Music-Dance: Sound and Motion in Contemporary Discourse

Music-Dance explores the identity of choreomusical work, its complex authorship and its modes of reception as well as the cognitive processes involved in the reception of dance performance. Scholars of dance and music analyse the ways in which a musical score changes its prescriptive status when it becomes part of a choreographic project, the encounter between sound and motion on stage, and the intersection of listening and seeing. As well as being of interest to musicologists and choreologists considering issues such as notation, multimedia and the analysis of performance, this volume will appeal to scholars interested in applied research in the fields of cognition and neuroscience. The line-up of authors comprises representative figures of today’s choreomusicology, dance historians, scholars of twentieth-century composition and specialists in cognitive science and performance studies. Among the topics covered are multimedia and the analysis of performance; the notational practice of choreographers and the parallel attempts of composers to find a graphic representation for musical gestures; and the experience of dance as a paradigm for a multimodal perception, which is investigated in terms of how the association of sound and movement triggers emotions and specific forms of cognition.

Patrizia Veroli is an independent dance scholar. She has been awarded a number of fellowships and grants and was a fellow of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies at Columbia in 1998. She is the author of Milloss. Un maestro della coreografia tra espressionismo e classicità (1996) and other volumes about XX century dance. She curated a few exhibitions and co-edited several volumes, among which are Omaggio a Djagilev (with D. Rizzi, 2011), and I Ballets Russes di Diaghilev tra storia e mito (with G. Vinay, 2013, 2 tomes). She is a member of the advisory board of Dance Chronicle and of the international board of Recherches en danse.

Gianfranco Vinay has been Professor of History of Music at the Conservatory of Turin (1974-1992) and later Maître de conférences in the Music Department of the University of Paris 8. He is the author of Stravinsky neoclassico. L’invenzione della memoria nel ’900 musicale (1987) and the editor of Stravinsky and Gershwin (both in 1992). His recent books include Charles Ives et l’utopie sonore américaine (2001), Quaderno di strada di Salvatore Sciarrino (2007) and Immagini gesti parole suoni silenzi. Drammaturgia delle opere vocali e teatrali di Salvatore Sciarrino (2010). He is the co-editor of I Ballets Russes di Diaghilev tra storia e mito (with P. Veroli, 2013, 2 tomes). He is a member of the advisory board of the journal Il Saggiatore Musicale.