by Jacquelyn Thayer
Leonard Cohen, needless to say, was a master. He may have been the kind of singer-songwriter you discovered, like me, as a teen or college-aged indie rock fan, along with acts like Nick Drake and the Velvet Underground. If you’re Canadian — and especially from his native Quebec — he’s a homegrown legend.
But sometimes the songwriting outstripped the production, as in the case of “Hallelujah.” While Cohen deserves all the credit for the song’s composition, his original recording is a bit more of its time than its later renditions. It’s synth-heavy, reminiscent of the Sunday School song cassettes of my childhood, and it made little popular impact when it appeared on his 1984 album Various Positions.
Cohen, though, considered the song unfinished, and would go on to tinker with it in concerts. John Cale was the first artist to reinterpret it, in 1991, with a cover for Cohen tribute album I’m Your Fan. Jeff Buckley made it his own a few years later after a chance encounter with Cale’s recording, and many consider his the definitive take.
Still, the song only became a pop culture staple in the early 2000s, when a host of TV and film music supervisors realized its soundtrack potential, and cover versions appeared everywhere from Cold Case to Shrek to The OC. The turn of the millennium was simply awash in “Hallelujah”s.
As with most musical trends, it took a little longer to arrive in skating. While it made periodic appearances — Sasha Cohen, for example, skated to Buckley’s for a handful of shows in 2010 — it didn’t really take root until 2012, when two world champions debuted their own show versions of Buckley: Carolina Kostner and Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir.
Madison Hubbell and Zach Donohue earn the credit for securing the song’s place in the competitive landscape, setting their 2015-16 waltz short dance to k.d. lang’s rendition. From there, while an occasional alternate version may arise — see Kaetlyn Osmond skating to Tori Kelly’s cover in 2017-18 — skaters have mostly split into two camps, Jeremy Ten and Patrick Chan skating Buckley, Wenjing Sui and Cong Han and Mariah Bell to lang. For this past season’s free dance — choreographed by fellow “Hallelujah” vet Scott Moir — Hubbell and Donohue, ever the “Hallelujah” trailblazers, became the first to pair Buckley and lang.
Skaters will point to Buckley’s vocals as the song’s standout element. “There’s something really raw about his voice,” said Virtue in a talking head for the broadcast of 2012’s Stars on Ice Canada. But when I listen to Buckley, it’s not his vocals that characterize this version for me; it’s his virtuoso guitar playing. There’s a pleasingly circular, shimmering aspect to the repeating chords, which serve as the melody’s only backdrop. The fluidity of it certainly suits skating.
Virtue and Moir’s program, choreographed by Marina Zoueva, uses rotational movement to echo the roundness of the chords. They easily match their knee bend to the rhythm; the musicality is obvious even when they’re simply doing crossovers. The most dramatic musical moment — “It’s not a cry that you hear at night…” — doesn’t involve wild gesticulation or emo faces. Instead, it’s essentially a call-and-response side-by-side step sequence.
But this is an ice dance show program, free of the choreographic restrictions of competition. Patrick Chan and choreographer David Wilson had the tougher task. And sure, the jumps — required for competition — feel a bit misplaced, because this is not a song with obvious, splashy highlight moments. It is steady, even in Buckley’s impassioned rendition. But that really doesn’t matter, because Chan’s blades illustrate the melody.
And while Chan does some light choreographic illustrating of the lyric, the ice dancers resist the impulse to choreoliterally interpret “the fourth, the fifth / the minor fall, and the major lift.” No, for Virtue and Moir and Hubbell and Donohue, the verse section dedicated to the intricacies of musical composition belongs to footwork.
The music is so spare that it can’t provide cover or distraction for the skater. It’s so muted, in fact, that for Virtue and Moir and Chan, the blades themselves become part of the audio. At the same time, it gives a skater only the bare bones with which to skate. You either can move on the subtlest of beats, or you can’t. Notice too that the guitar intro cannot be effectively performed with gesture; it’s pure rhythm. It can only be managed through footwork, like Carolina Kostner demonstrates. Buckley, then, is not for the shallow of blade.
Before performing it in the Opening Ceremony of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, k.d. lang initially covered “Hallelujah” in 2004, for her album Hymns of the 49th Parallel. In a 2017 interview, she described the song as “a cultural landmark,…a moral anthem,” and that’s kind of how she performs it. This version, with gentle but persistent piano backing giving way to strings, is fuller, more thickly woven than Buckley’s. A skater can become enmeshed with it. But, as noted with Chan, the song itself, regardless of singer, leaves few obvious points for jumps and other freestyle tricks.
Mariah Bell’s 2019-20 free program, with which she earned silver at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships, places more emphasis on arms and body than Chan’s program, with a particular focus on melody and vocal line. Footwork, when called for, is rhythmic, but it’s not the focus. Shae-Lynn Bourne’s choreography utilizes the music in an intelligent way — the spiral with lang’s final, elongated “Hallelujah” is a smart choice, and lyrics are not interpreted literally — and this also means that it’s a program created specifically to lang’s vision. There’s a warmth and emotionality that this recording lends versus the demanding exposure of Buckley’s, and it’s difficult to imagine how such a take with his audio might look.
Sui and Han’s 2017-18 short is also high on emotion, and again showcases this mostly through upper body flourishes. We can see again, too, that lang’s vocal line provides choreographic opportunity. But where the rhythm is emphasized, it’s in the footwork sequence, set to the pseudo-waltz strongly emphasized in lang’s version.
And this leads us to Madison Hubbell and Zach Donohue. To meet the rhythm requirements for the 2015-16 season’s short dance, Hubbell and Donohue used a musical cut that highlights this 6/8 time signature, and also includes a march interpolation composed specially for the program by Karl Hugo. “Anthemic” is a fair word to use here. The program is the polar opposite of a stripped-down Buckley; it’s about grandeur and stateliness. What’s also immediately obvious is, once again, the use of the upper body to demonstrate emotion — and to illustrate the music itself.
Contrast this with Hubbell and Donohue’s other competitive “Hallelujah.” The expression here comes from the feet up; every movement underscores Buckley’s intricate opening rhythm. While elements are placed on the subtlest of highlight moments, the blades are once again central. But notice what happens as the free dance transitions from Buckley to lang, via a connecting composition again by Karl Hugo. The grounded subtleties shift into something more emphatic, more emotive. Even as Hubbell and Donohue remain exceptional skaters, we’re back to placing the most obvious emphasis on that upper body grandeur.
So where does that leave us?. Every skater covered here is elite and exceptionally skilled, and not every choreographer could tackle any rendition of “Hallelujah” as effectively as those examined here. Lang is melody and soaring, open vocal line; Buckley is all about those chord progressions. And footwork is, fundamentally, the chord structure of skating.
Consider this: beautiful shapes and expressive movement are what first catch our attention, the straightforward melody we register and remember. But what’s grounding that piece? It’s the chords, the basic set of repeated notes — the fourth, the fifth, an F major to a G major. It’s what’s beneath the showy topline, but without which a piece becomes flimsy.
For skaters, footwork is that foundation. The greatest skaters and choreographers know how to communicate within that basic structure, like a jazz musician improvises off a selected melody or a ballerina conveys story through a controlled adagio. Rather than a top-down choreographic approach, where the feet maintain the rules while the upper body generates the artistic highlights, the true artistry comes at ground — or ice — level.
So “Hallelujah” is a tale of approaches. While lang gives us the more sweeping emotion, Buckley provides the real opportunity for blade-based bravado.