Adapting Piano Music for Ballet: Tchaikovsky's Children's Album, Op. 39

Abstract

The purposes of this paper are to impart the skills necessary for adaptation of existing music to novice ballet pianists and to expand their repertoire. New dance musicians often struggle with the choice of existing music for the ballet class. Publications written specifically for the purpose are good sources but can be outdated or limiting. The compositions pianists are familiar with usually need to be adapted to fit an exercise in the ballet class, as each exercise requires a certain musical structure. Pianists have been trained to follow the score reverently and thus need guidance on how to edit existing music for the ballet class. It is preferable to use intermediate rather than advanced piano repertoire as it is less technically demanding and requires less editing. Therefore, the author attempts to elucidate the process of adapting intermediate piano music by using Tchaikovsky’s Children’s Album, Op. 39, as a guiding model. Through the creation of a complete music edition of Children’s Album adapted for the ballet class and video demonstrations with dancers from The University of Arizona School of Dance, the author illustrates how to approach the following adaptations: adding preparatory measures (introduction); changing phrase length (phrase reduction, phrase extension, balances, finishes); changing the form (repeats, order of phrases, transitions); changing accompaniment patterns; making metric alterations (changing time signature, shifting the barline); and finally, reinterpreting markings on the score (tempo, dynamics, accents) to fit the dance.