AMS MDSG Business Meeting with Short Papers, 2025: New Directions in Choreomusicology
Chair(s): Rachel Gain (Yale University)
Organized by the AMS Music and Dance Study Group.
The first half of the MDSG business meeting, lasting roughly fifty minutes, will be dedicated to short lightning talks. While choreomusicology’s focus on dance represents a progression beyond the disembodied approaches of traditional musicology, in many ways, choreomusicological research has its own hegemonies parallel to those of musicology. For instance, staged ballet stands in for a Classical canon of Works, and research questions and methodologies frequently echo those of twentieth-century musicology. As such, our business meeting will feature papers that look to the future of the subdiscipline by engaging with developments in fields such as dance studies, performance studies, and anthropology, as well as in our sister disciplines of music theory and ethnomusicology. To these ends, we will feature three lightning talks that expand choreomusicology through interdisciplinary methods, archival interventions, and engagement with dance and movement practices on stage and beyond.
The second half of this meeting, lasting roughly forty minutes, will take care of the business pertinent to running the study group, including elections of new officers, review of funds, discussion of future plans, and the approval of minutes.
Presentations of the Symposium
Rhythmic Motives and “Las amarillas”: A Choreomusical Case Study
Andrea Tinajero Perez
The Ohio State University
Recent scholarship on choreomusical analysis has shown the importance that rhythm plays in choreography and texture. Leaman (2022) highlights Balanchine’s musical training and how his choreographies were driven by rhythm. Gain (2025) argues that the dancer acts as percussionist in tap dance, and that rhythmic schemata is crucial for the dancer. Mexican folk dance-music practices (hereafter folclórico) have long been studied by dance studies (Power-Sotomayor 2020) and ethnomusicology (Paraíso 2007), but theorization in music is still needed. In folcórico, zapateado (footwork) is performed with percussive attacks. Since zapateado is so prominent and creates a variety of rhythms, is it possible to analyze the zapateado as music? Zapateado patterns change across musical sections and are performed as loops. Anku (2000) argues that bell patterns in African dance-music are cyclical and form rhythmic sets. It is possible that zapateado forms cyclical rhythmic patterns as well. In this paper, I argue that the rhythmic patterns in zapateado should be considered part of the musical texture and should be analyzed as cyclical motives. Because practitioners play a crucial role in maintaining oral traditions, I collaborate with artist-scholar Alfonso Cervera to analyze the zapateado in their choreography of “Las Amarillas” by Los Lobos. With this work, I hope to bring the role of practitioners into music theory methodologies and expand the research on non-Western analysis beyond instrumentation and rhythm.
Accentuation Patterns and their Impact on Steps in Scottish Highland Dance
Stefanie Bilidas
Michigan State University
Scottish Highland dance is a unique cultural art form. Performed to live accompaniment by a bagpiper, the dance discipline has a strict instructional manual of steps and is taught by board-certified instructors. Dancers learn the same steps and dances; however, the execution of a particular dance can be modular. Depending on the specific dance, dancers may decide both what steps to perform and their order of steps. Additionally, in some cases, the music that the bagpiper plays live in competition is also subject to change. Because many interpretations of one Highland dance can occur simultaneously during a competition and over time when dancers perform at different events, Scottish Highland dancing eludes making direct comparisons between the music heard and the dance steps performed. In this lightning talk, I propose that music and dance interactions in Highland dance can be more fruitfully analyzed at the level of genre rather than moment to moment interactions, a concept proposed by Mari Romarheim Haugen (2021). Drawing on her holistic approach, I will show how accentuation patterns of the music inform the dance movements. For example, the Highland fling, a dance, is performed to a song in the musical subgenre called Strathspey. Strathspeys accent the downbeats of one and three in a common meter and the main movements of a Highland fling follow along. With phrasing and durational accentuation maintained between the music and dance steps, both the specific combinations of steps and musical tunes can be altered. The resulting music and dance relationships are highly contingent on what the dancer, dance teacher, or competition society decides, the music chosen by the live bagpiper, and the specific dance performed. For a dance discipline focused on maintaining tradition via strict pedagogical instruction, the actual performance of dances in competition settings brings about many variables. To accommodate the wide range of practices, I argue that by studying genre expectations of both the dance movements and musical tunes, one accounts for the shared commonalities between the music and the dance and the music-dance values of Scottish Highland dancing.
The Gurdjieff Movements Between Ritual and Reconstruction
Brian Fairley
University of Pittsburgh
The Howarth-Gurdjieff Archive at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts contains sketches, scores, publications, correspondence, and audiovisual material related to George I. Gurdjieff, the Greek-Armenian spiritual teacher who died in 1949. The archive’s chief focus is the Movements, a set of “sacred gymnastics” meant to be carried out by dancers and musicians in strict accordance with Gurdjieff’s instructions. The music for the Movements, in the usual telling, was composed by Gurdjieff himself, with help from his disciple Thomas de Hartmann, who arranged them for piano. Before the archive opened in 2014, the only people allowed to see the dance notation and musical scores for the Movements were authorized Gurdjieff teachers or approved musicians. A trip to the Upper West Side is now all it takes: although much of the material has been digitized, it is password-protected on the website of the Gurdjieff Heritage Society. These layers of secrecy have always been part of the Gurdjieff mystique, yet as a result the majority of research on Gurdjieff, a mercurial, wildly influential figure of twentieth-century culture, has been carried out by insiders speaking to other insiders. In this lightning talk, I offer a case study and methodology for working with the Gurdjieff Movements. Specifically, I use the now-available scores and diagrams to excavate a scene from the 1979 film Meetings with Remarkable Men, directed by Peter Brook. In the film, the young Gurdjieff is shown several Movements while visiting a monastery hidden deep in Central Asia. Brook and his collaborators make subtle adjustments to movement and orchestration, using traditional instruments where once there had been piano and folkloric costumes where once only white clothing was allowed. In his reconstruction of the supposed Central Asian origin of the Movements, the director Brook, a longtime Gurdjieff follower, weaves his own layers of fact and fabrication, moving between ritual and representation in search of a deeper spiritual truth. With this archive, I suggest, we can begin to ask some overdue questions of Gurdjieff and the Movements, now from a place of public knowledge rather than mere fascination.
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