The King Dances. Ballet Score. Commissioned by Birmingham Royal Ballet. Premiered in June 2015 at The Hippodrome, Birmingham. Published by United Music Publishing.
- Submitting institution
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Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- Montague1
- Type
- J - Composition
- Month
- June
- Year
- 2015
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
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- Criminology
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- Interdisciplinary
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- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
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- Reserve for an output with double weighting
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- Additional information
- The orchestral score for The King Dances (2015) was commissioned by Sir David Bintley/ Birmingham Royal Ballet and based on Louis XIV’s Ballet de la Nuit event of 1653. The challenge was compressing the essence of the original grand spectacle into a 40 minute ballet and composing an inventive, new score that referenced the era but was not pastiche. Pre-composition research included studying much of the extensive 1653 documentation and reframing that material and those ideas into a condensed, workable structure. The original 12 hour spectacle was divided into four sections beginning at 18:00 and culminating at 06:00 with the rising sun during which Louis was dubbed “The Sun King”. The “intrada” in Part I appears later in Part IV at a higher pitch where it serves as the climax tying the work together as bookends. While the harmonic and melodic structure of the individual parts can often be conventional, the use of inventive and new orchestration techniques are unique in ballet literature and do not appear in any of the great ballets of the 20th C. For example the use of “white noise” in the winds, pitch bending, playing on mouthpieces only, bowing percussion instruments (cymbals, crotales, tam tam, vibraslap), tubular bells lowered into a bucket of water, “prepared” harp, and 4 channel electronics whirling around the audience as an apparition (Part III: “Midnight to 03:00”). The electronic elements were developed from recordings of metal sheeting which were then manipulated, time-stretched, expanded and refined in Logic Pro X. In addition to the conventional notation were a number of notational symbols from the 20th C avant-garde such as arrowheads denoting “play any high pitch”, and the sign to continue an ad libitum texture. The work, seen in the context of the ballet world, was experimental and daring.
https://ump.co.uk/performance/stephen-montague-the-king-dances/
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
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- English abstract
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