Lecturer, Arts & Ideas in the Humanities
About
Rebecca Schwartz is a musicologist, dancer, and dance historian, and a Lecturer in the Residential College. A specialist in the relationship of music and movement in nineteenth- and twentieth-century ballet, she has an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Historical Musicology from the University of Michigan. Her interests and current scholarship involve musique dansante and the stylistic application of the danse d’école in works by Tchaikovsky and Ivanov, Stravinsky and Nijinska, and Prokofiev and Balanchine, among others; musical forces; musical gestures; kinesthetic empathy; and embodied cognition. She has presented her work at the American Musicological Society, The Sound Moves Conference at Roehampton, England, The Society of Dance History Scholars, and The Society for Ethnomusicology. Among her publications are the chapter “Musical Expression in the Bournonville-Løvenskjold La Sylphide Variation,” in Dance on Its Own Terms: Histories and Methodologies; the entry on dance critic Sarah Kaufman and fifteen other biographies in the Grove Dictionary of American Music, Second Edition; and “Aleksandr Nevskiy: Prokofiev’s Successful Compromise with Socialist Realism,” in Composing for the Screen in Germany and the USSR. She is currently working on a book on musique dansante and the art of ballet. In addition to her research and her ballet and Argentine tango dancing, she is a freelance editor of monographs and scores and an academic writing coach. She is the co-chair of the Music and Dance Study Group (MDSG) of the American Musicological Society.
