Tim Lihoreau - Ballet: Classic FM Handy Guides

A t Classic FM, we spend a lot of our time dreaming up wonderful ways of making sure that as many people as possible across the UK have the opportunity to listen to classical music. As the nations biggest classical music radio station, we feel that we have a responsibility to share the worlds greatest music as widely as we can.

Over the years, we have written a variety of classical music books in all sorts of shapes and sizes. But we have never put together a series of books quite like this.

This set of books covers a whole range of aspects of classical music. They are all written in Classic FMs friendly, accessible style and you can rest assured that they are packed full of facts about classical music. Read separately, each book gives you a handy snapshot of a particular subject area. Added together, the series combines to offer a more detailed insight into the full story of classical music. Along the way, we shall be paying particular attention to some of the key composers whose music we play most often on the radio station, as well as examining many of classical musics subgenres.

These books are relatively small in size, so they are not going to be encyclopedic in their level of detail; there are other books out there that do that much better than we could ever hope to. Instead, they are intended to be enjoyable introductory guides that will be particularly useful to listeners who are beginning their voyage of discovery through the rich and exciting world of classical music. Drawing on the research we have undertaken for many of our previous Classic FM books, they concentrate on information rather than theory because we want to make this series of books attractive and inviting to readers who are not necessarily familiar with the more complex aspects of musicology.

For more information on this series, take a look at our website: www.ClassicFM.com/handyguides.

M ikhail Baryshnikov once said, No one is born a dancer. You have to want it more than anything. Whether you agree with that or the American spirituals view that All Gods chillun got rhythm!, one thing is certain: ballet is the artistic pinnacle of dance.

When a human hears rhythmic music, its a primal instinct to start drumming fingers or tapping feet. Studies of sleeping newborns show that they have innate rhythm. Varying rhythms were played as they slept; irregular beats caused imitative reactions in their brains, while regular motifs soothed the breast, leading scientists to conclude that we are born with a built-in sense of rhythm possibly adopted from the mothers heart. But do we have an innate desire for dance?

Dance does seem to be an instinct. Scientists studying the brain have identified corresponding areas of the brain that are responsible for speech production and hand and leg gestures, suggesting that movements were used as a form of expression.

Put simply, dance may have been an early form of language.

Taking this as a starting point, it is not surprising that dance has been part of our societies for thousands of years. The Bhimbetka rock shelters, for example, in what is now Madhya Pradesh in India are thought to date back to 9000 BCE and show representations of communal dance, while an ancient Greek terracotta statuette (c. 3000 BCE) showing a woman dancing was found in Taranto, the birthplace of the dance we now call the tarantella.

All of this is dance, certainly. But its not ballet. To find the earliest twitchings of ballet, we only have to go back to much more recent times.

As with several other forms of artistic expression that combine elements of a number of arts, it is not easy to pinpoint the moment when ballet became identifiable as a discipline in its own right.

Entertainments involving movement to music, often with over-the-top input from scene painters and costume makers, had been taking place in the courts of Europe, particularly in France and Italy, from the time of Catherine de Medici in the mid-sixteenth century. The form, which was known as ballet de cour, came into its own in France, notably at the Burgundian court. It bore some relationship to the entremets of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries no, not tasty snacks between courses beloved of stylish cooks today, but ever more lavish theatrical spectacles staged during banquets and portraying such events as the capture of Jerusalem or the fall of Constantinople.

Frankly, it was a bit of a ragbag. A typical ballet de cour might involve a song to start off with, some rhymed verses, a series of dances on a single theme (known as an entre), followed by an exuberant grand ballet finale. Ducs and comtes, keen to demonstrate their wealth, refinement and artistic sensibility, would not only assemble the necessary talent to commission their own ballet de cour, but would often take a dancing role themselves. Even the Sun King himself, Louis XIV, would perform in one every now and then.

A seminal moment in the history of dance is the establishment in March 1661 in France of the Acadmie Royale de Danse a first attempt to lay down some rules for the genre and prevent it developing into an even more random and bastardised form. Thirteen experts in dance were tasked by the King to restore the art of dancing to its original perfection and to improve it as much as possible. The majority of the acadmistes, drawn from the Kings entourage, were mostly both dancers and musicians, which demonstrates how intertwined the skills related to making music and moving to it were at the time. Indeed a document entitled The Marriage of Music and Dance survives from 1664.

The founding of the Acadmie Royale de Danse was soon followed by the establishment of the Acadmie Royale de Musique. Although the two groups never formally merged, many members of both committees were associated with the Paris Opera Ballet, and over time the dancers at this period exclusively male recruited to entertain the King were interchangeable with those of the stage company.

Rather than existing as an art form on its own, ballet during this period often seemed to be a discrete unit within other entertainments, such as plays and operas.

Pierre Beauchamp (16311705) was born into a family of dance masters. He taught Louis XIV dance for twenty-two years and before his involvement with the Acadmie Royale de Danse he was Director from 1671 he had been the principal choreographer for Molires company of actors, the Troupe du Roy, providing the integrated ballets for plays such as Le bourgeois Gentilhomme and Le Malade imaginaire. Not only is he one of the first identifiable choreographers, but he is also known as one of the first people to attempt to notate dance; his system, published by Raoul-Auger Feuillet, is known as BeauchampFeuillet notation. He is credited with codifying the five positions of the feet still the basis of every childs introduction to classical ballet. He is also important to our story because of his collaborations with the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully (16321687).

From 1672 onwards, the calibre of Lullys music was one of the key factors in ballets popularity. He knew his market, and his market was, in the first and most important instance, the King. Lully always reserved a place in his operas and tragdies en musique for substantial danced sections. If the King was a fan of ballet, then Lully, the Italian servant made good, was canny enough to ensure that there was always ballet for Beauchamp to choreograph and for the King to enjoy.