Henning Kronstam and musicality

Every dancer who worked with Kronstam mentions his extraordinarily sensitive musicality. Kronstam was not a musician; his musical training consisted of those two years of piano lessons in childhood. However, he had an instinctive sense of both rhythm and melody. Julian Thurber, one of the company's rehearsal pianists who played for Kronstam for more than twenty years (and with his wife, Ingryd Thorson, also a rehearsal pianist, is a concert musician in his own right) described one aspect of Kronstam's musicality: "There's a connection between breath and dance. You can dance with a fixed diaphragm, where you sort of hop around, and probably do it all right, but where nothing happens, or you can dance with a free diaphragm, where certain things happen, and where you remain up in the air for longer periods, and where certain movements suddenly become worth something. That is the breath, and that breath is also a musical thing. He would choose slow tempi to work with until he got the breath inside the movement, and then he would work it." Thorson spoke of Kronstam's way of responding to music and how this was linked to the action in a dramatic ballet. "He pulls the tempi back when you're rehearsing with him. Where James first feels the Sylph coming in the window, Henning hears the music and responds to that, so it's like the music comes first, and then the response comes, and then the feeling that something is there, and then he moves. He doesn't move on the music, which normally people do. It's a response."

Many Danish dancers refer to this as "dancing through the music." Lis Jeppesen described it as a natural rather than regimented musicality: "The whole corps doesn't have to be on the beat, like soldiers," and added: "In one sense, it is singing the dance. You have to hear the music, and what is the soul of the music and what is the melody. And then you have to transfer the melody to your movements. The other thing you do is to extend the movement out as long as you can before you go further, and that is the phrasing."

Henning Kronstam: Portrait of a Danish Dancer by Alexandra Tomalonis. (2002). Pages 453-4.

Bruhn's response to music

Commenting on his very particular response to music, Bruhn says it is a response that must be felt individually. "You've got to hear the music for the first time every time you dance to it. If you hear the same thing every time, then you never feel the need to go back for more. The idea is that if you hear more, then you find more of yourself in the music. For me, music is a constant rediscovery. Once I know a role technically and know the outline of the character, then I always go back to the music, because that's my guide. That's when I know how much I can stretch a certain set of steps within so many bars. Of course, you must begin and finish in time with the music, but within that span you must literally 'walk' on the music. You must breathe it and live it and make it a part of your very being. Without that, all is lost!"


Erik Bruhn, Danseur Noble by John Gruen. 1979. Page 25-6.

Erik Bruhn on musical phrasing

Also, I had a facility for musical phrasing. Dancers who are just 'square' will never squeeze the dynamics out of the music and build up to any sort of climax. My fun in having survived the same daily classes for ten years at the school was that I could play with the phrasing of any given step.

. . . . Later on I had a vocabulary I could choose from when doing a certain role. I would experiment with the musical phrasing and, in that way, I could color the steps as well as the character I was portraying. I could actually make the steps fit the character.

Erik Bruhn, Danseur Noble by John Gruen. 1979. Page 24.