Music and Dance: The Rodeo Suite

As a society, we are constantly pairing things together in hopes of enhancing them: apple pie and ice cream, Indians and cowboys, and most relevant to this paper, music and dance. In an art form like ballet, it seems as though music and dance complement each other equally. Truly, it is hard to picture, or perform, a dance without music. However, this may not be the case for music, even if that music is composed specifically for a dance routine. The compilation of the music and the dancing from a scene in the American cowboy ballet Rodeo will be examined to ultimately help us understand they way in which they serve each other as a unit and their ability to function independently.

Music is reliant on expression through the medium of sound. Dance revolves around expression through movement. The ballet Rodeo, choreographed by Agnes de Mille and composed by Aaron Copland in 1942, combines these two channels to emphasize this ballet as an American genre about cowboys and cowgirls in the west. At the insistence of de Mille, characterization and emotion portrayal in both the choreography and the music was necessary (Pollack 369). Before Copland began composing Rodeo, de Mille outlined the dance for Copland in detail. She let him know how many measures she wanted for specific dance scenes and gave him descriptions of the music she wanted for a specific scenes and characters (Pollack 367). She also provided Copland with some cowboy folk tunes that he could incorporate into his compositions (Pollack 367). Seemingly, Copland was providing most of the collaboration for this ballet de Mille had envisioned. The inspiration for most of the music came from the dance movements and the story of the ballet. This is unlike Copland’s later compositi...

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...ricans roots and cultural identity. Overall, the Rodeo suite is an accessible piece that portrays the American brand.

Be that as it may, the music was composed in the context of the story of Rodeo, and once that association was made it is hard to break. Both Copland and de Mille forged an American masterpiece with their groundbreaking music and choreography, respectively. The work that both artists put into Rodeo contributed to the revolutionary new genre of 20th Century American ballet. The music and dancing work in parallel and in close interaction, to convey this humorous and lighthearted story. There would have been no ballet without both of these components. Nonetheless, the music composed under the inspiration and choreography of the story is successful as an entity. Although most things come best in pairs, the individual components may be just as harmonious.