Ballet Music
Music written to carry ballet on stage, shaping the dancers' bodies through rhythm and colour
Related
Ballet music is written for a danced drama and completed by the dancers' bodies. It supplies metre, tempo and clear sectional borders, giving choreography a frame to lean on; solos, pas de deux and ensemble numbers each call for a distinct musical character.
Before the nineteenth century, ballet scores were often assembled from several composers. Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty and Nutcracker gave a whole ballet an independent musical life, with symphonic scoring and recurring themes that can be heard away from the stage; Stravinsky's Rite of Spring later pushed rhythmic attack to the fore.
The common mistake is to treat ballet music as background accompaniment. A jump, a turn and a landing are timed by phrases; listen first for metric accent and sectional change, then for how the score is used by the dance.
Sources
- 芭蕾音乐与舞剧配乐的历史，参 The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, "Ballet"；本文为原创表述
Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.