Conference Agenda

Time is a fundamental preoccupation among phenomenologists, especially musical phenomenologists, since music is often described as a temporal art. Discussions on musical space frequently treat musical space as virtual, imaginary space. What happens when dance is added to music, so that physical space and motion are involved? In this paper, I give an account of space and time in dance and music as they interact in a choreography. I adapt, synthesize, and repurpose ideas from philosophers and theorists featured in dance and musical phenomenologies, such as Edmund Husserl, Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ernst Cassirer, Susanne K. Langer, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Rudolf Laban, Ernst Kurth, and Victor Zuckerkandl. I argue that physical and virtual forces in dance and music generate a flow where space and time are mutually implicated, creating what I call “choreomusical space-time.” This flow is continuous and heterogeneous and cannot be interrupted without changing the quality of the flow altogether. The spectator participates in shaping the flow by deciding on where to focus their attention, such as by empathizing with individual dancers, taking a macroscopic view of the overall pattern, or switching between the two. Following the lead of Cassirer, who used mathematical concepts to analogize phenomena in the arts and humanities, I compare processes in dance and music to vectors, calculus, and other mathematical concepts. To illustrate my ideas on choreomusical space-time, I analyze dance-music interactions in choreographies in neoclassical ballet and modern dance. I conclude by discussing what new insights into phenomenology dance and music can in turn bring us.

Within the recent outpouring of music theory scholarship on rhythm tap dance, the underlying analytic concerns driving these investigations have primarily echoed the priorities of traditional formalist music theory, focusing on elements including form, motivic development, rhythm, and meter. Quoting Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies (2008), Lochhead (2023) argues that responsible music theory scholarship needs to “have a critical understanding of some of the tools of research—not just the obvious technical tools but the conceptual tools.” On the contrary, tap scholarship typically leans on borrowed approaches while rarely interrogating their epistemological consequences.

In this paper, I interrogate tap dance transcription within music theory through the lens of scholarly responsibility, examining how transcriptions’ typical focus on rhythms and steps foregrounds and reinforces these two elements as tap’s primary sites of meaning. I interrogate the epistemologies afforded by this notational approach and how these, in turn, implicitly shape and constrain our academic priorities, especially when notation is the primary vehicle for analysis and analytical communication. Specifically, I argue that such transcriptions encourage limited textual formalist theorizing, foreclosing broader questions, such as how those rhythms and steps mean beyond themselves.

While tap scholars have frequently relied on notating tap as a key part of their research method, to date, there has been no serious scholarly examination of how to use transcription, nor of its affordances and conceptual ramifications. In translating tap into the two-dimensional graphic language of Western music, scholars uncritically apply Western, racialized methods and logics to a Black art form (Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva 2008, Perchard 2015, Ewell 2023), reifying the priorities derived from traditional music theory. This sustains ongoing epistemological violences against tap in the academy (Thomas 2020) and aids appropriations of tap for scholarly capital (Winkler 1997). More broadly, tap here functions as an elucidative case study for investigating epistemological tools in the field of Music Theory. My close reading of how methodology can reify and exclude illuminates the necessity of a renewed focus on the ethics and impacts of Music Theory’s “conceptual tools”—an ever more urgent concern as the expansion of repertoires in our discipline outpaces methodological and epistemological shifts.

In his chapter of The Cambridge Companion to Tango, Morgan James Luker states that Ángel Villoldo’s “El choclo” (1903) and Carlos Matos Rodríguez’s “La cumparsita” (1916) are the two most famous and recognizable tangos of all time, the formal structure, melodic-harmonic gestures, and accompanimental rhythms of which have become defining features of the genre. In this paper, I argue that rhythmic patterns heard on the surface of these emblematic pieces also organize deeper levels of musical structure and are commonly incorporated into choreographed and improvised dance interpretations.

The A section of “El choclo” features two small-scale rhythmic patterns that are broadly characteristic of tango—the 3+1+2+2 habanera rhythm in the bass and the 1+2+1 síncopa rhythm that permeates much of the section’s melody. An examination of how melody and harmony are organized within each four-measure phrase unit reveals similar rhythmic patterns at play on the larger scale as well: the 3+1 first half of the habanera is heard in the chord changes of the first three phrases while the habanera’s 2+2 second half is heard in the two-measure melodic motives. In the final four-measure phrase, repeated melodic fragmentation occurs in the middle of the phrase, creating the síncopa rhythm on a larger melodic scale as well. Similar analyses of the B and C sections reveal that: 1) melodic-motivic patterns are always in counterpoint (never alignment) with patterns of harmonic change; 2) the patterns within each musical parameter are derived from the surface rhythms of the habanera and síncopa; and 3) the different configurations of these melodic-harmonic interactions uniquely characterize each large-scale formal section of “El choclo.”

As the third essential component of tango (alongside music and poetry), dance also contributes its own rhythmic patterns to performances of “El choclo.” My own tango dance-notation system puts the rhythms of transcribed footwork patterns into dialogue with musical patterns at the level of the beat and (hyper)measure. Finally, I turn to examine these same types of rhythmic interactions in “La cumparsita,” showing that this piece too features a deep engagement with characteristic tango rhythms on all levels of melodic, harmonic, and dance structure.