The consolidated dance-music couple, so rooted in the tradition of Western dance to the present day, is a cultural construct that has its origins in the Renaissance, when for the first time in ...history dance is numbered among the Arts. The birth of specific dance treatises, which prescript a way of dancing for the hegemonic class, responds to the need to systematize a choreic style able to discipline the body, to provide it with features of social distinction, to reduce a physical practice through Art using words and musical notation and, finally, to leave a trace of a repertoire of choreographic compositions worthy of memory, some of which with its own musical accompaniment. The association between the two Arts reaches a point of great solidity in sharing of the measure (ethical and numerical) aimed at the aesthetic achievement of harmony.
TheApologie de la danse(1623) by François de Lauze constitutes the most substantive dance treatise of the seventeenth century. When Kirstein mailed a copy to Stravinsky, he sent the 1952 British ...reprint of the book, which had been greatly supplemented by its editor, Joan Wildeblood. The manual addressed the instruction, history, and function of several period dances, at least “the most advantageous” ones, as de Lauze concludes. But most important, Wildeblood offered detailed explanations of several popular dance patterns.
Given Stravinsky’s immersion in the music of the Renaissance, Kirstein could not have sent the manual at a more propitious
