of Mark Morris notes the varieties of music he uses but fails to mention the significance of musical inspiration to his choreographic designs (pp. 204–5). The "silence" of music in Au’s account is perhaps most glaring in her account of Twyla Tharp’s The Catherine Wheel, in which she observes that "the lyrics of David Byrne’s accompanying songs sometimes parallel the emotions raised by the action" (p. 203, emphasis added).

^41. I consider this phenomenon in the liner notes to my CD Apocryphal Stories (Albany Records, 2004).

^42. Of course, musicians may be visible to the audience, but when that is the case, there is often a sense of disruption; personally, I often find myself wanting to observe the movements of the musicians, which would ground the sounds for me. We are certainly accustomed to hearing without seeing the movements that make the sound possible; as Gorbman notes, "we do not . . . automatically identify a sound with its source" (Unheard Melodies, p. 11). Yet a more comprehensive response to live performance entails associating musicians’ movements with their sounds, which encourages a "louder" listening experience as well as empathy with the performers.

^43. Jordan avers that "it is possible to visualize many different aspects of music," and provides an extensive list, noting that "choreographers can choose to take on several musical features simultaneously, or just one, or none at all. Most vary their approach regularly during a piece." (Moving Music, p. 74). Hodgins, too, offers a taxonomy in the form of a "paradigm for choreomusical analysis" (Relationships Between Score and Choreography, pp. 25–30).

^44. Humphrey, The Art of Making Dances, p. 164. This passage is discussed by Jordan in Moving Music, p. 21.

^45. In fact, this is an interesting experiment: of course, one does not hear Purcell’s music unless one is already familiar with the choreomusical work, but the phrasing and accentuation of Limón’s choreography may suggest musical designs.

^46. Curiously, Joan Acocella, who generally offers a subtle and sophisticated understanding of music/dance relationships, relies on the notion of translation (Mark Morris, p. 171). Her description of Morris’s choreography as "a reading of the music" is more precise and illuminating (p. 160).

^47. Chion, Audio-vision, p. 36.

^48. Clearly, the distinctions between dance and film should not be ignored. While film presents a discrete unit in the form of the shot, dance is more continuous, like music. Dance may or may not embrace narrative and non-musical sounds, while film does so more often than not. And the order of events in the creative process is not trivial, for the fitting of music to film tends to privilege the latter, while the situation of fitting music and dance to each other may proceed in any number of ways. Nevertheless, I find a compelling model in Chion’s analysis of the way music and film work together. His concepts of added value and synch points, for example, provide a framework for understanding the reflection of a kinetic aspect upon a sonic one, and vice versa. In addition, as time goes on, dance, film, and video have more and more in common, although the phenomenon of live performance onstage still exemplifies dance for many. For a consideration of the way that video has informed and reconfigured dance, see Sherril Dodds, Dance on Screen: Genres and Media from Hollywood to Experimental Art (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2001). In an audio recording incorporated as a voiceover into the documentary In the Mirror of Maya Deren (dir. Martina Kudláek, Zeitgeist Films, 2004), Deren exclaims, "If I didn’t live in a time when the film was accessible to me as a medium I would have been a dancer or perhaps a singer. My reason for creating them is almost if [it] were dance except this is a much more marvelous dance. It’s because in film I can make the world dance."

^49. Jordan, Moving Music, pp. 64, 46.

^50. Lift was commissioned by the Boston Musica Viva (Richard Pittman, Music Director), and premiered by them in October 2005. The discussion of Lift in this article is based in part on discussions with Alison Crocetta. Lift may be performed with live music or with a studio recording dubbed onto the DVD.

^51. Chion, Audio-vision, p. 5.

^52. Gorbman offers the term "mutual implication" as an alternative to parallelism and counterpoint (Unheard Melodies, p. 15).

^53. George Balanchine claims that Delibes, Tchaikovsky, and Stravinsky "invented the floor for the dancer to walk on" (quoted in Teck, Music for the Dance, p. 16).

^54. In the process of preparing the score, I created an audio recording (with the musicians who performed at the premiere), so that the work could be performed with either live or recorded music. This split-screen compilation includes only rehearsals and a performance that used that recording, which permitted me to synchronize multiple dance performances with one consistently timed musical performance.

^55. This moment points out a hazard of composing for dance: in "purely musical" terms, I felt the need for a strong point of arrival, but in including it I risked the choreographer disregarding it. Composing a score with fewer emphatic statements might be safer (and, perhaps, less interesting).

^56. Chion refers to relationships of "contamination and projection" (Audio-vision, p. 9); Albright, paraphrasing Clement Greenberg, notes that "every act of transmediation is contamination" (Untwisting the Serpent, p. 11).

^57. "Dancing [with . . .] the Music," pp. 314, 315.

^58. Jowitt, Time and the Dancing Image, p. 320.

^59. Taylor "and his pianist remained motionless for the duration of the dance, which was accompanied by a ‘non-score’ by John Cage" (Au, Ballet and Modern Dance, p. 161): even "silence" demands musical attention. Blom and Chaplin refer to silent dance as well, but they touch on the fullness of such a performance when they write, "It is not a dance without music, but a dance in silence. It is not a dance without rhythms, but a dance where the rhythms are pulsed in only one place, the body" (Intimate Act of Choreography, pp. 156–57). The implication that musical rhythms are not pulsed in the body is revealing.

^60. Albright quotes Debussy in Untwisting the Serpent, p. 108.

^61. Albright, Untwisting the Serpent, p. 5. While Albright begins his discussion with this bald statement—understandably, given both his focus on modernity and his desire to turn our attention from dispersal to coherence—his ensuing discussion uses more suggestive language.

^62. Ibid., pp. 5, 6, 27.

^63. Ibid., p. 6.

^64. Marjorie Garber, Academic Instincts (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 53–96.

^65. Quoted in Jordan, Moving Music, p. 184. Although the word "show" suggests visual display, this statement avoids blurring sensory categories.

^66. Morgenroth, Speaking of Dance, p. 89.

^67. Jordan, Moving Music, p. 63.

^68. Edwin Denby suggests a fusion but locates the "listening" in the dance, not in the spectator, which is illuminating (and also prefigures Chion): "The visual action . . . makes particular stresses in the music more perceptible, and continuities more clearly coherent. . . . Inside the labyrinth of complex musical structures, you see ballet following the clue of the rhythm, you see it hearing the other musical forces as they affect the current of the rhythm, as they leave or don’t leave the rhythm a danceable one" (Denby, "Forms in Motion and in Thought," in Dance Writings, ed. Robert Cornfield and William Mackay [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986], p. 572). This passage is taken up by Jordan in Moving Music, pp. 74–75. Denby’s comment also touches on the way in which movement often seems to be timed so that it responds slightly after the sonic impulse, suggesting that the real-time performance incorporates a sort of onstage listening on the part of the choreographer and performers.

^69. In the chapter where Banes refers to "silent" dancers, she acknowledges this possibility: at Judson, "sometimes pure musical compositions, with no dancing whatsoever, were presented as part of a dance concert, encouraging the audience to think of music itself as dancing" ("Dancing [with . . .] the Music," p. 315). Indeed, musical performance itself provides plenty of choreographic information. During the week when I completed this article, I attended a performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion (Princeton University Glee Club, April 22, 2006) in which I observed the two bassists, although separated by eight feet or so, swaying in synchrony with their bowing, while the chorus members behind them offered a "contrapuntal" but not unrelated embodiment of the meter. Certainly the conductor’s chironomy presented another simultaneous layer of "music visualization," as did the less traditional but equally engaging conducting patterns of the eight-year-old boy sitting in the seat in front of me.

^70. Albright touches on this point but configures it as part of the opposition of intention and result, maintaining the notion of a binary between similarity and difference (Untwisting the Serpent, p. 7).

^71. Jordan, Moving Music, p. 61.

^72. Ibid. Jordan acknowledges these possibilities but seems to want to place them into either a spectrum, as noted above, or a binary opposition, as when she considers the possibility of music "offering a voice distinct from the dance or dancer, at particular moments. The music might add a separate layer of meaning. Or music and dance together might forge a special relationship that suggest[s] quite a different order of meaning from those suggested in surrounding passages. In both circumstances, there could be striking effects of incongruence or difference" (pp. 70–71).

^73. Albright, Untwisting the Serpent, p. 7. Although Albright acknowledges the interweaving of similarity and difference, like Jordan, he reverts frequently to the binary formulation.

^74. Jordan notes that "Cunningham advocated the opposite to wholeness and connectedness" (Moving Music, p. 20), but Sayre recuperates some sense of coherence: "The ultimate collaborator, then, the one who puts the work of art together, who makes some sense of it, is the one to whom it is addressed" (Sayre, The Object of Performance, p. 125). Cage’s notion of "polyattentiveness" or "the simultaneous apprehension of two or more unrelated phenomena" is discussed by Roger Copeland, "Merce Cunningham and the Politics of Perception," in What Is Dance?, pp. 321–22; this notion is also taken up by Sayre (p. 125).

^75. Carl G. Jung, "Christ, A Symbol of the Self," in Personality and Religion: The Role of Religion in Personality Development, ed. William A. Sadler, Jr. (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), pp. 143, 142.

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