A Note from the Guest Editors

This issue of the Opera Quarterly addresses theoretical, interpretive, and conceptual issues related to opera scholarship and the performing arts in general. It specifically focuses on the dialogue, both in and out of opera, between dance and music.

Producing scholarship about dance is a nettlesome endeavor, demanding first and foremost a knowledge of how the body expresses itself in space and time. For a discussion to have a historical basis, one must read newspaper criticism (some of it highly insightful); absorb the memoirs of passionate, garrulous balletomanes; sift through documents in known and unknown languages; study photographic records and lithographs; and then, if such materials exist, view and re-view film records that are legible to varying degrees. To produce scholarship about dance and music requires, of course, other types of expertise: a sensitive ear and the ability to read notation (best of all, dance as well as music). Largely because of the prerequisite skill set, it is easier to write about music drama than dance drama, which is part of the reason the latter has been trivialized over the former in musicological discourse.

In recent years, the situation has begun to change, and a new discipline, what could be called choreomusicology, has come into being. The essays collected in this issue, which address both technical and aesthetic matters, illustrate some of the conceptual challenges and possibilities of the discipline. Each arose from a paper presented at an international conference on dance and music called "Sound Moves." This event, held on November 5–6, 2005 at the Centre for Dance Research, Roehampton University (London), brought together historians, choreographers, and composers from Europe and North America for a series of academic panels, roundtable discussions, lecture-demonstrations, and performances.

"Sound Moves" sought to inspire new thinking about the possibilities within choreomusicology: a representative sample of that thinking is on display in this issue. Daniel Albright explores the treatment of dance in opera, isolating, for example, moments where the former attempts to imitate the latter, and the significance of that dialogue for a plotline. Dance and music occupy different realities, different worlds, and each, Albright suggests, can alter the time and space of the other. Wayne Heisler discusses how Richard Strauss, who is known primarily for his expressionist and neoclassical operas, came to compose a decadent ballet about Viennese decadence. However hard to believe, the ballet concerns an uprising in a patisserie: syrupy dance, accordingly, provides a topping for syrupy music. Helen Minors traces the history of Paul Dukas' ballet La Péri, showing through a detailed analysis of archival sources how the dance recodes the music. Deborah Mawer situates George Balanchine's setting of Maurice Ravel's La Valse in cultural context while also furnishing an ornate hermeneutic reading of the dance-music dialogue. Finally, Inger Damsholt and Barbara White alternately construct and deconstruct the term that has been the persistent bête noire of dance (and, for that matter, film) historians: Mickey-Mousing.

To different degrees, the events at Roehampton focused on the following questions: what types of dance-music relationships exist in the balletic and non-balletic repertoire, and how can one assess them? What do choreographers look for in music, and composers in choreography? How do dancers embody sound and musicians reflect movement in their performances? Finally, how similar or dissimilar are physical (kinetic) and aural (acoustic) gestures? Methodological issues dominated some of the discussions, as did ontological ones. Dance scholars, more than music scholars, are hampered by an absence of resources. The history of ballet may be as rich as that of opera, but much of it has been lost. It is on many levels an ineffable art.