Musicology and Dance : Historical and Critical Perspectives

Explores well-known European music through the lens of dance, including music by Purcell, Bach, Haydn, Wagner, Mahler, Fauré, and Debussy. It features genres such as cantatas, concertos, opera, ballet, and Protestant hymns, in contexts including the stage and ballroom, high art and popular entertainment, and professional and amateur performances.

Long treated as peripheral to music history, dance has become prominent within musicological research, as a prime and popular subject for an increasing number of books, articles, conference papers and special symposiums. Despite this growing interest, there remains no thorough-going critical examination of the ways in which musicologists might engage with dance, thinking not only about specific repertoires or genres, but about fundamental commonalities between the two, including embodiment, agency, subjectivity and consciousness. This volume begins to fill this gap. Ten chapters illustrate a range of conceptual, historical and interpretive approaches that advance the interdisciplinary study of music and dance. This methodological eclecticism is a defining feature of the volume, integrating insights from critical theory, film and cultural studies, the visual arts, phenomenology, cultural anthropology and literary criticism into the study of music and dance.