Modern Dance Forms: In Relation to the Other Modern Arts
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By relating the development of modern dance to movement...)
By relating the development of modern dance to movements in painting, architecture, drama, and music, the book prompts students to develop a keen ear for emerging trends in the arts as a continual resource for dance.
Louis Horst was an American musician and dance educator.
Background
Horst was born in 1884, in Kansas City, Mo. , the son of Conrad Horst, a musician, and of Carolina Nickell. His parents had immigrated to the United States from Germany in 1882. Ten years later, when Conrad Horst joined the San Francisco Symphony as a trumpet player, the family moved from Bethlehem, Pa. , to San Francisco. In a German-speaking household, music offered enlightenment, discipline, and a way of life that was to become the root of Horst's contribution to dance.
Education
As a child he studied violin with John Josephs and John Marquand. After graduating from public school he studied piano with Samuel Fleischman.
Career
By the time he was eighteen Horst had joined the musician's union. He supported himself as a pianist in dance halls and gambling houses, specializing in ragtime. As a pit musician at the Columbia Theater, he played the violin for musical productions and the piano for dramatic shows. He also worked with a concert trio and accompanied violinists and singers, among them Nathan Firestone and Berniece Pasquale.
In 1915 the famous Denishawn Company, founded by Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, came to San Francisco on a Pacific Coast tour, and Horst was asked to join as accompanist and later made his debut as musical director. When the Denishawn School opened in Los Angeles that year, Horst was named head of the music department. The school subsequently attracted such students as Martha Graham in 1916, Doris Humphrey in 1917, and Charles Weidman in 1919. In collaboration with St. Denis, Horst began to analyze the relationship of music to dance with experiments in musical visualizations. The school formed a "synchoric orchestra" of dancers patterned after a symphonic orchestra, and this influenced a trend toward a more abstract dance form, which was later developed by Doris Humphrey. Throughout this period, Horst continued to study composition.
After ten years with Denishawn, Horst resigned. He went to Vienna to study composition at the Conservatory of Music but, disillusioned by the dominant classical traditions there, returned to New York seven months later to join Martha Graham. Beginning with her first New York City concert in 1926, Louis Horst served as Graham's accompanist, musical director, composer, and adviser. Their close artistic liaison endured until 1948. Horst encouraged Graham's artistic growth from the Denishawn-influenced Debussyian studies of her first concerts to explorations of more dramatic materials. These resulted in penetrating dance statements such as Heretic (1929) and Lamentation (1930). Horst also served as accompanist and musical director for Helen Tamiris (1927 - 1930) and for Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman (1927 - 1932), as well as for Agnes de Mille, Ruth Page, Hans Wiener, Michio Ito, Adolph Bolm, Edward Strawbridge, Harald Kreutzberg, and others.
In 1932 Horst wrote incidental music for a production of Sophocles' Electra, and in 1935 for the Broadway production of Noah by André Obey. Between 1944 and 1953 he wrote five scores for documentary films. Horst's most successful compositions were Primitive Mysteries (1931), Celebration (1934), Frontier (1935), and El Penitente (1940), done in collaboration with Graham. Horst began teaching at the Neighborhood Playhouse in 1928 (and continued until his death), where he developed a course entitled Pre-Classic Forms. At the same time, he became music director for the Perry-Mansfield School of Theatre, continuing there for five years and returning again in 1946. From 1934 to 1942 Horst taught Pre-Classic Forms and developed Modern Dance Forms and Music Composition for Dance at the Bennington School of Dance.
His discerning eye and constant moral support to dance artists gave him unique insight into dance as an art form. He became respected as an educator and mentor in this seminal period of American dance history. Horst taught at Sarah Lawrence College (1932 - 1940), at Teachers College, Columbia University (1938 - 1941), at Mills College (1939), and at Barnard College (1943; 1950 - 1951). He also taught at the American Dance Festival, formerly at Bennington College and later at Connecticut College (1948 - 1964), and the Juilliard School (1951 - 1964), institutions that became leaders in developing modern dance. In 1955 Horst received a Capezio Award. Seeing a need for a critical review publication in dance, Horst founded the Dance Observer in 1934. He was managing editor and a major contributor to that periodical until his death.
His role as a theoretician of dance composition also influenced his teaching methods. He attempted to give students a sense of discipline and an understanding of style through their handling of movement. Aesthetic awareness was a first priority, to be followed by personal artistic statement with freedom of scope and originality in style. Horst's Pre-Classic Dance Forms (1937) was the first text to draw upon musical knowledge for formal principles of choreography. To make it possible for dancers to explore content in dance, he developed a course of study that analyzed the components of modern art in movement studies exploring time, force, and space in relation to other art forms. He drew upon art history for source material and focused on studies in style and content based on experiences of modern life. His Modern Dance Forms in Relation to Other Modern Arts, with Caroll Russell, was published in 1961.