Friday Miscellanea

The Canadian Opera Company is getting some great publicity from the Toronto Globe and Mail this season. I don't recall such extensive coverage in previous years. Today's piece is on the upcoming production of Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio) composed by Mozart at age twenty-six (he started composing operas at age eleven, so this is a mature work). The article goes into some depth (for a newspaper) on Mozart's Janissary band style, the spoken dialogue and the vocal virtuosity.

The music that Mozart wrote for Abduction (at 26 years old, believe it or not) is not for any old cast of singers. Packed into one opera are all the technical skills that opera singers work for decades to perfect. You'll hear dizzying displays of scales and arpeggios: The lovesick Belmonte kicks off Act 1 with more notes than you ever thought possible from a tenor.

You'll hear basses plunging into to their profound depths: Lean forward and listen as Osmin, right-hand man to the overseer of the harem, dives down to a low D and soars back up as high as an F – this is no droning bass role.

Most memorably, the sopranos of Abduction may cause your ears to pop by hitting impossible heights of their range. In particular, the character Blonde is tasked with singing a few much-anticipated – and freakishly difficult – high Es in her first aria. Konstanze may not rise up quite as high, but she makes a flashy entrance with her first aria, Ach, ich liebte ("Oh, I was in love"), twinkling like a beautiful banshee up on high Bs and Cs.

The way Mozart writes for sopranos is a mix of worshipping their skills and testing their limits – and Abduction is such a extreme example that Milos Forman included it in Amadeus, his 1984 film about Mozart's life. We catch a depiction of the debut performance of The Abduction from the Seraglio in Vienna, 1782, as soprano Caterina Cavalieri, the diva who first sang the role of Konstanze, flaunts the behemoth aria in Act 2, Martern aller Arten ("Tortures unrelenting").

The production runs until February 24 at the Four Seasons Centre in Toronto.

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This is Mozart opera week as tonight our local production of Don Giovanni opens. I have to confess that while I have been at a number of performances of this opera, I have always viewed it from the orchestral pit! Yes, I took up the mandolin just to play the obbligato part in one of the arias one year. It was a great experience even though my chair was right up against the tympani! In any case, tonight I will be seeing it from the audience for the first time.

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Salzburg has had the good sense to turn down the empty symbolism of being named a European "City of Culture." Slipped Disc has the details:

The city council voted overwhelmingly last night not to apply for the EU’s rolling title of City of Culture.

The reason given is that it will cost tens of millions of Euros that could be better spent on culture itself, rather than the trappings of a title.

Salzburg’s decision suggests that the title has been hopelessly devalued by being rolled around provincial fishing and mining towns in obscure corners of the EU under some all-must-have-prizes rule.

This illustrates rather well the futility of official boosterism. Salzburg is about as cultural as a city can get and certainly needs no Euro-stamp as validation. When I was last there, they had twelve concert halls and one (1) cinema!

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Also at Slipped Disc is a quote from a piece by Anne Midgette in the Washington Post about how she sees her job as critic:

Think of the experience as a conversation: The evening offers a point of view, and you respond to it. Is it a conversation that you want to continue, by going back and hearing that music again? Is it one you’re glad to have behind you? Is it something you want to talk about to other people — and can another person change your mind? All of this is part of the experience we have with any art form. And it’s a lot more fun to become an active participant than it is to receive the music in reverential, passive silence.

The comments are also worth reading.

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Quincy Jones, legendary music producer, gets nasty in his latest interview with Vulture (warning, he uses some strong language): 

What were your first impressions of the Beatles?

That they were the worst musicians in the world. They were no-playing motherfuckers. Paul was the worst bass player I ever heard. And Ringo? Don’t even talk about it. I remember once we were in the studio with George Martin, and Ringo had taken three hours for a four-bar thing he was trying to fix on a song. He couldn’t get it. We said, “Mate, why don’t you get some lager and lime, some shepherd’s pie, and take an hour-and-a-half and relax a little bit.” So he did, and we called Ronnie Verrell, a jazz drummer. Ronnie came in for 15 minutes and tore it up. Ringo comes back and says, “George, can you play it back for me one more time?” So George did, and Ringo says, “That didn’t sound so bad.” And I said, “Yeah, motherfucker because it ain’t you.” Great guy, though.

Were there any rock musicians you thought were good?

I used to like Clapton’s band. What were they called?

Cream.

Yeah, they could play.

Well, I agree with some of that! Not the Ringo stuff, though. Ringo was perhaps the most musical and original drummer in rock. And Paul? A bad bass player? Quincy, whatcha been smoking?

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 If you are interested here is a "new" musicology analysis of the theme music used on Canadian and US tv for the Olympic games:

Melding disparate musical sounds into one new work is part of the CBC’s mandate. In the early 2000s, the network was under pressure to make their programming more multicultural and so they shifted their focus to incorporate more “fusion programming.” This involved bringing together musicians from different cultures, styles and languages to see whether they might be able to find new ways to collaborate.

While the CBC’s intentions may have been good, the results have been mixed. According to ethnomusicologist Rebecca Draisey-Collishaw, the musical output has not served to reflect creative and multicultural “meetings” between different musical traditions. Instead it more often represents — musically — cultural minorities being assimilated into mainstream, white, Anglo codes that serve to reinforce the status quo.

Ah yes, those "white, Anglo codes" that oppress every other musical tradition... Damned C major!

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 Our envoi today is the overture to The Abduction from the Seraglio by Mozart. This is the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Fabio Luisi:

Post 2,500!

Yes, it's true this is the 2500th post to this blog. Hmm, lemmesee, at around 800 words per post that comes to

Two Million Words!!

Which is quite a few. And some of them were actually informative. And I'm not even counting those occasionally profuse musical examples.

This is, for me, a fulfilling experience and it is especially good when you comment as that always adds a lot.

Let's have some celebratory music. Bach, Magnificat:

Haydn, Lord Nelson Mass:

Mozart, Symphony No. 41, Jupiter:

Wait, is this getting excessive? Oh, probably. But that's one of the cool things about music. We have just piles and piles of really great, joyous, over the top, celebratory music. So let's end with one more, the Symphony No. 5 by Ludwig van:

Training is Expensive

A friend of mine who happens to be a seasoned orchestral string player and I attended a concert by our local youth orchestra on Sunday. The concert began with two isolated movements from different Mozart symphonies and continued with a movement from a Haydn symphony. At that point we left. Yes, we were horrible people, not giving these young musicians and their conductor a chance. But, believe me, the aesthetic pain was considerable!

So we should talk about how young musicians become capable performers. The short answer is: a great deal of painstaking work. This is also expensive work because students need a great deal of supervision by highly-capable teachers. I recently ran across a video clip that is a very good articulation of how this works. Over to Jordan Peterson, who explains how to teach people how to think:

As he says, marking a good essay is easy: check, A. Marking a bad essay is unbelievably difficult because everything is wrong. Well, that's the way it is with young music students. With very, very, very few exceptions everything they do is wrong: they hold the instrument incorrectly, they don't play in tune, their rhythms are shaky or soggy or just wrong, they miscount the rests, they play with an unpleasant grating tone, sometimes they play the wrong notes. What every one of the players in a youth orchestra needs is intensive private instruction from highly-capable teachers who have spent many years being trained themselves.

Some youth orchestras have gotten this kind of attention and one example is likely the students that have come out of El Systema in Venezuela and other places. I am not sure of the details of how they managed it--I suspect that if you have some pretty good devoted teachers and a very broad intake of thousands and thousands of candidates you can likely filter them down to a core of pretty darn good student players.

But the problem with our youth orchestra is that they are just getting started and I suspect that there is little quality private instruction available. There is probably limited rehearsal time as well. A very important intermediate step between weekly private lessons and orchestral performance is the sectional rehearsal where, for example, all the first violins get together and rehearse their part, ironing out differences in tuning and bowing so that they come together as a group. Every section in the orchestra needs this same attention and the leader of each section, the concertmaster in the case of the first violins and the principal players in each section needs to have the capacity and authority to lead and rehearse the section.

When we get to the full rehearsal it is the concertmaster and the conductor who need to be unambiguously in charge. The problem is that hiring capable concertmasters and conductors is very expensive and this youth orchestra, at least, simply can't afford it. My friend rather unkindly described our local conductor as someone who does not actually conduct, but rather does a kind of "interpretive dance" expressing what he feels about the rhythms. Amusing to watch, but not very helpful to the players.

My friend and I attended the first concert by this youth orchestra a few months ago, in the fall. Unfortunately they have not improved to any great extent. What they need to do is rigorous, disciplined work and they have to remove the less-capable players and seek out better ones to replace them. Or they can continue on as they have, which is more likely. I'm sure they will receive support from the local community.

As we were leaving the concert I said to my friend, that, you know, we really cannot beef about the performance because we, who are capable of helping them improve, are not actually doing so. We should probably be making a contribution. Unfortunately, there are turf issues here. The conductor, who has been growing this orchestra from scratch, likely does not want to hear our critique, nor accept our assistance because the first thing we would do is demand a much higher commitment to precision and accuracy as the sine qua non of any real progress.

I am reminded of a student I had when I taught at university who had come to us after a couple of years at a community college: he was an intelligent and motivated student, but, alas, he had a very sloppy technique that had not been well grounded. So for the first four months he studied with me I insisted he do nothing but play simple scales, slurs and arpeggios very slowly and only work on the very simplest of pieces. He had to take several steps back to go forward. This is what needs to be done with the youth orchestra. They need to understand that, no they really can't play a Mozart symphony. Not yet. They need to spend months or years learning how to play the very basic components that down the road would make up the elements of a Mozart symphony. If you can't play four notes in tune then you certainly should not be trying to play one hundred notes.

Unfortunately, every hour you spend playing with bad technique will take several hours to undo. There is no getting around this very hard truth. I would like to help the orchestra, but somehow, I suspect they would not welcome my help.

But, if you work hard for perhaps thirty years with a great deal of support from the surrounding society, you can get to some amazing results. As proof, here is a performance from the 2007 Proms by the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela conducted by the charismatic Gustavo Dudamel in a remarkable performance of the Symphony No. 10 by Shostakovich:

A Composer's Musings

Just by chance I ran across an item in the Wall Street Journal from several years ago in which composer Morten Lauridsen muses about what inspires him.

At the core of my work as a composer over the past 45 years are seven multimovement vocal cycles, each centered on a single poetic theme, most often by one author -- for example, "Les Chansons des Roses" on Rainer Maria Rilke's delightful poems penned in 1924; the "Madrigali 'Fire-Songs'" on Renaissance Italian poems; "Cuatro Canciones," my chamber settings of Federico García Lorca's poems about time and night; and the "Lux Aeterna" on sacred texts about "light." And for each cycle I've selected my musical materials -- harmonies, melodies, rhythm, formal construction, orchestration, etc. -- to complement aspects of the texts I've chosen, including their style, content, language and historical context. The musical settings range from accessible and direct to atonal, abstract and highly coloristic.

The piece he is talking about in this essay is "O Magnum Mysterium" premiered in 1994 by the Los Angeles Master Chorale under the baton of Paul Salamunovich. Here is a performance from YouTube:

Somehow he manages to make the harmonies sound fresh and interesting, which is a pretty neat trick (no, not a trick, a method).

I ran across this reading an article in American Digest titled “O Magnum Mysterium:” The Persistence of Sacred Beauty

It is a commonplace that the overwhelming mass of our contemporary art that is “exhibited” has devolved into mere “exhibitionism.” Vapid, disposable and preening the works are doomed to be buried in the gaping garbage pits of marketing-driven museums, and crapulous galleries that hold most contemporary American and European art. Still, great souls persist among us and great art, though it is often obscured by poseurs and perverts and pallid imitators of all stripes, can still emerge when talent and skill are wedded to inspiration and belief.

It is too easy to simply condemn most contemporary art as garbage even though a great deal of it may be. The Lauridsen piece is absolutely lovely in a way that slightly reminds me of Arvo Pärt, but it does exist in a delimited realm. All I mean by that is that it renders homage to great vocal music of the past a bit too literally. If we set all ideology to one side, as we should, then music like this deserves a place in our contemporary musical world. But so does, for example, Lux Aeterna by Ligeti:

Yes, that is a bit disquieting, but we do live in disquieting times so we need music like this as well as music that soothes. We also need music that explores, like this piece by Morton Feldman, Rothko Chapel:

Perhaps we even need music that challenges us, like this piece, Poem No 1 (1959), by Galina Ustvolskaya:

Is there any reason that we can't make a place for all of these different kinds of musics?

Sofia Gubaidulina, Part 10

As I was only barely aware of Gubaidulina prior to starting on this project, what I am doing first is just taking a journey through her life and listening to pieces along the way in chronological order. When this is done, I will do some more analytical posts on the music. We are in the later 70s. One large project she was engaged in was a large collaborative oratorio with two other composers, Paul-Heinz Dittrich of East Germany and Marek Kopelent of Czechoslovakia. The piece, on a text by Czech humanist Amon Comenius, was titled Laudatio Pacis. Unfortunately the authorities managed to prevent its performance and it wasn't premiered until after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1993.

At around the same time, Gubaidulina was working on a very different kind of piece, her Concerto for Bassoon and Low Strings. She has long had a fascination with low-register instruments. The inspiration for this work came from the virtuoso bassoonist Valery Popov of the State Symphony Orchestra. As became her standard practice, once Popov asked her for a piece, she began to study not only his instrument but he himself and his approach to the instrument. She wrote:

I had never heard a bassoon with such a voice and was literally bewitched by the musician's artistry. I attended all his concerts and class lessons at the Moscow Conservatory, where he taught. Gradually I began to penetrate into the essence of the instrument itself, to understand it like some character in a play. It was then that the idea came to me to surround the "personality" of the bassoon with low-register strings--double basses and cellos. The interactions between the soloist and the surrounding instruments are complex, contradictory, as in a dramatic scene full of action. The concerto includes moments of reconciliation and hostility, tragedy and loneliness. [Quoted in Kurtz, op. cit., p. 116]

The piece, despite a flurry of objections from Serafim Tulikov, president of the Moscow Composers Union, and Evgeny Makarov, head of the Artistic Council, was premiered in May 1975 in the Hall of the Composers Union. Here is a performance:

As of this writing, the clip has had only 43 views on YouTube! Also, the performance is curtailed and the other clips I see on YouTube are of single movements. Here is one of the last movement, but I am not sure of how it fits with the clip above:

Friday Miscellanea

Philip Glass, one of our most prolific composers, is premiering a new symphony, a homage to David Bowie, in May 2019. The Guardian has the story:

London Contemporary Orchestra and organist James McVinnie will perform Glass’s Lodger symphony, a work the composer had discussed with Bowie before his death, but only now has been realised. Based on Bowie’s 1979 album of the same name, it completes Glass’s reimagining of Bowie’s Berlin trilogy, following 1992’s Low symphony (Glass’s Symphony No 1), and 1996’s Heroes symphony (Glass’s fourth). 

The two musicians were friends and mutual admirers for many decades. “The two symphonies were of course originally intended to be part of a trilogy, just as Bowie and Eno’s Berlin albums are,” Glass told the Guardian in 2016, shortly after Bowie’s death. “We talked, years ago, about doing the third symphony based on Lodger, and the idea has not totally disappeared.”

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Slipped Disc has an item on the classical awards at the Grammys.

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Speaking of the Grammys, one winner was pianist Daniel Trifonov and the Globe and Mail has a profile of him:

Trifonov's postvirtuosic playing has its capacity to surprise, though. Listeners blown away by brilliant passage work in one section aren't prepared for the sensuousness of the next. The repertoire chosen for his Toronto concert – much of it taken from his new Chopin Evocations album on Deutsche Grammophon – heads deep into the heart of the Romantic Era, allowing for about as much heartfelt playing as can be imagined.

Yes, maybe this does represent a turn back to the romantic repertoire. But channelling Chopin is in itself sending a signal – rather like those newer, smarter businesses encouraging their employees to get plenty of sleep – that slow and soft may be the new fast and furious.

I want to take the opportunity to point out that the Globe and Mail last month decided to kill their comments completely until further notice. As I see it the problem was that every time the Globe published an obviously biased or simply false item they were repeatedly lambasted in the comments by people who were better-informed. This happened with such a high number of articles and opinion pieces that I guess they just couldn't take it any more. They could either strive for a better newspaper or simply suppress all the comments and, to their shame, they chose the latter. This frees them up to be even more biased and vicious, of course. There is an excellent example today. Jordan B. Peterson is pretty much a nightmare to every member of the Canadian establishment, whose voice is the Globe and Mail, so the more famous he becomes, the more pressing the need to smear him at every opportunity. The thinly veiled conceit of this item is Peterson's "paradox": The Jordan Peterson paradox: high intellect, or just another angry white guy?

Where other academics rise on the strength of their ideas, Peterson's fame has crested on their sheer proliferation. As with his online lectures, his new book is rangy and digressive, addressing a wide range of subjects (history, theology, critical theory, evolutionary biology) well outside his realm of professional expertise. He can skip from the journals of the Columbine shooters to Goethe within three sentences; and within three pages skips to Tolstoy, to Cain and Abel, to Christ Himself, and back to "the Columbine boys." If psychology has always been the smorgasbord of soft sciences, Peterson's brand of profundity is the sprawling, all-you-can-eat Mandarin buffet – a medley of undercooked ideas warmed under the heat lamp of his own faintly flickering intellect.

I would pay good money to witness a debate between this nonentity, John Semley, and Prof. Peterson. In days past a transparently biased article like this in the Globe would have been pummeled and slashed to ribbons by dozens upon dozens of commentators, but no more. They have solved their problem at last! In Canada, this is how we roll.

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Finally classical music finds its niche in the 21st century: Classical Music on the London Underground. It is used to control anti-social behavior on the London subway:

The use of classical music to deter anti-social behavior began on the District Line in 2003, which over the next 18 months saw a reported reduction of 25 percent in assaults on staff, and a 37 percent reduction in graffiti within the station. Subsequently, the scheme was rolled out to over 40 stations in 2008, and has been subtly altering moods ever since.

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And finally, the Atlantic has a think piece about the question of the universality of musical language. The first problem is that music, while it has some language-like properties, isn't really a language.

Imagine that you’re a researcher who has unlimited time and resources, and a time machine that can travel anywhere in the world. You use these wondrous gifts to get a recording of every song that has ever been sung, whether by people in big cities or those in small hunter-gatherer groups. You play these recordings to random volunteers, and ask them to guess the behaviors that were associated with each tune. Was the song used for dancing? For soothing a baby? For healing illness? Could people guess what songs are for by their sound alone, without any knowledge about their cultural context?

Yep, that's the question all right. The researchers did what I would call begging the question by severely limiting the song-types to just four out of a huge number of possibles:

Their collection—the Natural History of Song discography—represents music of four types: dances; lullabies; expressions of love; and healing songs intended to cure the sick in ceremonies.

Let's compare these categories to the songs on a CD of Nootka music we were listening to the other day: Canoe Paddle Song, Entrance Song, Medicine Man Song, Whale Song, Farewell Song, Echo Song, Welcome Song, Warrior Song, Wolf Song, etc. The only one that looks like it might fit in one of their categories is the Medicine Man Song, and that might not even be a "healing" song. So, right away, we see how the categories chosen map very poorly on at least one body of traditional music. Musicologists have tended to be skeptical of this project for different reasons:

“While music is universal, its meanings are not,” adds Anne Rasmussen, an ethnomusicologist at the College of William and Mary. And those meanings are created both by the people making and hearing the music, and by the entire cultural package that surrounds it. A Bach cantata that was composed to celebrate God, for example, means something very different when played in a 21st-century concert hall or in a New York deli. The meaning of music, in other words, “is not something you can perceive while listening through a pair of headphones,” says Rasmussen. 

Yes, musical meaning is really only comprehensible within a particular cultural context--in the absence of words, that is.

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YouTube has just about everything, including Machaut's tour-de-force rondeau, "Ma fin est mon commencement" that is a crab canon over a palindrome, meaning, well, that its beginning is its end. This video clip of the score shows exactly how that works:

The best description I can find on the web of what Machaut is up to with this piece is in the Wikipedia article on Retrograde Music.

The Resplendent M. Rameau!

I have, from time to time, mentioned Jean-Philippe Rameau, but have devoted surprisingly little space to him given how important a composer he is. He did after all, literally, write the book on harmony! So let us take some time and celebrate this remarkable composer.

Jean-Philippe Rameau, by Jacques Aved, 1728

Just to whet your appetite, here is a rondeau from his opera-ballet Les Indes galantes:

Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683 - 1764) is famous for being one of the leading composers and theorists of the 18th century. He, along with François Couperin, is the glory of the French Baroque. His greatest works were operas and he did not embark on this phase of his life until he was nearly fifty. He achieved early fame with his Traité de l'harmonie réduite à ses principes naturels, published in 1722, which attempts to discover the fundamental principles underlying tonal harmony and does a pretty good job of it. He says:

Music is a science which should have definite rules; these rules should be drawn from an evident principle; and this principle cannot really be known to us without the aid of mathematics.

[Rameau, Jean-Philippe. Treatise on Harmony (Dover Books on Music) (Kindle Locations 456-458). Dover Publications. Kindle Edition.]

Despite his best efforts and those of others, including Paul Hindemith, it is not quite possible to derive the rules of harmony from the overtone series or by dividing a string into its parts, and Rameau acknowledges this when he later says

No rules have yet been devised to teach composition in all its present perfection. Every skillful man in this field sincerely confesses that he owes all his knowledge to experience alone.

[Rameau, Jean-Philippe. Treatise on Harmony (Dover Books on Music) (Kindle Locations 482-484). Dover Publications. Kindle Edition.]

Rameau focuses on the fundamental importance of the fifth:

The sounds which form the fifth and the fourth are included in the divisions of the undivided string and are consequently generated by the fundamental sound. With regard to intervals, however, only the octave and the fifth are directly generated by the fundamental sound. The fourth is merely a result of the octave, since it arises from the difference between this octave and the fifth.

[Rameau, Jean-Philippe. Treatise on Harmony (Dover Books on Music) (Kindle Locations 967-969). Dover Publications. Kindle Edition.]

 It must be confessed that as a writer Rameau was confusing, awkward and prolix and his explanations are often difficult to sort out. Here is his explanation of the relationship between the three different possible inversions of a major chord:

The major perfect chord is formed from the three numbers 4:5:6. If we raise 4. to its octave, we shall have 5:6:8; this forms the chord called the sixth chord, because the sixth is heard between the two extreme sounds. If we then raise 5 to its octave, we shall have 6:8:10; this forms another chord called the six-four chord, because the sixth and the fourth are heard between the two upper sounds and the lowest sound (to which all intervals of a chord should be compared). If we then raised 6 to its octave, we should have 8:10:12, which is in the same proportion as 4:5:6.

[Rameau, Jean-Philippe. Treatise on Harmony (Dover Books on Music) (Kindle Locations 1365-1369). Dover Publications. Kindle Edition.]

What he terms 4:5:6 we would call a major chord in root position: CEG. If you raise the C an octave you obtain the chord EGC which is notated in figured bass as a 6 chord (meaning that the C is now a sixth above the bass, E). Then if you then raise the E an octave you have the chord GCE which is, in figured bass notation, referred to as a 6/4 chord because the two notes above are now at the intervals of a sixth and a fourth. This is taught to every beginning music student and it was in fact Rameau that first laid out a coherent theory of inversion which provided a rational foundation for the theory of harmony and gave him wide recognition as a music theorist, as famous in his own field as Isaac Newton was in physics.

But it is for his compositions that he is most know today. Neglected for nearly two hundred years, it is only in the last fifty or so years that his music has been unearthed and restored to its previous glory. He was not a prolific composer, but his few suites for harpsichord are justly appreciated today. Fanciful names were typical of the French clavecinistes. Here is one of his most delightful pieces Les Niais de Sologne avec six doubles meaning "The Simpletons of Soulogne with six variations." This is Trevor Pinnock on harpsichord:

In recent years Grigory Sokolov has given some extraordinary performances of Rameau on piano. This is Les Cyclopes:

But his greatest achievements were in the realm of opera. Here is the overture to Hippolyte and Aricie:

And, if you have the time, here is a complete performance of Les Indes galantes, though I should warn you, as it is a recent production (Bordeaux, 2014) while the instruments are original, the costuming most certainly is not. The opening ballet, for example, is danced by a whole troupe of nude dancers though the singer is somewhat clothed. Rest assured that later on the costume department does come up with some items so the entire opera is not performed in the nude! Blogger won't embed, so just follow the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BxKd_2hCBQ

(I would have put up the less-controversial and perhaps more faithful version by William Christie, but I could not find it on YouTube.)

If you want a less, uh, "galant" version, here is the closing Chaconne:

My expertise does not extend to dance, so I am not sure how much if any of this choreography is the original. I'm pretty sure that they had dance notation, so perhaps it is. But again, the costuming is likely not!

Enjoy!