Thinking about music and dance has existed largely in negative space in Western culture. The International Encyclopedia of Dance (Cohen et al. 1998) contains no article on philosophy (tellingly, there is an article on aesthetics, the most “embodied” branch of philosophy); conversely, there is no mention of dance in the article on philosophy in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (Sadie 2001). Large-scale works of music may contain movements that are called, well, “movements,” composed of gestures arranged in patterns rooted in dance, yet musical thinking in the past couple of centuries has expunged almost all but these linguistic traces.
Western musical philosophy since the Enlightenment has often been premised upon music’s ineffability and sublimity, its seeming ability to appeal directly to the mind; the “vulgar” traces of the body were almost always denied or ignored. This conception of absolute music – music without external reference – underlay the nineteenth-century symphony. This genre, which came to signify the highest musical accomplishment, is one in which “abstract” architectural edifices were built on the basic floor-plans of social dance while ballet developed as an independent theatrical art. The twentieth century produced thoughtful and musically adept choreographers such as Isadora Duncan, George Balanchine, Martha Graham, and Katherine Dunham; but while practitioners and critics were expanding both the physical and the intellectual horizons of the dance, musical thinking was still, primarily, grounded in the nineteenth-century ethos. Not until the end of the twentieth century did thoroughgoing philosophical and analytical writing about dance, and its relationship to music, start to appear.
Francis Sparshott, a rarity among philosophers in having written extensively on dance, posits that music has so much intellectual theory, and thus heft, because its materials are so artificial (constructed from insubstantial but scientifically amenable acoustic events), that theory is a way of grasping music’s substance. Dance, conversely, has so little theory because its materials are the most familiar – the human body and its gestures, which seem transparent and self-evident. Music required a theoretical apparatus, based on mathematical proportion and thus, both literally and figuratively, rationality (Sparshott 1988: 90–1).
Dominant Western conceptions of music and dance derive from the Greeks. Thinkers, makers, and doers of the dance have been concerned with three fundamental – and broadly overlapping – areas of inquiry: the relationship of music and dance, their origins and connections to the other arts; the body – the medium, source, and agent of dance; and choreography – the specific, aesthetic union of music and movement.
From its birth, music has registered the rhythms of the human body[,] of which it is the complete and idealised sound image.
(Jacques-Dalcroze 1980: 7)
Music . . . is the dance of the inner life, and its outward manifestation is dance.
(Sparshott 1995: 222)
The nature of the connection of dance to music through the medium of the human body is at the heart of almost all philosophy regarding dance. Does dance arise from the body’s response to music, or is music the audible trace of bodily movement? Even when addressed by science – listening to music lights up parts of the brain associated with both emotion and movement (Levitin 2006: ch. 6) – the origins of these intimately related arts tends to regress to a chicken-or-egg argument, a function, perhaps, of unnecessary boundaries.
For the Greeks, all arts were “of the muses,” and the muse Terpsichore’s art comprised both music and dance in a single, inseparable ideal of choral dance – a unitary concept common to many, if not most, cultures around the world. The differentiations for Plato were of degree rather than kind: not “music” and “dance,” but “play” and “discipline,” “gymnastics” (sheer activity) and “mimesis” (activity with meaning) (Plato 1900: bk. 2).
The impulse to dance and sing is natural in the young of all creatures; where humans differ is in the ability to create order and to pass on that knowledge. Ordered motion generates “rhythm,” the mingling of voices creates “harmony,” and the two together form “choric song” (Plato 1900: 664e–665a). Ordering requires discipline, and that discipline provides pleasure in achievement: the educated can sing and dance well. But is what they sing and dance good? For Plato, that distinction is based not on execution, but intent. His arts are mimetic – they represent, or are expressive of, emotions, states, actions; whether they represent images of virtue or vice determines their goodness (655d–656a). However, Plato opens a thin crack into which Western culture will eventually insert a wedge; choric art is ideally integrated, but he distinguishes between the arts of music, dance, and poetry, and notes that an imbalance can produce unpleasant results (669b–670b). For Aristotle, the distinction between the arts is more subtle: they differ in their medium, the objects, and the manner of imitation, though in each case imitation is produced by rhythm, language, or harmony, either singly or combined (Aristotle 1984: 1447a14– 1447b29).
The mimetic principle held sway in Western music, which was ideally expressive of text, until its rapid overturn around the turn of the nineteenth century, as idealism overtook materialism (Bonds 1997). A subtext to the revolution in musical aesthetics which led to the elevation of abstract music over texted or programmatic (mimetic) music was the gradually growing distrust of or disgust with the body during the Renaissance and Reformation, enshrined in the mind/body split of the Enlightenment.
Music’s lack of specific meaning, which had been seen as a liability, was suddenly its strength, providing its ability to convey the inexpressible, ineffable, and the sublime, transcending body and word. Without text or program, however, music needed structure, and this came from the human body it was “transcending”: the voice or word, and the body or dance. The essential unity of poetry, music, and dance is found in the inextricable interpenetration of their principles: poetry depends on meter and repetition with variation (rhythm), rhyming and assonance (sound, not meaning), and its rhetorical flourishes rely on higher order processes, such as the “rhyming” of ideas through unexpected but satisfying juxtaposition (Ratner 1980; Adorno 2002c). Patterns of repetition and contrast create the pulse of the dance, and the musical forms that supported abstract musical expression were rooted in Renaissance dance forms: the minuet and trio retained the name and rhythms of the dance, and their rounded binary form lies at the heart of the symphonic sonata form. Sonata form itself is a dramatic principle, the interaction of characters or themes in a scheme of exposition, development, and recapitulation that one can trace directly to Aristotle’s conception of tragedy.
Idealism was primarily a Germanic philosophy, in which Richard Wagner was certainly steeped, but his conception of Gesamtkunstwerk respects the Grecian unity. He analogizes the severing of the individual arts from each other with the Tower of Babel (Wagner 1993: 104), but his language is laden with dance imagery: “By their nature [the arts] are inseparable without disbanding the stately minuet of Art” (95). Wagner desires re-integration, but still sees music as the transcendent art. While he famously hails Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony as the “apotheosis of the dance” (124), the Ninth is a greater achievement because it “anchors” itself in the “Word” and in doing so surpasses, by embodying, the other arts (126–7). Although his argument borders on logical implosion, it nevertheless fuses both philosophical strains: integration and transcendence.
Wagner’s idealistic fusion was a significant influence on subsequent generations of artists, not least the American dancer Isadora Duncan, who took her inspiration from the Greeks, but explicitly filtered through “the German Masters”: “Beethoven created the Dance in mighty rhythm, Wagner in sculptural form, Nietzsche in Spirit. Nietzsche created the dancing philosopher” (Duncan 1969: 48). For Duncan, the impulse to dance was not only “natural” – to be found in the human body – but also in nature itself: “Man has not invented the harmony of music. It is one of the underlying principles of life” (1969: 78). This conceptual elision of music, dance, and life is prevalent in the early twentieth century, particularly through the metaphor of rhythm, from Emile Jacques-Dalcroze’s “rhythmique,” a force analogous to electricity or to the chemical and physical forces of nature (Spector 1990: 116), to the driving, inspirational energy evoked by lyricist Ira Gershwin’s use of the word “rhythm” (see Crawford 1993: 219). Like the later twentieth-century concept of “soul” (the African-American roots of both are probably not coincidental), this “rhythm” came from life and gave life to dance.
Duncan descends from the dominant Germanic musico-philosophical line; but, for most of the nineteenth century, theatrical dance had followed a more southerly route. Ballet arose from social dances codified in the French court of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and became increasingly professional by the nineteenth. It developed as an independent art relatively late, emerging from divertissement within opera to a free-standing entity near mid-century. French dancer and choreographer Marius Petipa almost single-handedly created the classical ballet when he was recruited to the Imperial Theater of St. Petersburg, Russia. The two lines converge when Isadora Duncan’s visit to Russia in 1904 significantly impacts many artists, including Mikhail Fokine, the first choreographer of impresario Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. This company of Russian dancers in Paris (1909–29) worked with the most prominent composers and artists of the day, setting the foundation for the coming century of dance.
Many find in the Ballets Russes the closest realization of the Gesamtkunstwerk yet achieved – Sparshott posits that these ballets “fail” in being collaborative, rather than being the product of one artist. Diaghilev may have assembled the artists, but he would not have claimed the kind of authorship Wagner envisioned. Sparshott suggests that the company’s collaborative aesthetic did not serve as the model it might have because of a philosophical clash with the individualistic mainstream of modernist art (1988: 69), though its impact was nonetheless tremendous.
One of Duncan’s principal influences on Fokine, and by extension the Ballets Russes and its progeny, was that she did not shy away from dancing to “great music”: Beethoven, Chopin, Schubert, even Wagner, implicitly restoring equality between music and dance, though this was – next to her scanty attire – the most controversial aspect of Duncan’s art. Despite this redressed imbalance, the modernist ideal of individual expression (essentially an intensification rather than rejection of major Romantic principles, such as organicism and the importance of innovative “genius”) emphasized division, a policing of the boundaries between and even within arts.
Sparshott has aptly compared music and dance to the hydrogen and oxygen atoms in a molecule of water (1995: 227), but this concise image has not impeded him from making some of the most nuanced examinations of the music-dance compound:
It is often said that dance movement is characteristically movement patterned by music – or, more precisely, since one can dance without music, movement patterned as if by music. But really, dance is in some respects prior to abstract music. Time as the measure of movement depends on what is moved, and in music as pure form nothing is really moved. Should we not say that what singers and players of instruments do is already to dance, in that they perform the dance that will embody the form that the music identifies? No, better not; but one sees the point of saying it.
(1988: 374–5)
The human body is the medium of dance: its material, its means of communication, and the substance through which it propagates. For Wagner, this made dance the most realistic of all the arts (1993: 100). For Louis Horst, Martha Graham’s musical director and mentor, the physical manifestations of dance and the basic elements of music are equivalent: rhythm is rhythm, whether manifested in sound or motion; melody is linear contour, an outline traced in space; and harmony is voice, “that inner muscular quality which is the physical essence of movement” (Horst and Russell 1967: 30) and realized in the body as “understand[ing] through contrast” (33) – what is dissonance and resolution in music becomes muscular tension and release in the body.
Horst, like Duncan, looked back beyond the received conventions of art to previous eras for his concepts. The dancing body had grown increasingly incorporeal as ballet became an art: the impetus was increasingly “up,” toward lightness and ease, an aristocratic bearing unencumbered by gravity. Pointe shoes decreased the body’s contact with the ground, and long tulle tutus hid the muscular work of the legs to heighten the illusion of weightlessness; dancers of Romantic ballet portrayed ethereal characters – sylphs, wilis, ghost nuns. In Petipa’s classical ballet, the body regained substance and muscularity, though still through graceful characters such as swans and princesses; dance movements became more defined, and tutus were shortened for the display of athletic legs.
These bodies were disciplined, as Plato had counseled, but Isadora Duncan found them ugly, distorted by the artificiality of their training and dress. This reaction against ballet was a strong feature in modern dance; Duncan’s striking recollection of seeing Eleanora Duse on stage was not about the actress’s movement, but how her presence grew in stillness (Duncan 1969: 121). This outward manifestation of the inward, a return to the body and “weight,” recurs frequently in modernist dance aesthetics: in the “primitive” stamping of Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring, in Graham’s psychological dramas, in Katherine Dunham’s anthropological exploration of African roots of Caribbean dance.
Ironically, it is Duncan who predicts the direction ballet (and music) will take in the twentieth century by denying ballet’s ability to convey the new American. In hindsight, her words in “I See America Dancing” evoke both Aaron Copland and the Balanchine dancer: “Long-legged strong boys and girls” will dance to music that will “gush forth from the great stretches of earth, rain down from the vast sky spaces of stars, and the American will be expressed in some mighty music that will shape its chaos to Harmony” (Duncan 1969: 49).
Duncan’s death comes in the same year as George Balanchine’s Apollo: 1927. Although based in the classical Russian technique, Apollo presages the new, clean, athletic, disciplined, and fast American ballet. The critical inspiration for Balanchine came in the restraint of Stravinsky’s music: “it seemed to tell me that I could dare not to use everything, that I, too, could eliminate” (Balanchine 1949: 81). Complementarily, American composer Elliot Carter cites Balanchine’s ever-unfolding transition from one gesture to another as a key inspiration for his own composition (in Mason 1991: 166) – music is not always the leading partner.
Dance in the new American century, however, was not merely an elevated art on the theatrical stage, but also a popular pleasure, one heavily influenced by an African-American culture and aesthetic of bodily movement far removed from the one to which Duncan aspired, her “natural” beauty conditioned by her Euro- American culture. Technological advances in communications and travel after the First World War brought various dialects of body language into more vigorous contact, impossible to separate from their source cultures, whether the stain of slavery in the US or the rise of fascism in Europe, each providing a particular filter through which to view the moving body. Although himself an enthusiastic (and apparently skilled) ballroom dancer, émigré philosopher Theodor Adorno viewed the jazz dancing of his adopted American home in the 1930s with disgust; for him, the music contained no “authentic” complexity and therefore no intellectual content. The sheer appeal to the body created in the “jitterbuggers” a “spite” that they turned upon themselves in frustration:
They cannot be altogether the spineless lot of fascinated insects they are called and like to style themselves. They need their will, if only in order to down the all too conscious premonition that something is “phony” with their pleasure.
(Adorno 2002b: 468)
Adorno’s own experiences could cast a pall on otherwise telling historical and sociological observations of the swing era into which he had been rather unceremoniously dumped, perhaps most dramatically in his quasi-geometric “proof” of jazz = fascism:
The effectiveness of the principle of march music in jazz is evident. The basic rhythm of the continuo and the bass drum is completely in sync with march rhythm, and, since the introduction of six-eight time, jazz could be transformed effortlessly into a march. The connection here is historically grounded; one of the horns used in jazz is called the Sousaphone, after the march composer. Not only the saxophone has been borrowed from the military orchestra; the entire arrangement of the jazz orchestra, in terms of the melody, bass, obbligati, and mere filler instruments, is identical to that of the military band. Thus jazz can be easily adapted for use by fascism.
(Adorno 2002a: 486)
The jazz band, he notes correctly, is rooted in the military, and each step in his historical march is essentially correct, but that last one is a doozy.
Whether as the other, the beloved object, or an accent or slang, the vernacular is inescapable in the twentieth century, always in productive tension with the cultivated. Popular music, largely African-American or otherwise “ethnic,” brought the body back into music in ways in which hegemonic European culture had largely effaced. Dance historian Constance Valis Hill observes that some French-based choreographers of the 1920s adopted only the superficial “primitive” aspects of jazz, but others went deeper:
They explored the structural and dynamic aspects of jazz music such as speed, dissonance, polytonality and polyrhythms that accented, pulsed and even suspended time. They assimilated the parts of jazz dances that isolated body parts, squared the port de bras, and created new body dynamics.
(Hill 1996: 228)
Racism remains a subtext even in the enthusiastic French embrace of African and African-American dance in the 1920s; popular dance was certainly not immune. For example, in tap dance the light-footed, upward-impulsed, composed body of Bill Robinson (and his crossover audience) was seen by some black dancers as “white,” whereas Eleanor Powell’s low (pelvic) center of gravity and downward drive was seen as “black” (where, of course, “black” is seen as “authentic,” itself a highly contested cultural construct).
A reintegration of music and dance in the body permeates the century. Critic André Levinson described Josephine Baker’s dancing as if the music came from inside her (Hill 1996: 236). This embodiment of music runs through not just Elvis Presley’s swiveling pelvis or the dancer-singers such as Madonna and Britney Spears, for whom the voice is adjunct to the body rather than the reverse, but more emphatically in the black gospel tradition represented in various inflections by Sam Cooke, James Brown, Jackie Wilson, Aretha Franklin, and Al Green. Michael Jackson’s riffs can seem to be generated from the impetus of his light but dynamic dancing, rather than his movements being a choreographed response to the music. At the other end of the vernacular–cultivated divide, Leslie Satin observes that in the danced “operas” of Meredith Monk, “the movement is the singing and the singing is the movement” (1996: 126). Monk herself recalls Isadora Duncan’s “environmental” dancing when she says, “to find the flow I realized that in those days I could really let myself be danced by the air and by the space and I could let myself be sung” (quoted in Satin 1996: 137).
Choreography is the constructed union of music and dance. To a great degree, it is in this practical aesthetic exploration where we find the most specific thought about the relationship between music and dance.
At choreography’s peak as an independent art, the choreographer of the classical ballet in Imperial Russia is the dominant creative power, soliciting music from the specialist composer. Yet this is not exactly music ordered by the yard.
Music must excite, support and guide the movement of the choreographic artists . . . In short, as the best woman is the one of whom nothing is said, the best music for ballet is that which passes almost unnoticed, for once the public’s attention is directed toward the music, it means that the music is not wholly suited to the subject, although excellent in and of itself.
(Valentin Skalkovsky, quoted in Wiley 1985: 8)
If this balance is appropriately struck, the music is deemed dansante, “which, although a quality not easily defined, is wrongly condemned as trivial” (Wiley 1985: 5–6). At its simplest, dansante music comprises a steady beat and melody to support (and presumably incite) the movement.
Historically, it had been possible to distinguish between music for dancing (social dance, ballet) and music such as a symphonic minuet and trio that was conceptually and rhythmically dance music, but not intended for the practical purpose of dancing. After Duncan, that distinction blurs; it becomes possible to dance to all music – or no music, although, in practice, dance without music tends to be about the absence of music or the sounds made by the dancers. Such dance is still perceived through the ordering principles we deem “musical.”
Duncan, for all her embrace of “great music,” counseled students, “Please don’t let any one persuade you to try to dance to Debussy . . . the gesture of Debussy is all inward – and has no outward or upward” (1969: 107). Horst does not exactly disagree, but has a more nuanced understanding of impressionist music:
Frequently altered tempo, abrupt changes in dynamics (from a tense to a relaxed movement, from a slow to a fast or a change in space and pace) contribute to the shimmering, fragmented quality which gives the style its flavor. Although it is impossible for the human body actually to fragment itself, by these devices of interrupted line, texture, and rhythm an effect can be achieved which is similar to the one the painters attained with their broken colors.
(Horst and Russell 1967: 138)
Horst, a musician by training, conceived of (and taught) choreography according to the principles of music composition, and, like the Romantic symphonists, relied upon pre-classical dance forms for structure. One of his first rules was that composition was not an inspirational experience but based on “a conception of a theme and the manipulation of that theme” (Horst and Russell 1967: 23).
Ruth St. Denis coined “music visualization” as “a substitute for the much abused expression ‘interpretive’” (Spector 1990: 209–10). “Music visualization” can be understood as merely reproducing acoustic events in the visual realm, but this superficial understanding wildly underestimates the creativity required. The same music can inspire many divergent interpretations, which can in turn influence the audience’s reception of the music.
Doris Humphrey, who embraced “music visualization” both as terminology and as practice, wrote with insight and, more rare, practicality. Her discussion of music suitable for dance echoes Skalkovsky’s: not all music is suitable for dance, particularly the “too-complex composition in general, which is so demanding of attention that it cannot make a good partner” (Humphrey 1959: 132).
But she also argues for independence, if not autonomy:
The dance should be related to, but not identical with, the music, because this is redundant – why say in dance exactly what the composer has already stated in music? . . . The ideal relationship is like a happy marriage in which two individuals go hand in hand, but are not identical twins.
(Humphrey 1959: 164)
Humphrey’s conception of this “ideal relationship” is broad-ranging: dance without music “does not seem empty, or as though the bottom had dropped out, but increases concentration and attention to movement to an astonishing degree” (142). She relates that in setting a procession to Bach’s Passacaglia in C minor her choreographic idea was nine bars against eight of music – but “no one noticed” (135); however, such contrasting or contrapuntal hypermeasures create a rhythmic tension, whether they are consciously noticed or not (Jordan 1996: 21).
The choreographer most associated with music–dance counterpoint is undoubtedly George Balanchine, particularly in his collaboration with Stravinsky, with whom he shared an artisan’s approach to creation: “When I listen to a score by him I am moved – I don’t like the word inspired – to try to make visible not only the rhythm, melody and harmony, but even the timbres of the instruments” (1949: 78). Still, rhythm is the ordering principle as well as the impetus to motion:
Stravinsky’s strict beat is his sign of authority over time; over his interpreters too. A choreographer should, first of all, place confidence without limit in this control. For Stravinsky’s rhythmic invention, possible only above a stable base, will give the greatest stimulus to his own powers. A choreographer can’t invent rhythms, he only reflects them in movement. . . . As an organizer of rhythms, Stravinsky has been more subtle and various than any single creator in history. And since his rhythms are so clear, so exact, to extemporize with them is improper.
(Balanchine 1949: 75)
But, on a finer scale than even Humphrey, Balanchine values silence:
A pause, an interruption, is never empty space between indicated sounds. It is not just nothing. It acts as a carrying agent from the last sound to the next one . . . An interpreter should not fear (unfortunately many do) Stravinsky’s calculated, dynamic use of silence. He should give it his trust and, what’s more, his undivided attention.
(1949: 76)
Balanchine’s choreography certainly embraces these rests and pauses: enchaînements repeat, syncopated against musical repetition so that each movement is constantly recontextualized; a rest can act as a spotlight or quotation marks, framing a movement. But the counterpoint extends far beyond the step or phrase, into the architectural: “Planning rhythm is like planning a house, it needs a structural operation” (Balanchine 1949: 75). Stravinsky echoes: “Balanchine’s visualization of the Movements exposed relationships of which I had not been aware in the same way. Seeing it, therefore, was like touring a building for which I had drawn the plans but never completely explored the result” (1972: 34).
Twentieth-century choreography converged toward the Balanchinian counterpoint between music and dance: complex and flexible, ranging over cultivated and more vernacular styles. In theatrical and cinematic dance, the relationship between music and dance is particularly close, as a choreographer will work with a dance arranger who shapes and orchestrates the music to best support and reflect the dance, creating a unified whole. In collaboration with electronic composer Thom Willems, William Forsythe’s ballets, such as . . .In the Middle Somewhat Elevated . . ., often impose large-scale structures on repetitive or seemingly random musical patterns, just as individual gestures can be highlighted by – or themselves highlight – particular musical events. Even when that intimate interaction is denied, it can be found by the audience: in the intentional divergence in the collaboration of John Cage and Merce Cunningham, music and dance are composed separately, each according to its own chance operations, and what happens when they are performed together is the “work.” As audiences are inextricably bound by their enculturation, however, they will unconsciously register the coincidences and contrasts of the movements and sounds as an unfolding counterpoint.
Sparshott proposes perhaps the most succinct and yet powerful means of approaching music and dance by declaring the relationship prepositional: one may dance to, with, for, against, around, across, or on top of music. This simple idea is tremendously provocative, and implicitly underlies much work in the emerging field of dance analysis. Each preposition suggests a different relationship, one that can be (and often is) grasped immediately by dancers, musicians, critics, and audiences. The challenge is to explain how this impression is created, though the language may remain beyond our grasp. “I am not sure I have ever seen anyone dance ‘under the music’,” Sparshott concludes, “but I am by no means sure I haven’t” (1995: 224).
See also Adorno (Chapter 36), Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Chapter 24), Music, philosophy, and cognitive science (Chapter 54), Plato (Chapter 28), Rhythm, melody, and harmony (Chapter 3), Visual music and synesthesia (Chapter 44), and Wagner (Chapter 35).
Adorno, T.W. (2002a [1936]) “On Jazz,” in Adorno (2002c), pp. 470–95.
—— (2002b [1941]) “On Popular Music,” in Adorno (2002c), pp. 437–69.
—— (2002c) Essays on Music, ed. R. Leppert, trans. S.H. Gillespie, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Aristotle (1984) Poetics, trans. I. Bywater, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2, ed. J. Barnes, Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 2316–40.
Balanchine, G. (1949) “The Dance Element in Stravinsky’s Music,” in M. Lederman (ed.) Stravinsky in the Theatre, New York: Pellegrini & Cudahy, pp. 75–84.
Bonds, M.E. (1997) “Idealism and the Aesthetics of Instrumental Music at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 50: 387–420.
Cohen, S.J. et al. (1998) International Encyclopedia of Dance: A Project of Dance Perspectives Foundation, Inc., New York: Oxford University Press.
Crawford, R. (1993) The American Musical Landscape, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Duncan, I. (1969) The Art of the Dance, ed. S. Cheney, New York: Theatre Arts Books.
Hill, C.V. (1996) “Jazz Modernism,” in Morris (1996), pp. 227–42.
Horst, L. and Russell, C. (1967) Modern Dance Forms in Relation to the Other Modern Arts, New York: Dance Horizons.
Humphrey, D. (1959) The Art of Making Dances, New York: Rinehart.
Jaques-Dalcroze, É. (1980 [1930]) Eurhythmics, Art and Education, trans. F. Rothwell, ed. C. Cox, New York: Arno Press.
Jordan, S. (1996) “Musical/Choreographic Discourse: Method, Music Theory, and Meaning,” in Morris (1996), pp. 15–28.
Levitin, D.J. (2006) This is your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, New York: Dutton.
Mason, F. (1991) I Remember Balanchine: Recollections of the Ballet Master by Those who Knew Him, New York: Doubleday.
Morris, G. (ed.) (1996) Moving Words: Re-writing Dance, London: Routledge.
Plato (1900) Laws, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, trans. B. Jowett, vol. 4, New York: The Jefferson Press, pp. 1–480.
Ratner, L.G. (1980) Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style, New York: Schirmer Books.
Sadie, S. (ed.) (2001) The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edn, London: Macmillan.
Satin, L. (1996) “Being Danced Again: Meredith Monk, Reclaiming the Girlchild,” in Morris (1996), pp. 121–40.
Sparshott, F.E. (1988) Off the Ground: First Steps to a Philosophical Consideration of the Dance, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
—— (1995) A Measured Pace: Toward a Philosophical Understanding of the Arts of Dance, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Spector, I. (1990) Rhythm and Life: The Work of Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, Stuyvesant: Pendragon Press.
Stravinsky, I. (1972) Themes and Conclusions, London: Faber.
Wagner, R. (1993) The Art-work of the Future, and other works, trans. W.A. Ellis, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Wiley, R.J. (1985) Tchaikovsky’s Ballets: Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, Nutcracker, Oxford: Oxford University Press.