Ballet Music: A Handbook

[innopac]

Ballet Music: A Handbook by Matthew Naughtin (the music librarian of the San Francisco Ballet orchestra)

Part 1 -- How Ballet Works

Part 2 -- Repertoire and Reference

http://www.amazon.com/Ballet-Music-Handbook-Finders/dp/0810886596

From Amazon:

Musicians who work professionally with ballet and dance companies sometimes wonder if they haven’t entered a foreign country—a place where the language and customs seem so utterly familiar and so bafflingly strange at the same. To someone without a dance background, phrases and terms--boy’s variation, pas d’action, apothéose—simply don’t fit their standard musical vocabulary. Even a familiar term like adagio means something quite different in the world of dance. Like any working professional, those conductors, composers, rehearsal pianists, instrumentalists and even music librarians working with professional ballet and dance companies must learn what dance professionals talk about when they talk about music.

In Ballet Music: A Handbook Matthew Naughtin provides a practical guide for the professional musician who works with ballet companies, whether as a full-time staff member or as an independent contractor. In this comprehensive work, he addresses the daily routine of the modern ballet company, outlines the respective roles of the conductor, company pianist and music librarian and their necessary collaboration with choreographers and ballet masters, and examines the complete process of putting a dance performance on stage, from selection or existing music to commissioning original scores to staging the final production. Because ballet companies routinely revise the great ballets to fit the needs of their staff and stage, audience and orchestra, ballet repertoire is a tangled web for the uninitiated. At the core of Ballet Music: A Handbook lies an extensive listing of classic ballets in the standard repertoire, with information on their history, versions, revisions, instrumentation, score publishers and other sources for tracking down both the original music and subsequent musical additions and adaptations.

Ballet Music: A Handbook is an invaluable resource for conductors, pianists and music librarians as well as any student, scholar or fan of the ballet interested in the complex machinery that works backstage before the curtain goes up.

[sandik]

Thanks so much -- I'll have to look for this!

[DanielBenton]

I just read through much of this book. It might be useful as a starter to pique the interest of a student composer, but it is not in any way comprehensive in it's list of repertoire (probably an impossible task). Somewhat more irritating is the selective detail about the works listed. Also the appearance and readability of the section on repertoire could be vastly improved.

[RhinoHaggis]

After years of avoiding it, I finally picked up a copy.  It's not cheap.  The information it does have is detailed and -assuming it's accurate- an incredible time-saver to have in one place.   I don't want to downplay how hard it is to construct this information from scratch. However, I'd hesitate to say it's a handbook to anything but titles.  Not a handbook to ballet MUSIC.   My people (musicians) continue to pretend that it is possible to keep track of and identify musical numbers without  any written music ...  but it isn't.   It's IM-possible.  A small two-to-three bar snippet of the first principal melody next to each cited piece would make this book worth its weight in gold.    But as it is, since -outside The Main Ballets Everyone Knows-
     i. virtually none of the music is available anywhere in print or on an audio recording, and
     ii. recorded performances virtually never have a detailed list of musical numbers and composers  (and when they do it's wildly inaccurate)

.... IF we have a recording of a ballet and we want to know the music..... we still won't know.

Is this the music referenced in the book?  Don't know.
If there are multiple references, which one is THIS one?  Don't know.
But the music is PLAYING, surely there is a way to identify it?  Nope.
But we both recognize it! Surely....   Nope.

NOPE.

We can come up with a hundred other similar scenarios where -because we have no indication of the actual notes played for any part of any piece- we will simply never know the answer.  Unless of course, we already knew all the music in question.... in which case we wouldn't need the book , would we?

...Because music can't be identified unless some part of the music itself is provided -either inside our minds by our memory.... on a recording, or on the written page.