Musical Anatomies and Scientistic Ruptures in Stepanov Notation

Vladimir Ivanovich Stepanov's Alphabet des mouvements du corps humain (1892), a treatise on dance notation, reveals an attempt to preserve what the author deemed most important in dance. This paper examines the document as a musicological, aesthetic, and medical text, in addition to a dancerly one. The Alphabet draws on a vibrant cosmopolitan discourse centred not in Saint Petersburg, the place of Stepanov's education, but in Paris, the city of the document's publication. Stepanov makes little mention of Russian ballet, but instead justifies his notational system through reference to the ideas, words, and inventions of two French scientists, Étienne-Jules Marey and Jean-Martin Charcot. He posits a theorization of the body modelled on kinematic principles, and his work invests in objective and physiological aesthetics. Notation can only ever record an art for incompletely, and strategies of notation reveal the ideological agendas of their creators. Stepanov articulates a desire for a new, objective dance theory - modelled on music theory - that could be both generated and recorded by notation. He also suggests that musical rhythm can be used to express the temporal organization of physical gestures, and that music and anatomy interact in ways of which we are only dimly aware. 

About the author

Sophie Benn is a musicologist and cellist, currently finishing her PhD at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland (USA), where she researches notation, music, and the body in late 19th-century and early modernist aesthetics. Sophie has forthcoming chapters in The Routledge Companion to Choreomusicology and the volume Bodies and Sounds in Motion, edited by Stephanie Schroedter. She has received support for her research from the American Musicological Society, an Eva L. Pancoast Memorial Fellowship, and as a Graduate Affiliate of the Baker-Nord Center of the Humanities. Sophie currently serves as the Chair of the Dance Studies Association's Dance and Music Working Group and on the editorial board for the journal Sonic Scope. In August 2021, she will begin a new position as Assistant Professor of Musicology at Western Kentucky University, just north of Nashville.