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 for athletes 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 for using 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 for the 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."
词句笔记：
overhaul：全面整修
spark a massive overhaul：引起大面积的整改
coerce：vt.强制
skew：adj.歪的，斜的；n.歪斜；vi.变歪；vt.使歪曲，使扭曲
choreography：n.编舞
minute：adj.细致的，细微的
minute scrutiny：细审
film score：电影配乐
leery：猜疑的，不信任的
status quo：现状
