Preview

Les Délices: Caractères de la danse—

An interview with Debra Nagy

By Mike Telin

The next event in this year's season for Cleveland's French Baroque Ensemble, Les Délices, is “Caractères de la danse”, two concerts scheduled for Saturday, January 28 at 8:00 pm at Tregoning & Company on West 78th Street in Cleveland and Sunday, January 29 at 4:00 pm at Plymouth Church in Shaker Heights. The performers will include Debra Nagy, baroque oboe, Julie Andrijeski, violin, Josh Lee, viola da gamba & Michael Sponseller, harpsichord.

The program includes music by Hotteterre, Rebel and Boismortier and takes us on a journey back in time to the world’s first ballet school, TheAcadémie Royale de la danse, founded in 1661 by King Louis XIV. “A lot of baroque music is based on French dance forms, so it is a wide open palette”, Debra Nagy told by telephone from Chicago. “It was interesting to do the research on the specific dance aspects of the program.” She went on to point out the importance of using the correct terminology when talking about baroque dance. “We tend to talk about baroque dance in a general way, but what we are talking about is the French “noble” style of dancing. This is not to say that dancing was not happening in other places, but it was not as formalized. There was a lot of social dancing, but what was happening during the first half of the seventeenth century in Germany and England was a little more like country dancing — although that was also happening in France as well.”

Ms. Nagy also reminds us not to be overly romantic in our thoughts about TheAcadémie Royale de la danse. Although the French were the first to develop a system for notating the dance movements which is still in use today, “my understanding is that while it is nice to imagine that there were hundreds of ballerinas, in its initial stages it was more like any other intellectual academy — it was mainly men, many of whom were dancing masters who came together to codify and set standards for the field. Dancers were recruited for the academy and it became sort of a feeder for the corp de ballet for the opera.”

Although the baroque dance suite that we know today has its roots in the ballroom, the music that the musicians played from was not nearly as organized. “Musically speaking, the dance suites began as large books of music organized by keys from which players could pick and choose the pieces. The precise collection of dances that we have come to know as the baroque dance suite grew out of what would happen in the ballroom.”

Of all the great dance music in the program there is one piece that Debra Nagy is extremely fond of for a couple of reasons. “Caractères de la danse by Rebel, the piece we adopted as the title of this program is a really great piece. I like to combine pieces that are new to me with ones that I have a long history, and this is one of those pieces that I have been living with for as long as I have been playing the baroque oboe. When I was a student at Oberlin Catherine Turocy from the New York Baroque Dance Company came to do a special project with the students, and Caractères de la danse was on the program.

“The piece is very educational because you hear almost every dance form in the piece, but you only hear eight to sixteen bars of each dance form. Musically it kind of turns on a dime.”

Although Caractères de la danse exists in different versions, a short score as well as one arranged in five-part orchestral scoring, Ms. Nagy notes that “for this concert I have made an arrangement that uses elements of both.”

If you think you need to understand baroque dance in order to enjoy the program, don’t worry, Ms. Nagy says. “This is a chamber music program inspired by dance and it’s a fun program for anyone and everyone regardless of their knowledge of the music. After all this is music that is meant to inspire us to move.”

If you are inclined to read more about French baroque dance, please follow this link to an informative article on the Library of Congress website.

Click here to comment on this article. All comments will be moderated by the editorial staff.

Published on ClevelandClassical.com January 24, 2012

Click here for a printable version of this article.