"Dancing to Scarlatti, Listening to Ballet: Animate Sound in Alexei Ratmanksy's Seven Sonatas"

Assistant Professor of Music at Smith College, Maeve Sterbenz, presents the first Granoff Music Center Colloquium of the semester. She will speak about the relationship between music and dance in a contemporary ballet called Seven Sonatas, choreographed by Alexei Ratmansky to keyboard sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti. The talk will consider ballet as a lens for music analysis. The dancing body provides a rich source of affective attributes and gestures that listeners may project onto sounds and sonic patterns. Through physical movement, Ratmansky’s ballet vividly animates Scarlatti’s music, shaping musical interpretation in striking and unexpected ways. This colloquium is presented by the Granoff Music Fund.