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The music of Olympic figure skating isn’t what it could be

Music epitomizes the uneasy line that figure skating has long tried to walk between athleticism ａｎｄ　art. Do you want a skater who creatively interprets the music ａｎｄ　gives an ethereal, memorable performance? ｏｒone who can nail all the jumps? The answer has never been clear.

That tension was brought into the spotlight at the 2002 Winter Games, when Russians Elena Berezhnaya ａｎｄ　Anton Sikharulidze beat the Canadian pair of Jamie Salé ａｎｄ　David Pelletier because their marks for "presentation" (the art part) overshadowed the Canadians’ clear win on "technical merit," because a French judge was coerced into skewing her vote.

The resulting controversy sparked a massive overhaul of the rules ａｎｄ　judging system in 2004. Yet even under the new system, which involves minute scrutiny (with replays) of each technical element involved in a program, a part of the final total includes marks fｏｒchoreography ａｎｄ　interpretation －－the "art" part of the equation, which directly relates to the musical selection.

Initially, the new rules inspired skaters with a new sense of caution. Skaters are "starting to use music that is repetitive ａｎｄ　has less definition than it used to have," Weisiger says. "A lot of programs now use music that sounds the same over ａｎｄ　over, kind of drones on ａｎｄ　on."

But Weisiger doesn’t think the new rules are the whole problem. It’s "also a new generation of choreographers," she says, who "don’t have the same appreciation fｏｒclassical music."

Even for those who do want to improve the musical level of the sport, there are limits to what you can do in less than five minutes, especially when you’re working with a skater, a choreographer ａｎｄ　a coach who may all have their own ideas of what they want.

"The problem is that these people don’t know any music," says music writer David Hurwitz, who established a small side business on his CD-reviewing Web site, Classics Today, to advise figure skaters on their musical choices. Skaters tend to cling to what has done well before: "Carmen," in various permutations, tops a list that includes a heavy dose of Russian ballet ａｎｄ　dance music ("Swan Lake," "Scheherazade") ａｎｄ　Spanish-themed works.

Even the musically knowledgeable do things to their musical selections that would outrage any purist. Alexander Goldstein, a Russian-born composer who has been arranging music fｏｒathletes since he worked with the Soviet figure skating and rhythmic gymnastics teams in the 1970s, points out that on his computer he can "make the music faster, make the music slower, without any degradation of the sound quality." But that’s the least of his manipulation.

There’s an argument to be made fｏｒusing ballet music ａｎｄ　film scores rather than more demanding works: If you’re going to chop a piece of music down into a four-minute segment, perhaps it’s better to use functional music that was written to be adapted to its users rather than masterpieces that can only suffer through abridgement -- like the arrangement Goldstein prepared fｏｒthe Canadian ice dancers Tessa Virtue ａｎｄ　Scott Moir of the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony.

"You need something people can relate to, something that can evoke some kind of picture quickly," Weisiger says, wondering how many iterations of "Phantom of the Opera" will be heard at this year’s Olympics.

In fact, some risk-takers have been rewarded, like the ice dancers Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean, who did more than perhaps any other skaters to elevate the sport to an art form with, among other things, their signature dance to Ravel’s "Bolero."

But coaches are still leery of putting their skaters at a disadvantage. Weisiger dreams of creating a routine to Debussy’s "Afternoon of a Faun"; "it’s just so ethereal," she says. But one day when she played it at the rink, she says, "one of the young male coaches skated by ａｎｄ　said, ’Oh, God, don’t use that; that will put everyone to sleep.’ " As a result, it’s back to the status quo, where "all the guys want to see the action hero," she says, ａｎｄ　adds, "ａｎｄ　all the girls skate to something Spanish."

詞句筆記：

overhaul：全面整修

spark a massive overhaul：引起大面積的整改

coerce：vt.強制

skew：adj.歪的，斜的;n.歪斜;vi.變歪;vt.使歪曲，使扭曲

choreography：n.編舞

minute：adj.細致的，細微的

minute scrutiny：細審

film score：電影配樂

leery：猜疑的，不信任的

status quo：現狀

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