Intonation in the plastic arts: analysing baroque dance music

Материал из HEPTACHOR.

INTONATION IN THE PLASTIC ARTS: ANALYSING BAROQUE DANCE MUSIC

Tatiana Rybkina (Tula)

The idea of “intonation” in the plastic arts, including dance, is a child of the search for synthesis or unity, so typical of turn-of the-century art.

Dance tales the idea of intonation from music. Speech intonation shapes both music and the art movement. An image in music is unconsciously perceived as an expressive gesture. The latter is understood as a “non-sound equivalent of the intonation in music”, which conserve its energy, direction and spatial shape. It is perceived as a “silent portrait” of intonation. This tradition of scholarship coined the terms, “intoned gesture” and “intonation in the plastic arts”.

In contemporary literature on choreography, music and music education, the term, “intonation in the plastic arts”, has different meanings. They range from “an expression of music in bodily plasticity” (which is close to free dance) and “the original movement impulse, spontaneously emerging under the influence of music, created by music” (linked to the improvisation in music) to “movement which reflects the character of the music”, etc.

Under the “intonation in the plastic arts”, we understand the “actual interaction of bodily movements and the music, which expresses a certain meaning”. It has two aspects:

• 1. “movement influenced by the music”, with the accent on the movement;

• 2. “movement in the music”, with the accent on the music.

1. The meaning in dance is created by the key intonation, which combines movement with affect.

Intonation in both music and the plastic arts is based on the rhythmical organisation of dance, which itself originates in human anthropology.

The music that accompanies dance, reflects the key intonation through the key rhythmical figure, which has its peculiar genre, style and imitative qualities.

Tempo, meter and rhythm patterns all contribute to creating rhythmical unity and semantic depth of musical intonation. They can be co-ordinated in different ways in the system “movement-music”. Rhythm is only an invariant quality of the intonation in the plastic arts.

2. “Movement in the music” is based in the musical or acoustic text – a sounding music piece.

It opens a possibility for reconstructing movements out of the music by means of the plastic analysis. The latter can discover hidden layers of musical content – of its genre, for instance – which we will demonstrate with the example of a baroque suite. In the theatre, “Galiarda”, of the Tula College of the Arts, we used such analysis for reconstructing dance movements out of the music. Our analysis includes three stages: verbal (a narrative about dance), musical and plastic perception. We analysed «basse dance» (ground-level, promenade-like dances) and «haut dance» (with high, limping movements); «basic dance suite» and «intermissions» from the point of view of their plastic depth. We used seventeenth-century music, like this fragment of a bourrée by an anonymous composer from M. Prettorius’ Collection.

• Stage I. The word bourrée means to make sudden leaps. It is a medieval French dance, a version of branle. It was often accompanied by singing or yelling of the dancers. Dancers formed two lines – male and female. Movements were slow and heavy, with strong tapping of heals into the ground. Their character was determined by the dancers’ wooden shoes ready to slip off the foot.

• Stage II. By listening to the fragment, we determine its moderate tempo; its meter 2/2; its balanced and simple rhythm out of quarters; spring-like ascending motion with numerous impulses; repeated motifs. They are typical of simple and heavy leaps.

• Stage III. Movements are selected out of the familiar vocabulary and connect to each other by means of repetitions, variations and contrasts.

This is an example of “decoding” the information from a music piece, which itself is a “mould” of the movements that created it. It is based on usage of music-and-plastic “intonation patterns”, or “formula”.