Smithsonian Associates: Ballet Music – The Soul of Movement, Lecture 4 – Ballet’s Diaspora

Audiences love the spectacle and the sets, adore the costumes, and thrill to the brilliance and beauty of the choreography and the performers, and above all we are moved and exalted by the music. While dance is as old as we are, ballet is a much more recent evolution. By tracing ballet’s rapid journey from French courtly dance to an internationally beloved artform, we find its path travels directly through the magnificent scores of composers like Debussy, Stravinsky, Copland, and of course, Tchaikovsky.

In a 4-session series, speaker and concert pianist Rachel Franklin uses her unique live piano demonstrations and historic and contemporary film clips to illustrate how the music from such ballet masterpieces as Giselle, Swan Lake, Daphnis and Chloë, Le Sacre du Printemps, and Appalachian Spring became a treasured part of our cultural landscape.

British-born Franklin has been a featured speaker for organizations including the Library of Congress and NPR, exploring intersections among classical and jazz music, film scores, and the fine arts.

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The United States saw some of the finest ballet creations of the 20th century. Aaron Copland created scores of enormous beauty working with the great choreographers Agnes de Mille and Martha Graham, and jazz found its way naturally into masterpieces by Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins. Franklin also looks at how choreographers such as Balanchine, Ashton, and Macmillan used classical music not originally composed for ballet.