Tilden Russell's book is for dance theory what Oliver Strunk's Source Readings was for music history, in 1950: the first comprehensive compilation of primary-source writings in its field in English. With his commentary on these judiciously selected and (where necessary) expertly translated texts, Russell traces the serpentine, and sometimes discontinuous, path of important thinking on dance over the centuries, going a long way toward providing the overarching history of dance theory that we still lack.
Tilden Russell is Professor Emeritus of Music at Southern Connecticut State University. The Compleat Dancing Master (2012), his two-volume translation with commentary of Gottfried Taubert's Rechtschaffener Tantzmeister, received the Society of Dance History Scholars' de la Torre Bueno Prize Special Citation. He further explores early eighteenth-century German dance theory in Theory and Practice in Eighteenth-Century Dance: The German-French Connection (2017), and is co-author, with Dominique Bourassa, of The Menuet de la cour (2007). He has written and lectured on Taubert and his contemporaries, dance theory, the minuet and scherzo, and other topics in dance and music history, with articles published in Dance Research, Dance Chronicle, The Journal of Musicology, Journal of the American Musicological Society, Musical Quarterly, Acta musicologica, Imago musicae, Beethoven Forum, The New Grove 2nd edition, and elsewhere.