Anne Searcy, Music History, University of Washington

Image credit: Savannah Moon Photography

I am an associate professor of music history at the University of Washington, where I research and teach about the intersections of music, politics, and dance. In my current book project, Choreographing Minimalism: Music, Neoliberalism, and the Creation of Contemporary Ballet, I explore how minimalist music helped create contemporary ballet in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, and how in turn writing for dance shaped minimalist music. My first book, Ballet in the Cold War: A Soviet-American Exchange, analyzes the American and Soviet cultural diplomacy programs, focusing on tours by the Bolshoi Ballet in the United States and by American Ballet Theatre and the New York City Ballet in the Soviet Union. I have also published articles on the ballet Spartacus and the musical Hamilton. Before coming to the University of Washington, I taught at the University of Miami. You can find a list of my publications below.

Choreographing Minimalism: Music, Neoliberalism, and the Creation of Contemporary Ballet

Under contract with Oxford University Press

Between the late 1970s and the early 1990s, ballet and minimalist music each underwent a radical transformation. Minimalist music moved into the classical music mainstream. At the same time, choreographers started creating a new style of ballet that evoked modernity through off-center movements, an emphasis on effort, and innovative treatments of space and time. In this book, I argue that these artistic revolutions were surprisingly intertwined with one another and with the move towards neoliberal austerity in arts funding during the 1980s.

Minimalist music continues to play an outsized role in contemporary ballet and ballet in turn has helped popularize and shape minimalist music. This book explores how minimalist music and contemporary ballet responded to the changing economy in the 1980s, how dance reshaped minimalist music as a genre, and how minimalist music helped create contemporary ballet.

In 1959, the Bolshoi Ballet arrived in New York for its first ever tour of the United States. The tour was part of the Soviet-American cultural exchange, arranged by the governments of the US and USSR as part of their Cold War strategies. This book explores the first tours of the exchange, by the Bolshoi in 1959 and 1962, by American Ballet Theatre in 1960, and by New York City Ballet in 1962. 

Drawing on both Russian- and English-language archival sources, this book demonstrates that the separation between Soviet and American ballet lies less in how the ballets look and sound, and more in the ways that Soviet and American viewers were trained to see and hear. It suggests new ways to understand both Cold War cultural diplomacy and twentieth-century ballet.

On May 12, 1983, New York City Ballet became the first major ballet company to perform a work to minimalist music: Jerome Robbins's Glass Pieces, titled after its score by Philip Glass. The premiere came at a turning point for both minimalism and ballet. The dance world was reeling in the wake of the death of choreographer George Balanchine. Simultaneously, minimalist music was in the process of moving from countercultural avant-garde venues to wealthy, high-status institutions. Although previously minimalist music had helped postmodern choreographers create works that celebrated everyday movement and equality among dancers, for Robbins minimalist music conjured a sense of urban propulsion. In each of the ballet's first two sections, Robbins choreographed to Glass's music in two ways simultaneously: A group from the corps de ballet used the egalitarian techniques from postmodern dance to create a modern urban backdrop, while another group of soloists used virtuosic techniques from modernist ballet. This allowed audiences to shift their focus at any given moment between the anonymity of the corps and the heroic subjectivity of the soloists. In the third section of Glass Pieces, Robbins staged a virtuosic group dance for the corps de ballet, using Glass's exoticist music for Akhnaten to create an escape from the relentless modernity of the first two sections. Altogether, I argue that Glass Pieces is one of the earliest works of contemporary ballet and an important step in minimalist music's transition from its earlier heyday as a music representing countercultural egalitarianism to one representing the modern city.

“Dancers on a grid: Musical Minimalism Arrives at New York City Ballet in 1983”

Journal of the Society for American Music, 16, no. 4 (2022): 381–398.

“Alexei Ratmansky’s Abstract-Narrative Ballet.”

In The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet, ed. Kathrina Ferrugia-Kriel and Jill Nunes Jensen, 490–502. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.

Alexei Ratmansky’s works challenge the way that Western critics and choreographers split ballet into abstract and narrative categories. This chapter explains how Western ballet arrived at the division between abstract and narrative. This developed out of the ideology of absolute music, the understanding that music could not have any meaning other than a purely formal one. During the Cold War, American choreographers such as George Balanchine took up the belief in absolute music in order to push against Soviet models of ballet. The Cold War also encouraged Western ballet experts to conflate abstraction with progress. Within this context, the chapter analyzes Ratmansky’s Russian Seasons (2006), which can appear as both abstract and narrative to its audiences. Ratmansky’s career thus challenges many long-held assumptions in the West about forward progress in ballet.

“Bringing Dance Back to the Center in Hamilton.”

American Music 36, no. 4 (Winter 2018): 448–466.

Though Hamilton has often been analyzed as the sole product of composer, lyricist, and star Lin-Manuel Miranda, Miranda’s collaborators played an important role in shaping the musical. This article analyzes the choreography by Andy Blankenbuehler as a parallel physical score. It draws on interviews with Blankenbuehler and observations of the rehearsal process.

Within a single decade, the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow produced distinct versions of Aram Khachaturian’s ballet Spartacus by Igor Moiseyev (1958), Leonid Yakobson (1962), and Yuri Grigorovich (1968). A close examination of the three productions, analyzed along with evidence from the transcripts of the theater’s artistic committee meetings, newspaper criticism of the ballets, and audience surveys from the theater’s archive reveals how the productions participated in Thaw-era debates about the place of nationality in Soviet society. The original two choreographers, like Khachaturian, used the ballet as a place to stage the ‘‘Friendship of Peoples,’’ a metaphorical representation of Soviet society as a meeting place for diverse nationalities, conceived of as essentialized folk cultures. In 1968, when Grigorovich staged the ballet, he radically rearranged the score, replacing Khachaturian’s multi-ethnic display with an exhibition of ethnic homogenization. Grigorovich’s revisions reflected Khrushchev’s and Brezhnev’s campaigns to shape a single, unified Soviet national identity.