Gastvortrag (Jour fixe)

Amy Ming Wai Tai: „A Phenomenological Approach to Analyzing Choreomusical Form“

Zeit: 5. November 2026, 18 Uhr c.t.
Ort: Raum A0201, Seilerstätte 26, 1010 Wien

Is form being or becoming, or both? Music scholars have understood musical form as one or the other (e.g. Schmalfeldt 2011, Bonds 2010). Analyzing choreographies to music may inspire us to consider this question differently than analyzing music alone, because dance is both becoming and being. Dancers experience becoming as their bodies go through continuous change in the process of dancing, but the being of their bodies continues to exist. This paper explores the nature of the form of a choreography to music (which I call “choreomusical form”) by extending ideas from phenomenology, a field of study that is concerned with questions of being and becoming in relation to space, time, and movement. Dancers comment that the logic of a dance emerges from what came before and from the music. However, there is also no preconceived notion of what that logic is outside of the context of the specific piece. A successful choreography is thus enwrapped in an apparent paradox where the work fulfills the logic that it creates for itself. This seeming conundrum reflects phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s idea of “chiasm,” where terms in a relation co-create and co-define each other without settling into a stable relationship, so that there is constant movement between them. In analyzing choreomusical form, the logic of the work and the fulfillment of the logic exist in a reciprocal relationship: the logic of the piece arises out of previous events and creates expectations on what happens next, but the fulfillment of the logic in turn changes the logic itself because new events change the perception of the whole. In other words, form emerges in the chiasm between being (logic created by previous events) and becoming (updating that logic as more events unfold). To illustrate my theories, I will analyze the first movement of Serenade (1934) by George Balanchine, choreographed to P. I. Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings in C Major Op. 48. The music is in sonatina form, with predictable repetitions of sections. However, the choreography does not repeat except at the introduction and coda; in between we only see continuously morphing patterns that do not map neatly onto the narrative arc of the music. The logic of this piece comes from the interaction between unpredictable patterns in the dance and predictable ones in the music, and it is the negotiation between the two in the process of perception that creates the form of the piece. I conclude by discussing whether insights from analyzing choreomusical form may lead us to think of musical form in novel ways.

Amy Ming Wai Tai is an assistant professor of Music Theory at Indiana University-Bloomington. She finished her PhD in Music Theory at Yale University (2024), MA in Music Theory at University Wisconsin-Madison (2018), and BA in English Studies and Music at the University of Hong Kong (2016). Her research focuses on the relationship between ballet and modern dance and western art music. Her other research interests include phenomenology, narrativity in non-programmatic dance and music, and Labanotation, one of the most widely used dance notation systems. She is working on a book, tentatively titled Between Being and Becoming: A Phenomenological Approach to Choreomusical Analysis.