DANCE TROUPES PIT LIVE AGAINST CANNED MUSIC

. . . One of the things we were all concerned with--David Tudor, John ( Cage ) and myself--was that the musical part ( of “Nocturnes” and other ballets ) remain live. In other words, we did not want to have recorded music.

-- Merce Cunningham,

in “The Dancer and the Dance”

The curtain rises, the audience hushes. Several dancers appear and--to the accompaniment of music coming from somewhere--begin dancing. It’s impossible to see into the pit, but it sure doesn’t seem like that music is coming from there. Is it possible that the performance might be different--less live , somehow--since there are no live musicians?

This situation--increasingly common in recent years--has spurred one of the contemporary dance world’s pressing debates: Must it be live, or can it be Memorex? Is the interaction of musicians, conductor and dancer(s) so important that dance cannot thrive on recorded music?

In these days of shrinking budgets, fragmented audiences and spiraling performance scales for unionized musicians, the presence of a live orchestra (or even a string quartet) at a dance performance can make or break the company’s often meager financial resources.

Reasonably faithful sound reproduction or not, the fact remains that the unanimity of preference for live accompaniment points out the lamentable gap between what dance companies would like to do--and what they are financially capable of doing.

“I think most companies would definitely prefer live music--hell, they’d like to have celestial choruses if it could be made to happen--but most times limited finances are the deciding factor,” said William Hammond, executive director of the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater.

Still, those companies that can afford live music, opt to do so--in increasing frequency, according to Los Angeles-area orchestral contractors whose job it is to hire pit orchestras to accompany itinerant dance companies. (Some companies, such as the New York City Ballet, have an orchestra under contract which may separately decide to accompany the dancers on tour, but in these hard times such contracts are becoming rarer.)

“I don’t notice the demand (for ‘pick-up’ orchestras) as having fallen off at all recently,” said Mickey Nadel, one such independent contractor whose clients include American Ballet Theatre and other major touring companies. “If anything, there seems to be more movement in that area lately than I can remember. Since this city (Los Angeles) has become so dance-conscious now, the large companies and ‘star packages’ that play here assume they must have an orchestra to be taken seriously.”

But those with a longer perspective remember better days--when major international ballet companies (for which orchestras are mandatory, unlike smaller modern dance companies) from Sweden, Britain, Denmark and Italy toured the West Coast.

“Fewer companies are coming in now than used to be the case; there’s just a lot less dance money out there than there used to be,” said Atilio DePalma, another L.A. contractor who’s been in the business for 22 years. “While it’s true that the companies that do hire an orchestra do so for more performances, the number of companies coming in is way down. No producer wants to spend for it if they feel the audiences don’t really care one way or the other.”

Pebbles Wadsworth, who is responsible for UCLA’s dance programming, says the audiences at Royce Hall do care about the live music issue--”You wouldn’t believe the amount of letters we get about that”--but they may not be aware that the additional funding required is as much the balletomanes’ responsibility as anyone else’s.

“We need to tell the community that if they want live music, they must help make it financially feasible,” said Wadsworth. “The university is trying to commission more pieces that use smaller ensembles (among them the Kronos Quartet, the Dave Brubeck jazz band and possibly the Emerson Quartet), and we hope we’ll be able to slowly bring live music back.”

The overwhelming majority of Royce Hall dance concerts use taped music, a circumstance that Wadsworth said is “strictly a financial issue.” She said UCLA is organizing a National Endowment for the Arts matching-grant program to help re-establish live accompaniment to dance programs there. Right now, the funds available to UCLA aren’t enough to provide touring companies with live accompaniment.

“If we had our druthers, every dance concert would have live music,” Wadsworth said. “We feel strongly about this. It’s the community that has to make the commitment to live music if they want it.” Where live music is featured, it’s most often the local producers--such as the Lincoln Center Operating Company in New York, the Washington Performing Arts Society in that city, and the UCLA Performing Arts Series here--that provide the funds. If the money isn’t there, the tapes make the trip. Typical dance concert tickets cost several dollars more in New York--where most major dance companies are based--than they do in Los Angeles, where the touring companies are less in control of such financial matters as hiring an orchestra.

The Paul Taylor Dance Company, which uses an orchestra in New York but almost always brings along tapes on the road due to a smaller financial commitment by producers at the tour’s stops, depends on the local sponsor for the funds to hire an orchestra. As a result, the company is almost always disappointed--the sole exception is their dates in Washington, where an orchestra is provided for it.

“The tapes we use are made during a special taping session, played by the pit orchestra we use here in New York,” said Henry Liles, the company’s operations director. “The taping sessions are part of our contract with the union. So at least the dancers are hearing familiar sounds, even if those sounds aren’t live.” He said the company’s touring repertoire isn’t affected by the live/tape decision, since the music of all the choreographers’ ballets are recorded.

And using a live orchestra is no less expensive in New York than it is in Los Angeles. According to local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, which covers all of New York City and Long Island, a 40-member orchestra would cost a prospective sponsor about $35,000 for three performances, three dress rehearsals with the dance company and three orchestral rehearsals in a rehearsal hall. Local 47, which covers Los Angeles County, calculates an approximate $33,000 figure in the same performance situation.

Tapes, of course, cost quite a bit less.

Not all medium-size companies have an extreme aversion to tape. Every company representative with whom Calendar spoke said their troupe used tapes exclusively at rehearsals, except for final dress rehearsals. In addition, since such companies as the Tulsa Ballet and the Seattle-based Pacific Northwest Ballet (both of which have recently appeared or will soon appear in Los Angeles, at UCLA’s Royce Hall) cannot expect to compete with ABT and New York City Ballet, they say they feel their use of recorded music is a move dictated by audience preferences for more dancing and less expense on non-dance performance trappings. And, of course, economics.

“Though we’re pretty well funded compared to a lot of other groups, you really have to watch what you spend no matter how much you’ve got,” said Connie Crowley, general manager of the Tulsa, Okla., ensemble. “Some companies feel that live music is an integral part of performance--that they couldn’t give one without it--but we feel here that we’d rather give quality dance and suffer through the tapes than give fewer performances or let our repertory deteriorate.”

“We firmly believe that it’s better to perform with live musicians,” said Jane Andrew, Pacific Northwest’s administrative head. “It just adds that other element that makes dance a unique. But of course it becomes a financial decision at base, though we always try to adjust the program toward those pieces in which the live element isn’t totally essential. But we always include at least one piece with live music. No one really likes the idea of using only tapes, but sometimes . . .”

Some companies draw a line down the middle of the either/or enigma and perform programs that feature some pieces with orchestral (or at least instrumental)accompaniment but use tape for others. The bicoastal Joffrey Ballet is a local example.

“The choreographer sometimes will have pieces where the music is really impossible with live musicians,” said the Joffrey’s Penelope Curry. “So we use tapes for those. But Robert Joffrey usually insists on live music. Many of our sponsors would no doubt prefer we use tapes, but when you’re playing opera houses, you really can’t use tapes.” Curry said the Joffrey’s tapes are made either off of tapes (for Twyla Tharp’s “Deuce Coupe”) or by contracted musicians and singers in New York studios (for Arpino’s “Light Rain”).

Most of the less-endowed companies record their tapes from recorded sources such as records (being careful to pay royalties, of course)or hire local musicians to record reproductions of existing scores--this last usually in the case of small ensembles or solo performances. Most companies also tote audio gear around on tour to reproduce these tapes, with generally satisfactory results and surprisingly few breakdowns, according to company directors.

But there remains at least one company of less than monumental resources that continues to insist on live music for its accompaniments:the San Francisco Ballet, which performs at home and on the road with its 45-member core ensemble (meaning the company hires extra musicians at each tour stop, if the repertory being danced demands it).

“We thought we could guarantee a consistently better level of performance if we had our own orchestra,” said Denis de Coteau, the company’s music director and chief conductor. “It’s unfortunate that companies have to do away with orchestras--and music directors, of course--but I think the success of a company hinges on this direct involvement with music.

“There’s a certain excitement when a dancer has a certain step that requires exact timing from the orchestra--and when that exactness comes, and the choreography works, it’s a kind of a transcendent experience,” de Coteau added. “But the trends aren’t really with our company on this one. I just hope the taped-music movement doesn’t devolve into something quaint. I mean, what if opera turned out to be like this, with singers performing to a taped accompaniment? It’s a pretty depressing idea.”

But then, many choreographers--those working since World War II, at any rate--have sought to rise to the economic and aesthetic challenges involved with live music by fashioning pieces accompanied by solo piano (Jerome Robbins’ “Dances at a Gathering”), or chamber ensemble (George Balanchine’s “Duo Concertante,” to Stravinsky), or even musique concrete or tape-specific sounds (Balanchine’s “Variations pour une porte et un soupir”)--though these remain the stark exceptions rather than the general rule.

“Choreographers don’t think necessarily in terms of live music these days,” said Hammond. “It’s very much a feeling of, ‘Whatever works best, is most effective.’ If that’s taped Beach Boys or whale songs, that’s what will be used.”

The other concern is that taped music, with its mechanical consistency, makes the dancers themselves less fresh and receptive to the music day in and day out, though this is by no means a universal fear.

“With canned music, it’s always the same music. The dancers can depend on that, but they also might just become complacent about it--not much of a spark there to respond to,” said de Coteau. “It’s as if a mechanical quality is inherited by the dancers from the reproduction device. All we know is that canned music certainly seems to take dance away from its original theatrical roots.”

“Actually, our dancers seem to prefer tape,” said Hammond. “The tape is something they can count on, and it’s not something they figure is going to mess around with their timing.”

And what about Cunningham’s own ensemble?Does it still insist on live music wherever possible?Yes--although the pieces in its repertoire rarely call for the expense entailed by symphonic accompaniment.

“We only perform only with live music, period,” said Art Becofsky, the Cunningham company’s executive director. “These are bad old times, but there remains a definite attraction to the live experience, and that’s what we are all about here. We’re too aware of how tape deadens the dancers’ anticipations, their ‘bounce’ if you will. Besides, John Cage (the Cunningham company’s music adviser)would murder us otherwise!

“Certainly there are financial considerations. But the musicians’ salaries are as essential as the dancers’, so far as we’re concerned. When live music goes away, dance will go away, too.”