Session Synopses
Musicians in Series: Ballet
Lucy Allan, Rob Kaplan and Bill Patterson will play for Musicians in Series: Ballet where musicians rotate playing combinations in a dance class led by a BU professor, Elizabeth Sweatt on Saturday, September 6 at 9:30pm
Dr. Suzanne Knosp is the Co-Host for the IGMD 35th Anniversary Conference and will moderate the session Musicians in Series: Ballet
Musicians in Series: Contemporary/Modern
John Toenjes, Farai Malianga, Chia-En Li, and Tim Russell will play for Musicians in Series: Contemporary/Modern where musicians rotate
playing combinations in a dance class led by a BU professor, Kellis Oldenberg on Saturday, September 6 at 9:30pm
Dr. Owen Rockwell is the Host for the IGMD 35th Anniversary Conference and will moderate the session Musicians in Series: Contemporary/Modern
For Art’s Sake: Serving One Another for the Sake of Serving Art
Josh Nichols will give a presentation titled, For Art’s Sake: Serving one another for the sake of serving Art on Friday, September 5 at 3:15pm
There is a foundational link between great music and dance collaboration, and the symbiotic function of this link greatly depends on the collaborative atmosphere and ulterior motives behind it. Many find this link difficult to describe, which often coincides discussions about artistic “soul mates” and “kindred spirits.” Yet it is easy to identify its failures and successes—collaborative relationships either breaking down when there is disunity and dysfunction, causing a rift and tear in the artistic experience, or flourishing with creativity and beauty, resulting in an elevated and meaningful experience of dance and music.
But what exactly makes this collaboration collapse or flourish? Is it the deep understanding and anticipation of each other’s wants and needs in any given collaboration, like the great collaborative relationships of yore? Yes, and more—it is this presenter’s argument that the burden of success lies in the mutual and unconditional service of each person to the other first, to serve one another before being served. This results in the collaboration of dancers and musicians transcending the ordinary and creating extraordinary Art. Evidence of this is presented through historical analysis, anecdotes, and philosophical treatise.
If one will accept the goal of dance and music collaboration is to create “Art”, then it follows that we must serve our collaborative partners first before our own interests, inevitably leading to a more beautiful and thrilling enjoyment of dance for both artist and audience.
Predict and Connect: Tools for Compelling Advocacy in Our Field
Greg Woodsbie will give a presentation titled, Predict and Connect: Tools for Compelling Advocacy in Our Field on Saturday, September 6 at 4:00pm
The role of the dance musician has experienced significant decline as recorded music increasingly replaces live accompaniment in dance education and performance. Why this has happened is clear—the convenience and cost-effectiveness of recorded music— but if and why it’s a problem is a far, far murkier question, usually answered very abstractly and in ways that are generally easy to ignore. To answer well requires interdisciplinary insights from evolutionary biology, neuroscience, music therapy, and social-emotional learning to build compelling arguments for the deeply humanistic value of our field. The purpose of this presentation is to educate dance musicians about some of the mechanisms by which humans process music, enabling us to better articulate the benefits of live musical accompaniment to dancers, teachers, and administrators while providing a framework to further the efficacy of our musical communication in the studio. We will discuss the central importance of entrainment. We will see how imagination is a key component of processing and understanding all sorts of sensory experiences. We will zoom out to identify the empathetic functions of music and dance in human societies. We will zoom back in to the studio to look at the known gains and losses experienced by dancers when we remove live music, as well as the more subtle and powerful losses that we don’t usually see. This mirrors the gains and losses that ALL of us (but especially teenagers and young adults) are experiencing with the increased use of technologically mediated social activities (social media, video chatting). We will discuss the potential further challenges that generative AI could bring to this topic, and finish with discussions of co-teaching models that could provide additional benefits to schools while addressing resource constraints. I aim to populate stronger and more specific language and arguments for the value of live music and generate discussion and imagination about how these ideas can lead to renewed integration between these historically wedded art forms.
Ben Hazard — "Ghost Hero"
Rob Kaplan will give a presentation titled, Ben Hazard — "Ghost Hero" on Friday, September 5 at 10:30am
Ben Hazard was a child prodigy pianist, professional dancer, flutist, composer, and former member of the International Guild of Musicians in Dance. His musical gifts emerged early—he began performing professionally at age six, playing major piano concerti ranging from the Baroque era to early 20th-century styles. At 16 he studied at the Conservatory of Cincinnati, where he pursued composition under Yanos Takacs, Scott Houston, and John Cage. During this time, he observed his first ballet class, and within a year was a principal dancer with the Cincinnati Ballet, and later with the Atlanta Ballet. At age 28, he joined the Metropolitan Opera as Principal Musician for the Metropolitan Opera Ballet. His improvisational style was steeped in the rich pianistic experiences of his youth. The purpose of this presentation is to offer a glimpse into how I’ve been using recordings of Ben’s playing in ballet class to inform and deepen my own musical approach. First, by closely listening to his recordings, I will highlight the structural relationships between the left and right hands—and how these interactions help shape a musical narrative. Second, I will play several transcriptions and demonstrate how these ideas are influencing my own improvisations for ballet class today. Exploring his work from both an improvisational and compositional perspective provides a deeper understanding of his artistry—and the creative spirit that brought us together in a close friendship over the last 12 years of his life. Although Ben passed away in 1992, I’m still learning from him. He has become one of my “ghost heroes.”
The Pianist in Exile: Introducing criticality to practice, learning, teaching, and research in dance accompaniment
Lucy Allan will present a talk entitled The Pianist in Exile: Introducing criticality to practice, learning, teaching, and research in dance accompaniment on Sunday, September 7 at 3:00pm
Most dance accompanists learn their craft on the job, without any specific education in their field, and those who do undertake a formal qualification in dance accompaniment usually learn received wisdom. Musical accompaniment for dance is an under-theorised area, with a paucity of academic research in the subject. Meanwhile, sociological research has found its way to all sorts of niche, specialist human activity, including professional ballet! Yet, musical accompaniment for dance remains overlooked as a subject of sociological inquiry. I would like to introduce my PhD research, which explores how pianists for professional ballet experience what we might call “ballet culture”. I am a piano accompanist for Scottish Ballet and the department of Modern Ballet at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, as well as Lecturer on the Conservatoire’s Piano for Dance programme and a graduate of Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. As such, I am incredibly well-placed to carry out this unique research. In this presentation, I will offer some preliminary thoughts about how musicians may fit (or not fit!) into the norms and expectations of the professional ballet environment. I will then introduce Zygmunt Bauman’s theory of “exile”, which serves as a theoretical framework for my PhD, before sharing further details of my research. Finally, I will discuss what it would mean to introduce criticality into the field of dance accompaniment, with particular focus on how this might impact the learning and teaching of it as a subject. I hope that my research will be of interest to participants who are dance accompaniments, who may see themselves reflected in my work or feel galvanised to reflect on their own experiences as an “outsider” in the ballet studio. Participants who are ballet dancers and educators may benefit from hearing an alternative perspective on their professional environment – one which is often overlooked in practice and in research. This, in turn, can lead to better understanding and communication between practitioners from both disciplines. More widely, the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland is one of the only places in the world to offer a degree solely in Piano for Dance, and so the research I will present has the potential to impact on how accompanists for dance are educated.
Musical Motion: Updates to Musical Pattern Movement Theory and Research
Andrew Warshaw will present his ongoing work entitled Updates to Musical Pattern Movement Theory and Research on Saturday, September 6 at 11:15am
Beginning in local, 2005 NYC IGMID meetings and continuing through IGMID events in 2006, ‘07, ‘08, ‘09, ‘11, ‘12, ‘13 and ‘15, also in conferences such as the 2018 Il Corpo Nel Suono (The Body in Sound) in Rome, attended by many IGMID members, I have been developing a approach to movement/music relationships that addresses an unexplored parallel between the fields. Even with important recent research on embodied musicality and the emergence of choreomusicology as a dance/music study, there has been little systematic investigation of how locomotion - body movement that travels through space – contributes to musical organization. Music and locomotion both involve complex, patterned coordination of limb movements, but studies of such topics as dance rhythms in music, tempo & expressivity, and even work on the evolutionary origins of music have not produced any empirical approaches to how the varieties of limb movements involved in locomotion also determine aspects of musical expression. My work involves identifying Pattern Movements, encoded but audible representations of locomotor movement, in instrumental music. Beginning with a model of early childhood movement acquisition that references its evolutionary origins, I correlate types of locomotor coordination with the specific limb actions, intentions and affects that create music, particularly piano/percussion music. The result is a methodology demonstrating that much of world music - from Beethoven sonatas to Mandinka balafon music, to Western post-tonal compositions, Indonesian gamelan and even music with strings - communicates, along with other messages, unique and precise images of the coordination patterns of vertebrate/human locomotion. Thus, many structures, developmental procedures and phase transitions of musical compositions also can be understood as schemes of locomotor movement. My approach can be presented graphically, showing how at any time-scale of a musical score the locomotor Pattern Movement is unfolding; and it also can be applied aurally, naturally integrating with the complex, often metaphorical processes of musical listening. In sum, it can provide musicians and dancers with a common theoretical and practical perspective to the juxtaposition of movement and music. In addition to presenting and publishing on my approach, I’ve recently been conducting workshops for musicians and dancers at conservatories in the U.S. and Europe, exploring these concepts collaboratively. In my conference presentation, I’ll give a brief overview for new members who’ve never seen it; but the focus here will be on updating where my work has gone since last presented to IGMID and outlining pathways for future development.
Expansion, Contraction, and Transformation: The Creation of Sacred Space for Communal HealingThrough Africana Music and Dance
Dr. Lisa Beckley-Roberts will present Expansion, Contraction, and Transformation: The Creation of Sacred Space for Communal Healing Through Africana Music and Dance on Sunday, September 7th at 1:30pm
Communities have known for millennia the impact and power of music and dance while contemporary Western medicine and social science are just beginning to consider this. Through the lens of trauma-informed ethnomusicology, this research explores the ways that a Community African Music and Dance Ensemble created a space in which they were able to heal on a personal and communal level after experiencing the murder of Trayvon Martin and later the acquittal of George Zimmerman. Building upon real or imagined cultural and communicative memory, the paper elucidates the process that members of the ensemble learned repertoire, identified with the community from which it came, and subsequently felt that they were able to reclaim their power through this process. This paper explores that process and the means by which the community created sacred space through their performance. In so doing the research is reflexive, informant-centered, and polyvocal in nature and includes both the process of creating the work as well as a viewing of the finished product.
Legacy: Transient Nullity Emergent Resurgence
John Toenjes will lead a discussion session titled Legacy: Transient Nullity Emergent Resurgence on Sunday, September 7th at 10:30am
A rap session for those interested in talking about: What does legacy mean to us as individuals? What legacy do we leave as dance musicians? What role does the Guild play in making a legacy from the studio corner possible? How do retiring academic professors whose positions will be eliminated deal with the loss of importance in the field that this indicates? How do current and upcoming members think about how they might impact the dance and music world—their legacy—and what this means to their career and satisfaction with the vocation in the long run? How do we as a profession continue to assert influence in the dance world, what new avenues are opening for building a legacy of influence and satisfaction?
Using Percussion and Electronics to Accompany Modern Dance Classes
Owen Rockwell is host for the IGMD 35th Anniversary Conference at Belhaven University and will give a demonstration of his approach to using percussion and electronics to accompany Belhaven University modern dance classes, in a class taught by Erin Rockwell on Friday, September 5 at 1:00pm