Doris's Dance Rhythms from Tap to Type

It's safe to say that, in the relationship between a dance and its music, the music has to come first to a certain degree.  That isn't to say that music can't be written with certain moves in mind, but rather that even in the basic start of choreography the dancer has to hear something as they flail alluringly.  I've only encountered a few pieces that invert this relationship, making music off the action or very idea of dance, and today we've got one of the lucky few.  It begins with modern dancer Doris Humphrey (1895-1958), a contemporary of Martha Graham and co-header of the Humphrey-Weidman company (partner Charles Weidman shown above).  I'm not exactly sure how she met semi-serial composer Wallingford Riegger (1885-1961), but the result of their meeting would make it into a modern percussion anthology, which made it into my hands at the Harvard music library.

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While the idea of notating through music improvised dance rhythms is a neat one, and everybody seems to have been happy with the result, I'm a bit sorry to say this piece is also a good example of why early percussion ensemble music doesn't hold up that well.  This piece dates from the late '30's, a time when the very idea of music by percussion alone was a novel one, and the seminal periodical New Music Edition gathered a bunch of pieces of that ilk for a compilation.  The best one is Johanna Beyer's IV (the piece I heard live and mistook for the Waltz in my article), and it doesn't take too many glances at this one to see that there's not much to see (though it's a nice touch that Riegger deferred to Humphrey on the composition credit).  I'd normally apologize for not finding a recording but in this case you can just look at the thing and hear it just fine.  Riegger did write a band piece called Dance Rhythms years later that might have a couple of these guys in it but I couldn't tell after a first listen.  Somebody could make a case for proto-minimalism here, and I'll let them have that opinion.  It just seems a little stodgy.  I mean, Wally, where's your sense of fun?  Your friend Ray's having a great time with soda bottles right over there!

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~PNK