Playlist: Five Musical Masterpieces That Changed Modern Dance
7 February 2025
Sara Veale, author of Wild Grace, explores five musical masterpieces that helped steer the modern dance zeitgeist.
The modern dancers emerging at the turn of the twentieth century both inspired and found inspiration in fellow artists, including painters, writers and, of course, musicians.
Loie Fuller harnessed experimental sounds of the moment, like Claude Debussy’s symphonic sketches, to enrich her multisensory spectacles; Maud Allan teamed up with the Belgian composer Marcel Rémy to vivify her sinuous Salome routine; Katherine Dunham toured with African drummers who complemented the polyrhythms of her shimmering technique.
Each of these dancers had a soulful relationship with music, one driven by a distinct corporeal reverb. ‘Your body does not feel the same when you dance to strings as when you dance to woodwinds,’ Martha Graham once declared. ‘It simply cannot.’ Graham – like the other creators who feature in Wild Grace, my take on the pioneering women of modern dance – used music to prime the body as an instrument of joy, resilience, vigour, debate and change.
Here are five musical masterpieces that helped steer the modern dance zeitgeist.
Iphigénie en Aulide – Christoph Willibald Gluck
Isadora Duncan, known for her silken sense of musicality, often invoked the work of classical giants to deepen her expressive choreography. She danced her early tours in the United States to Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide suite, sculpting its mythic episodes – including the maenads’ legendary dance for Dionysus – into something silver-smooth.
Appalachian Spring – Aaron Copland
Aaron Copland’s bespoke score for Martha Graham’s Appalachian Spring won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1945, prompting critical comparisons to the likes of Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky. With its sweeping gestures and striking configurations, the vivid allegorical production – a portrait of resilience in the Pennsylvania backwoods – exemplifies the radiance of Graham’s technique.
‘On Top of Old Smokey’ – Woody Guthrie
Sophie Maslow’s breakout work, Folksay, quilted together jigging modern dance and folk ballads from Woody Guthrie in a tender ode to America’s heartland. Guthrie accompanied Maslow and her troupe on-stage for early performances in the 1940s, improvising homespun banter in between songs.
‘Strange Fruit’ – Billie Holiday
Abel Meeropol’s 1937 anti-lynching poem, Strange Fruit, took on a mournful new dimension when Billie Holiday sang its haunting words at New York’s Café Society, a hothouse for political cabaret in the years of the Second World War. Pearl Primus took to the same stage in 1943 and transformed Meeropol’s verse into a physical lament, channelling anguish with thrusting fists and brutal slumps to the floor.
‘Tehillim Pt. 1 and 2’– Steve Reich
The stories, songs and tribulations of the Jewish chronicle informed the majority of Pearl Lang’s dance portfolio, from prophetic writings to the devastation of the pogrom. Lang was gripped by the Hasidic ideal of ‘ecstatic dance’ and called upon music from some of the great Jewish composers of the twentieth century, including Steve Reich, to connect her themes to new contexts and offer a modern lens for consideration.
Listen to the full playlist:
The untold history of the extraordinary women who drove the modern dance movement and changed cultural narratives about sex, power and women’s rights.
Sara Veale is a London-based writer and editor focusing on dance, feminism and design. She studied literature and dance as an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and holds an MA in English: Issues in Modern Culture from University College London.
Veale has been a freelance dance critic since 2013, reviewing major international dance companies, covering arts festivals across the UK and Europe and interviewing industry giants. She has written regularly for the Observer, The Spectator, Fjord Review and DanceTabs. Her dance criticism has also appeared in Gramophone, Auditorium, Exeunt and more; her literary criticism has appeared in the Literateur, Fiction Uncovered and Review 31, where she was the fiction reviews editor from 2014 to 2020. Veale is also a member of the Dance Critics’ Circle.
