Bruce Lazarus

Searching for….Search: One Perspective on Composing for Modern Ballet

 

First published in Journal of International Guild of Dance Musicians, fall 1995

Revised in October 2024

 

 

In the spring of 1994, my first year as composer-in-residence for New World School of the Arts (NWSA) Division of Dance in Miami, Florida was drawing to a close. I was sitting in a Miami Beach café with choreographer Gerard Ebitz to enjoy a few moments of quiet conversation before we went our separate ways for the summer.  Only a week earlier, the end-of-year dance concert had gone very well, and had featured Gerry’s and my first collaborative ballet, NWEL (New World Ebitz Lazarus), an ambitious, 15-minute, three-movements work of almost completely abstract music and dance. Creating and producing NWEL had been an intense, exhausting, and finally exhilarating experience. We were pleased to bask in the pleasure of our success, yet at the same time we were already planning our second collaborative work for the spring 1995 dance concert. 

 

“I’d like the piece to have a haunting quality, “said Gerry, “and it would be great if the musical ensemble included oboe and a cello. Let’s make the piece in one continuous movement.”  “Sounds good, Gerry,” I replied, adding optimistically, “I’ll aim to have the piece finished in the fall.”

 

The choreographer’s ideas sounded good to me because they guided me toward a new direction where I could aim my creativity. I had never before thought of composing anything intentionally haunting. It would be an interesting challenge, and the finished work would be unique in my catalogue. Oboe and cello was undoubtedly a good starting combination of instruments for this type of piece. Those instruments would be the main actors, but I felt more instruments would be needed; maybe a small section of string instruments for depth, or just piano as a supporting character. 

 

Work on my new score began, not with composing, but rather in immersing myself in other works of eeriness and suspense. Knowing that film scores by composers such as Bernard Herrmann, Leonard Rosenman, and Jerry Goldsmith could serve as models for my own piece, I rented – there was no such thing as “streaming” in 1994! – a number of movies with creepy soundtracks such as director Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca, Spellbound, Vertigo, and Marnie. I also turned to the novels of Emily and Charlotte Brontë, especially Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, to capture impressions of mystery and haunting lights.  

 

It was around this time that my mom died after a long illness. My sadness at this major turning point was extreme, and it was difficult to focus on washing dishes, never mind thinking through a complicated new composition.  Still, I knew my mom would want me to keep going, she was a great cheerleader that way. With that in mind, I was determined to honor her by carrying on while allowing my feelings of loss to suffuse every measure. This in itself was unusual since I tended to think of myself as primarily a composer of ideas, not emotions (and I still do in 2024, the time of this writing). The decision to base my music on personal feelings became yet another factor making the new piece unique in my output.

 

Note: I subsequently composed a second, non-dance work, Threnodies and Anthems, which was intended as a memorial to both my parents. A short video based on Threnodies and Anthems can be viewed at:  

https://www.brucelazaruscomposer.com/videos

 

After a few weeks of viewing the suspense and understated violence of Hitchcock, reading the dark, atmospheric romances of Brontë novels, and reconciling myself to the death of my mom, I was ready to begin looking for musical ideas.  I thought first of the tritone and its iconic use in music to represent instability, for example in West Side Story songs such as “Maria” and “Cool”. I intuited that the tritone would be influential on my choices concerning melodic contour, harmonic derivation, and its innate instability would govern the overall mood.  By June I decided to add piano to oboe and cello to form a trio, and worked hard sketching ideas for the three instruments.

 

I sincerely believed the new work would be finished in September 1994, but in fact I had little to show Gerard Ebitz until November that year. It was okay though. Gerry had a lot of new choreographic ideas, and since my work was still open-ended, it was not hard to accommodate him. For choreographic reasons, many of the sections I had composed needed to be expanded considerably, and one section in particular needed to be repeated several times with variations. The incompleteness of my work allowed the flexibility to expand or contract entire sections without compromising the materials.

 

But by January 1995, the piece still wasn’t finished. Time was growing short for an April performance and a piece of the musical puzzle was frustratingly missing. I needed a short, vital motive to answer a rhythm which dominated the central section of the piece:

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This time choreographer Gerard Ebitz supplied a solution. While he was auditioning college dancers for this far-from-completed piece, Gerry demonstrated a movement pattern based on my 16th figure but then added a few eighth-notes with accents in slightly odd places:

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I wanted to leap to my feet. “That’s it!” I thought, “it’s very simple but it’s exactly what I need.” And with this last puzzle piece in place, I completed the score quickly. Gerry and I decided to call our new piece Search because the choreography featured images of dancers in pursuit of their true spiritual selves, sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing while remaining mindful that time is moving inexorably forward.

 

The music for Search was rehearsed and professionally recorded by excellent student musicians from the New World School of the Arts Music Division, and a few weeks later it was beautifully danced and well-received at the NWSA Dance Division end-of-semester concert in April 1995.  Soon after the concert, Gerard Ebitz reflected:

 

As a choreographer, the images of a dance spring from a musical source. While I never know where a piece may go or end up, it always starts with the mood, the dynamic tension, the rhythms, and the dialogue of instruments found in the score. When I first heard the original sketches, I saw images of people sweeping by us with inner turmoil and questions in their souls. I find the  piece succeeds because it is abstract enough for the viewer to find their own story or conclusion. The title, certain gestures, and images are what you might call suggestions or guide posts for audiences to use in their own discovery of the dance and music.

 

At the time of the spring 1995 dance concert I couldn’t help but recall the ideas and memories which originally sparked the music, its slow germination and eventual completion: the early conversations with Gerry, the books, the movies, my mom, Gerry’s almost off-hand solution to the rhythm issue, finishing the score in the nick of time, enjoyable collaborations with NWSA music and dance students, the satisfying performances, the positive reception afterward.

 

It is always an amazing experience to see my work interpreted in dance. Perhaps it is the closest I can get to hearing my music through someone else’s ears. In the years after Search, Gerard Ebitz and I created two more collaborative dance-music pieces for NWSA, but I believe it was in Search that we had expressed ourselves most completely, clearly, and meaningfully.

 

 

A video of a performance of Search from spring, 1995 at New World School of the Arts can be viewed at https://www.brucelazaruscomposer.com/videos