Embodied musicology has shown that many musical concepts, such as metaphors of musical space and motion, benefit from being understood in embodied terms. However, these metaphors often feel abstract and analytically irrelevant to music theorists. Dance has the potential to illuminate these ideas because it visualizes phenomena, such as movement across physical space, that are often considered as merely metaphorical in musical discourse. Drawing on examples in the aesthetics, philosophy, technique, and choreography in ballet and modern dance, this paper explores how dance helps us revisit conventional understandings of important metaphors in western art music, especially those that are difficult to comprehend if we think of music as only a notational artefact. For instance, what did musical phenomenologists such as Rudolf Bode and Victor Zuckerkandl mean when they wrote that rhythm and meter constitute a flow of force, and that even rests are filled with force and energy? How do we understand the concept of transition in music, when there is no physical need for one note to prepare for the next? Applying research in dance kinesthetics, I show how it takes a careful balancing of forces in different directions for a dancer to “hold” a pose. As such, there is no true stillness in dance. Moreover, transitions are physically necessary in dance, because dancers cannot jump from one place to another without travelling through the space in between. Analyses of dance-music interactions in specific choreographies demonstrate how understanding such metaphors from the perspective of dance can lead us to understand the music differently. By using dance to show what an embodied perspective of music looks and feels like, this paper uses the rising discipline of choreomusicology to illuminate core concepts in the established discipline of musicology, thereby challenging us to re-think conventional concepts in music from a novel perspective.

In recent years, there has been an increase in analyzing tap dance through its rhythmic intricacies, bodily elements, and interaction with jazz musicians (Robbins and Wells 2019; Bilidas 2019; Leaman 2021a; Gain 2022). Extending into the domain of form, Brenna Langille (2020) analyzed tap dance at the phrase level demonstrating how tap’s own sense of phrasing interacts with jazz phrase structure. Rachel Gain (2023) explored how tap dance choreography can seek to clarify passages of formal ambiguity in Bach’s music. Building on this scholarship, my paper examines tap dance’s sense of form at the sectional level and its interaction with post-millennial popular music. Being receptive to both the norms of formal sections in popular music (Stephenson 2002; Everett 2009; Summach 2011; Temperley 2018; Nobile 2022) and tap dance’s own internal form created through step difficulty and rhythmic accumulation (Valis Hill 2010), choreographers negotiate between the different formal trajectories of each discipline, simultaneously serving the role of composer and analyst as they add a percussive layer to pre-recorded music. I analyze various choreographies, demonstrating how departures from popular music norms often are in tandem with a preference for tap dance’s formal trajectory, whereas places of formal alignment are uncharacteristic of tap dance form.

Climactic gestures are a commonality between music and dance, serving as clear formal signposts for the audience as well as moments of emotional intensity (Bhogal 2008; Lee 2018, 2020; Touizrar 2020; Touizrar, Garay, and Thompson 2023). Despite their significance in both domains, the relatedness of musical and danced climaxes in choreographic scenes remains underexplored.

This presentation examines how the interaction of choreography with music emphasizes the climactic moments in ballet scenes, using the Lever du jour scene from Maurice Ravel’s symphonie chorégraphique Daphnis et Chloé as its primary analytical example. While Michel Fokine’s original choreography is now lost, several choreographers have reimagined the ballet, including Frederick Ashton (1951, London), Jean-Christophe Maillot (2010, Monaco), and Benjamin Millepied (2014, Paris).

I use three analytical approaches: 1) score-based analysis that describes the introduction and elimination of instruments and rhythmic content, 2) audio analysis that accounts for sound intensity and timbral descriptors (spectral centroid and spectral flux), and 3) choreographic analysis (performance videos) that adapts existing choreomusical notation systems to transcribe and analyze choreographies (Goodchild and McAdams 2018; Leaman 2016; Peeters et al. 2011).

A productive tension is established between the music and the choreography: the climactic gestures analyzed in the score, audio, and choreography do not simply align with and reinforce each other; instead, each domain suggests an interpretation of the other, sometimes requiring a revision of an initial interpretation. The choreographer thus shares control with the composer and the orchestra over how the trajectory of the scene is ultimately understood.

The score, audio, and choreography must be analyzed in conjunction to fully understand the effect of climaxes in a choreographed scene. With this specific case study of Lever du jour, I show that ballet choreography may emphasize or contradict the strength of climaxes as established through the musical content.