Dictionary of Music - Birding America

26 ballet de courOPÉRA-BALLET). Lully’s most important successor incomposing ballets was Rameau.Ballet continued to be popular during the eighteenthcentury, both in operas and as a separate entertainment.From France it spread to other parts ofEurope, especially Austria, Russia, and, somewhatlater, Denmark. The century between 1750 and 1850saw the rise of famous ballet dancers, such as Jean-Georges Noverre (1727–1810), for whom Gluck,Mozart, and Beethoven all wrote ballet music. However,despite the great popularity of ballet during thisperiod, relatively little of its music has survived.By the late nineteenth century the chief center ofballet was the Russian city of St. Petersburg, and itwas there that the great ballets of Tchaikovsky—Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, and Sleeping Beauty—were first performed. It was also Russia that becamethe source of modern ballet, for it was the leadershipof Sergei Diaghilev (1872–1929) and Michel Fokine(1880–1942) that produced the first great modernballet troupe, the Ballets Russes. In 1909 this groupbegan to perform in Paris, and its influence on balletgrew very quickly. Nearly all the prominent composersof the time wrote ballet music for the BalletsRusses, among them Debussy, Ravel, RichardStrauss, de Falla, Prokofiev, Hindemith, Bartók, and,perhaps most important of all, Stravinsky.In the 1920s the Russian tradition was brought toEngland, whose most famous troupe was theSadler’s Wells Ballet (later called the Royal Ballet),and soon afterward ballet began to become popularin the United States. At first the American ballet followedthe European models, but in time it developedits own styles, as well as its own music. The mostimportant choreographer in this development wasGeorge Balanchine, who commissioned numerousAmerican composers to write ballet scores.Although classical ballet continued to be an importantart form during the second half of the twentiethcentury, companies commissioned less new music,instead relying on arrangements of existing scores,ranging from song cycles by Schubert and Mahler totranscriptions of operas, etc. Indeed, sometimes asingle ballet included transcriptions of several worksby quite different composers.The chart on the preceding pages lists some ofthe more famous ballets.ballet de cour (bA lā′ d ə koo r′) French:ballet.” See under BALLET.ballet operaballettSee OPÉRA-BALLET.See BALLETTO; also under FA-LA.“courtballetto (bä let′ô) pl. balletti (bä let′ē) Italian,ballett, English. An Italian dance form of the sixteenthand seventeenth centuries. It was scored forlute from about 1550 to 1600, for voice form about1590 to 1625, and for chamber ensemble during theremainder of the seventeenth century. Both theinstrumental and vocal versions consisted of tworepeated sections of different length, A A B B. However,in the vocal balletti each section ended with fala(see also FA-LA). The principal composer of vocalballetti was Giovanni Gastoldi (c. 1550–1622).ballo (bäl′ô) pl. balli (bäl′ē). The Italian wordfor dance; tempo di ballo means “in dance tempo.”bambuco (bäm boo — ′kô) Spanish. The nationaldance of Colombia. It is performed by two singers inclose harmony (a third apart), with guitar and luteaccompaniment. The lyrics are melancholy, and themusic is usually in a minor key.band 1 An instrumental group made up mainly ofbrass, woodwind, and percussion instruments, asdistinguished from the ORCHESTRA, in whichstringed instruments outnumber all the others. 2 Anyof various unusual instrumental groups, such as abanjo, marimba, or accordion band. 3 In the seventeenthand early eighteenth centuries, any largeinstrumental group, regardless of its makeup or thekind of music it played; among famous groups towhich the term was applied were the court orchestrasof King Louis XIV of France and King CharlesII of England. 4 brass band A group of musiciansplaying brass instruments. A typical brass band consistsof about twenty-four musicians playing cornets,French horns, flugelhorns, euphoniums, andtrombones. Originally formed to play militarymusic, the modern brass band dates from about1830, when the use of valves made brass instrumentsmore practical, and it soon became popular