Music for an American
Dance
Doris Humphrey
American Composer’s Alliance
Bulletin, vol 8 no. 1, 1958
Vivian Fine wrote a score for me some twenty
years ago:—it was quite a score and quite
an experience. She was a true collaborator in a
field, that of composing for dance, which is so
different from other kinds of program music that
it calls for unique qualifications. The dance is
an art which, through a part of the theater, has
its roots in physical and psychological sources
which differ from those of the opera, the film or
the musical to a marked degree. All these forms,
except programmatic concert music, depend on the
word for explicit meaning; consequently music
does not bear the full burden of the dramatic
idea. Not so in dance, where words are rarely
used and movements and music carry all the
responsibility of communication. This means,
among other things, that the theme must be
suitable and intelligible in these
terms—not everything can be danced about.
So the first task in a collaboration of this sort
is the choice of the idea by the
choreographer.
My enthusiasm for James Thurber led me to
select one of his series of drawings, at the time
brand new, concerning the adventures of a middle
class American family called The Race of Life.
Vivian and I both loved his dry and improbable
humor, and the episodes met all the requirements
for dance: plenty of action, contrast,
independence from words. The scenes were all
quite short, six of them, and had subject matter
with a challenging range; The Beautiful Stranger,
Night Creatures, Indians, Spring Song,
culminating in the achievement of the goal, a
mountain top covered with the heart’s
desire—gold, jewels and money.
Vivian Fine met all these moods with
imagination and a full awareness of their
Thurberian gaucherie and humor. Even his
Beautiful Stranger is no chic adolescent, but
plainly bears the germ of the full-grown Thurber
female, rather hard, aggressive and blowzy. To
catch such a conception in music was a difficult
feat. She treated the Indians with a very funny
version of an authentic pseudo-Indian popular
song. Both in the music and the dance our Indians
were phony, gaudy cigar-store fixtures. Night
Creatures was handled with grotesquerie, but
still with a dreamlike delicacy. At this point
she added to the all-piano score a Flexatone
whose sliding eeriness exactly met the
requirements of the weird scene. In its entirety
it was a notable score—bright, humorous,
expert.
Among many other pieces written for the dance
by Vivian Fine, Opus 51, composed for Charles
Weidman, stands out, but in all her undertakings
in the dance field she has an uncanny sense of
what to choose as sound and that sine qua non for
dance composers, a complete understanding of body
rhythms and dramatic timing.