The 2023–2024 ballet season has delivered compositions that challenge, provoke, and enchant—from the Royal Opera House to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. This year's standout scores reflect an art form in vibrant dialogue with itself, where choreographers and composers are forging collaborations that redefine what ballet music can be in the twenty-first century.
Why Ballet Music Matters Now
Ballet has never been only about the dancers' bodies. It is, at its core, a negotiation between movement and sound, each medium amplifying the other's expressive power. Yet in an era of digital distraction and fragmented attention, the sustained, wordless storytelling of ballet music carries renewed force. The scores that defined this season did not merely accompany choreography; they argued with it, completed it, and occasionally upended audience expectations about which sounds belong in the theater.
Standout Scores of the 2023–2024 Season
Thomas Adès: The Dante Project (Royal Opera House, 2021; revived 2023–2024)
Though Adès's score premiered three seasons ago, its 2023 revival at Covent Garden confirmed its place in the contemporary canon. Composed for Wayne McGregor's three-part ballet after Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, Adès's music moves from the industrial clangor of Inferno through the suspended, glassy harmonies of Purgatorio to the ecstatic, almost overwhelming density of Paradiso. The orchestration demands—and receives—virtuosic playing: keening violins, shattering percussion, and brass choirs that seem to descend from another sphere entirely. Critics noted the London Philharmonic's performance under Adès's baton as "ferociously committed" (The Guardian, October 2023), with the score's final minutes achieving a rare theatrical transcendence.
Anna Thorvaldsdóttir: Metacosmos (New York City Ballet, February 2024)
The Icelandic composer, known for her orchestral works of tectonic stillness, made her NYCB debut with this newly commissioned score, choreographed by Lauren Lovette. Metacosmos unfolds across twenty-two minutes of slowly accumulating texture—strings bowed near the bridge to produce spectral overtones, low brass issuing subterranean rumblings, harp harmonics flickering like distant stars. Where traditional ballet scores telegraph emotional beats, Thorvaldsdóttir's music withholds easy resolution, demanding that dancers—and audiences—inhabit uncertainty. The result, wrote Marina Harss in The New York Times, was "ballet as meditation, movement as weather system."
Joel Thompson: The Snow Queen (Pacific Northwest Ballet, November 2023)
Thompson, a 2022 Grawemeyer Award winner, composed his first full-length ballet score for PNB's holiday season, with choreography by Alejandro Cerrudo. Drawing on Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale, Thompson merged Romantic orchestral tradition with harmonic languages rooted in African-American spirituals and contemporary spectralism. The score's central "Mirror of Reason" sequence—a twelve-tone row shattered and reassembled across pounding timpani—provided one of the season's most viscerally exciting dance episodes. PNB music director Emil de Cou led the Seattle Symphony in performances that balanced architectural clarity with eruptive passion.
Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring: A Centennial Reckoning (Multiple venues)
No survey of this season could ignore the hundred-year echo of Le Sacre du printemps. Rather than dutiful revivals, 2023–2024 brought radical reimaginings. Most striking was Sasha Waltz's production for the Paris Opera Ballet (September 2023), which paired Stravinsky's original with newly composed interludes by Du Yun. Yun's electronic and acoustic interpolations—featuring processed vocalizations and microtonal string harmonics—framed Stravinsky's primitivism as prophecy, asking whether our own ecological moment constitutes a new kind of sacrificial necessity. The critical response was sharply divided, which may be the highest compliment to a work that still possesses dangerous voltage.
Inside the Collaboration: Mazzoli, Abraham, and the Problem of Breath
When composer Missy Mazzoli began work with choreographer Kyle Abraham on The Upending for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (premiered December 2023), she confronted a problem that orchestral composers rarely face: the audible breath of dancers. "Kyle's movement vocabulary is so grounded, so weighted," Mazzoli explained in a Vanity Fair profile, "that I found myself writing phrases that left space for exhalation, for the sound of bodies working."
The solution—interlocking rhythmic cells that dancers could anchor to, with deliberate gaps where lungfuls of air became part of the musical fabric—pro
