Graham / Riegger - Prelude to Action
This is my third post about music from the Martha Graham repertory, though in fact it tells the story of my very first experience of dance accompaniment seven years ago - still one of the most meaningful and memorable musical experiences I’ve had in New York.
After graduating from The New School for Jazz in 2014, I began exploring New York’s vast music scene with the idea of finding jobs that called for some of the skills I had learned: playing piano, improvising, composing, arranging, accompanying singers and instrumentalists. The picture was not immediately clear; I had a hard time finding jobs that involved anything artistic, valued self expression or allowed for any creative input. It wasn’t until a friend asked me to come play a dance class with him that I discovered the world of dance accompaniment. Even today, with recorded music of all kinds readily available, New York’s long-standing tradition of live music for dance classes, rehearsals and performances still generates a steady demand for musicians who can not only make music on the spot but also put their egos aside and support the dancers first and foremost. My friend was playing for classes at the Graham school and needed a substitute, so he invited me to shadow him for a few weeks before letting me handle a class on my own.
After a few timid classes as a sub, I was offered my first steady class at the Graham school. Being a newbie, they figured the best way to start me off was to give me an easy class where I only had to play for the first half. The class started with Graham technique exercises, with live accompaniment, and then for the second half the students learned choreography from the Graham repertoire, with recorded music. The teacher of the class was Carrie Ellmore-Tallitsch, a former principal dancer with the Graham company among others and a wonderful artist in her own right, and the repertory she was teaching was “Prelude to Action,” a section from Graham’s masterpiece Chronicle.
Chronicle is a three movement piece from 1936 set to the music of Wallingford Riegger. It is one of Graham’s most popular and impactful works and one of the few that is explicitly political and outspoken in its reaction to war and violence. When the dance was first revived in the 1980s and 90s, Riegger’s original score had been lost and the music had to be reconstructed. A separate Riegger dance score from the same era was repurposed as the music for “Steps in the Street,” one of Chronicle’s other sections. I have not been able to confirm exactly how the current music for “Prelude to Action” came to be, however I recall hearing an (unverified) anecdote that it was reconstructed from surviving fragments by Justin Dello Joio (son of the composer Norman Dello Joio, another Graham collaborator).
Read about Chronicle on the Martha Graham Dance Company website: Link
Watch excerpts from “Prelude to Action” performed by the Graham company:
After a week or two of watching and listening to “Prelude to Action” in the class I was accompanying, I naively asked the teacher Carrie if she had the score. As it turned out, this sort of question was not common at the Graham school and no one was able to help me (although I know the score does exist somewhere in their archives). But I had the idea that if the dancers were practicing to recorded music while I was just sitting around, surely there was something more productive to be done. I went home and started looking online for the music, the dance, the orchestral parts - anything to work from - but had little luck. Later I even went as far as the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts and waited for hours just to find an old irrelevant musical sketch titled Chronicle. The next week I tried playing along with the recording the dancers were using, picking out melodies and playing from memory. Now the teacher noticed and asked me if watching a video of the piece would help. I still have the bootleg I made, full of noise from people walking in and out the lobby where I was sitting with my audio recorder next to the TV. It was enough - by next week I had made the first minute or so into a piano reduction, and Carrie let me play it with the dancers instead of the recorded music.
There is a special kind of electricity and excitement I have felt only a few times in my life: playing with a big-band for the first time, my first recital, performing on a big stage in front of hundreds of people. Playing my piano reduction for the Graham school students week after week, I felt that same excitement, and I could tell that Carrie and the dancers were excited too. We added a few more steps each week, and by the end of the semester spectators would crowd outside the door and peek in to see this strange repertory class that somehow had live accompaniment.
Aside from the incredible fun and challenge of playing for this class, I learned a tremendous amount about the Graham style and the music that best compliments it, and the timing couldn’t have been better. The musical elements from Wallingford Riegger’s score provided me with an essential “toolbox” as I went on to play many more classes and develop my own take on dance music. I am deeply grateful to Carrie Ellmore-Tallitsch for giving me my first (and best) dance class opportunity, and I feel proud to share this transcription and story with you.
Note: The transcription I have made is an excerpt from the full piece, starting with the slow middle section and continuing through to the end.