Somewhat as an extension of his courses, Allen has tried to figure out what, if anything, he knows about how music works with dance. This has resulted in a few written paragraphs.
Music Composition for Dance in the Twenty-First Century: Questions about the Dance/Music Relationship
was presented at the conference Music and Dance in Unity
in Stockholm, Sweden, in August 1998, organized mostly under the auspice of the International Guild of Musicians in Dance.
Dancing to the Music between Balanchine and Cunningham
was published in the Cornell Dance Program Newsletter in 2000.
Allen presented a paper about choreographer Trisha Brown's use of music in the dances Set and Reset and Twelve Ton Rose at Sound Moves: An International Conference on Music and Dance, 5-6 November 2005, hosted by the Centre for Dance Research at Roehampton University in London. On the Edges of Music: Trisha Brown's Set and Reset and Twelve Ton Rose
is on pp. 39-46 (pp. 42-49 of the .pdf file) of the Proceedings. A further reworked and expanded version from July 2006 is available in either htm or pdf.
Parameters of Perception: Vision, Audition, and Twentieth-Century Music and Dance
was written with Kathleya Afanador and was presented at the 38th Annual Conference of the Congress on Research in Dance, held November 2-5, 2006, in Tempe, Arizona. Here are versions in pdf and in htm.