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From the horse’s mouth: musical ‘originality’ in freestyle dressage

ABSTRACT This article explores how Western music aesthetics and the construction of a human-nonhuman boundary are interrelated in freestyle dressage – a form of horse riding to music. Using UK-based pianist, producer and rider Gaynor Colbourn’s production of freestyle tracks as a case study, I examine music’s potential to either uphold or disrupt the belief that horses are innately pliant partners. I argue that the notion of dressage as a ‘natural’ relation between horses and humans is invoked by riders so as to protect themselves from the unpredictable effects of reimagining horse-human relations beyond the saddle. For Gaynor, a freestyle track must complement this understanding of riding as a natural relation in order to sound ‘original’; the originality of a track relies on Gaynor’s honouring of the apparently natural musical preferences of an individual horse, which in turn activates that horse’s compliance and ensures the quality of the sport as a form of entertaining spectacle.