Movement to Music: Notating Baroque Dance for Musicians

Abstract

The connection between musicians and dancers in eighteenth-century France was strong because of the opportunities they had to play together and their experience with each other’s art. Many musicians today lack the opportunity to develop this same understanding of dance. The experience of performing eighteenth-century French dance music for both dancers and musicians today can be improved by facilitating musicians' understanding of dance. In this thesis, I propose a new dance notation system, Baroque Musical-Dance Notation (BMDN), which indicates to musicians the types, directions, and number of steps in a dance. These elements of a dance assist musicians in understanding how best to support a dancer through their choice of tempo, phrasing, accent, articulation, and ornamentation.

In this thesis, I discuss the development of, and experimentation with, the BMDN to explore how musicians’ increased knowledge of dance influences the performance of eighteenth-century French dance music, and aids communication with dancers. Through audio- visual analysis of the recordings made in these experiments, and interviews with the participants, I found that the BMDN changed musicians’ approaches to the music in their choice of tempo, use of tempo changes, placement and type of accent usage, length of articulation, and choices of ornamentation. These changes resulted in better support for the dancers and enhanced the musical performance. The experiments revealed that the BMDN has the potential to greatly enhance the performance of eighteenth-century French repertoire. Further experimentation with the BMDN could result in a reinvigoration of the connection between dancers and musicians and better the experience of performing historical dance and music.