The American Music Festival sounded like a bad idea from the very beginning, when New York City Ballet co-ballet master in chief Peter Martins announced his plans at a press conference in May of last year. Not only did American music seem a slippery peg on which to hang a dance festival—past City Ballet festivals had been dedicated to individual composers whose music Balanchine considered intrinsically danceable—but Martins had invited a number of modern and postmodern choreographers to create works on the City Ballet dancers. Attempting to play down the significance of what was in fact a huge departure for the company, he vaguely described these choreographers as being “not automatically associated with classical ballet,” then added, “They speak a slightly different language, or perhaps dialect, from us.” But the difference between Balanchine’s language and those of the likes of Lar Lubovitch, Eliot Feid, William Forsythe, and Laura Dean is at the heart of what New York City Ballet has stood for from its inception, and to hear the company’s artistic director pretend otherwise was chilling.

The results—seen during the first three weeks of the company’s spring season in April and May—confirmed one’s direst expectations. Slogging through the twenty-two premieres by fourteen choreographers, one struggled to discern a focus. There were composers who work in traditions with far stronger ties to Europe than to the country of their birth, like Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, who advertised her artistic patrimony by using the generic title Tanzspielto describe her commissioned