Article 11 — The music

MUSIC IS THE MAIN SUPPORT OF THE ARTISTIC DRESSAGE PROGRAM. It does not accompany the choreography: it carries it. Everything that follows flows from this.

THE MUSIC MUST THEREFORE BE DANCEABLE. That is the first criterion. A piece must carry a readable tempo and clear phrases, on which the horse can set its gaits and the pair build its transitions.

Music written for dancing — waltz, tango, salsa, latin, rock, rhythmic popular music — lends itself naturally. Atmospheric music, film scores and show music, however beautiful, often have no marked tempo: the pair then cannot dance, and the score suffers.

Choosing your music is not choosing what you love: it is choosing what your horse can dance to.

FOLLOWING THE SHAPE OF THE MUSIC — Where a piece has a chorus that comes back regularly, taking up the same precise sequence of movements at each return is a mark of mastery: mastery of the music, whose structure has been heard, and mastery of the horse, able to reproduce the sequence identically.

The audience then recognises the chorus with the eyes as much as with the ears. The horse becomes an instrument of dance.

This quality is rewarded in the mark for interpretation of the music.

ONE PIECE OF MUSIC ONLY — The program is built on a single musical work, taken as it exists. It may be SHORTENED, it may not be ALTERED.

Assembling several pieces end to end to fit the horse's gaits is forbidden and means elimination. In such an edit, it is the music that is adapted to the horse. Artistic Dressage asks the opposite: it is the pair that places itself at the service of a work as it stands. That is the whole difficulty, and that is what sets it apart from freestyle tests to music.

FREE MUSIC — the competitor chooses the music under these conditions.

IMPOSED MUSIC — the Federation announces the date of the competition on its website and supplies the imposed music, different for the Amateur category and for the Pro categories. Competitors have from fifteen days to three weeks, depending on the calendar, to build their choreography.

This format serves three purposes. It guarantees genuinely danceable music. It places every pair in a category before the same material, and therefore in an exact comparison. And it demands an effort of creativity on a piece one has not chosen and does not necessarily like: that is where the difference between riders shows.

At live competitions, the music is sent to the organisers before the competition, within the stated deadlines, as an MP3 file.