While dance and music have been intertwined since their origins, the modern visual-corporeal-musical spectacle we call ballet has its origins in the splendor of the French royal court in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. French operas of those eras, which sometimes went by the designation "opéra-ballet," were grand, intricate pageants incorporating dance, singing, and wondrous stage machinery and design. (read more)

While dance and music have been intertwined since their origins, the modern visual-corporeal-musical spectacle we call ballet has its origins in the splendor of the French royal court in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. French operas of those eras, which sometimes went by the designation "opéra-ballet," were grand, intricate pageants incorporating dance, singing, and wondrous stage machinery and design. In its most common manifestations, however, ballet music is instrumental; the combination of music and dance tells and embodies the story. The ballet was brought to perfection in nineteenth-century France. Adolph Adam's Giselle might be thought of as a touchstone of classical ballet, and its image of a heroine doomed to keep dancing forever lurked in the minds of choreographers for decades afterward. The tights and tutus associated with ballet also were standardized by the early productions of Giselle. Classical ballet nowadays is most often linked in the mind with the transplantation of the French art of dance to Russia (largely the work of choreographer Marius Petipa), where the ballet music of Tchaikovsky gained public affection that has declined not a bit up to the present day: Swan Lake is pervasive enough, but The Nutcracker has become part of popular culture. Ballet music, often condensed and arranged into "suites," is often heard in concerts and on records, but the ballets of Stravinsky and other great ballet composers arose as collaborations between composer and choreographer -- between creator of music and creator of dance. Several of Stravinsky's greatest scores -- Petrouchka, The Firebird, and The Rite of Spring, to name just a few -- are usually performed as orchestral music today but were originally written for dancers. Copland is another composer whose connections with dance are underappreciated; such beloved works as Billy the Kid and Rodeo were composed with choreography in mind. The original choreographer of The Rite of Spring, Vaslav Nijinsky, and its promoter, Serge Diaghilev, were key players in expanding the vocabulary of dance beyond its traditionally graceful set of moves, and for much of the twentieth century new dance works were designated by the term "modern dance" rather than "ballet." Modern choreographers tended to draw eclectically on a variety of musical sources for their works, but some worked closely with contemporary composers. Many of John Cage's early pieces entailed collaborations with Merce Cunningham and other choreographers, and Meredith Monk is perhaps the most inventive of a number of contemporary creative figures whose works include both music and dance elements.(collapse)