Ballet Music

Ballet music is orchestral music composed specifically to accompany a staged dance work, which means it has to serve the choreography and storytelling on stage as much as it works as concert music on its own. Composers write with tempo, phrase length, and mood tied closely to what dancers are physically doing at each moment.

Tchaikovsky's ballets — Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, The Sleeping Beauty — are the genre's best-known achievements, full of vivid, danceable melody. A very different approach arrives with Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, whose violent, irregular rhythms were written for dance but shocked its 1913 premiere audience so badly it reportedly sparked a riot — proof that ballet music doesn't have to be gentle.

Where to start listening: Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker suite is warm and immediately familiar; Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring shows the same genre pushed to its most confrontational extreme.