Is the king of dance losing his way?

Journalists invariably do two things with Mark Morris: call him a "master," an "institution," "a genius," "a latter-day Balanchine," and report that he always choreographs with score in hand. If Central Park updated its heroic statuary, a marble Morris would soon appear, with score in hand.

The choreographer may be largely responsible for the media's fixation on his musicality?in interviews, he happily discusses the latest score he cannot be parted from while remaining tightlipped about the dance itself, and he has admitted to loving music more than dance?but even he has grown tired of journalists' incurious nod toward his complex gift. "It's a well-known fact that I'm the most musical of choreographers," Morris, in a "grand-dame accent," informed the Times once everyone had already said so. This was a few years ago. The topic has become shtick. So I thought I'd take it up again.

A painter I knew who taught life drawing once told me that the hardest and most crucial habit for his students to learn was also the most obvious: to see. To draw not what they thought a nude looked like but the person before them. Morris hears what the music actually says, measure for measure and in its entirety. He also knows what you think it's going to say, and he makes sure to prove you wrong.

Gloria (1984), which his troupe performed earlier this month as part of the Mostly Mozart Festival, unfolds to Vivaldi's Gloria in D major. The singers praise the Lord ("We praise you, we bless you, we worship you, we glorify you. We give you thanks for your great glory, Lord God, heavenly King, Almighty God and Father. For you alone are Holy?are Lord?are the Most High") for a full 30 minutes.

But it's not what you think. Unlike present-day Christians, the singers are not smug. They're not mainly jubilant, either. The voices rise arduously through the muck of mortal suffering like serfs constructing a huge monument to a master who has only once stooped to their level. Their own lowly state saddens and frightens them more than His exalted one excites them. Faith, the music says, is as difficult as defying gravity.

So, in the dance, people keep low to the ground, inching forward on their bellies. God's on a whole other level and they aren't tuned into it.

Morris establishes this fact at the rise of the curtain. A man is stretched out like a lizard. A woman has planted herself on stubborn legs, weight sunk into her hips, and, like a washed-up waitress at a chintzy diner where the customers don't tip enough, looks at us. Just before the music hits its first heavenly peak, the man and woman hold hands and plod offstage. When God thunders in all His glory, they're out of the picture, playing cards probably.

Later, left to themselves on the dolorous earth, the dancers (10 now) fall down a lot?sometimes in a clump and sometimes alone. Sometimes someone catches a person as she falls. Sometimes no one does, but it's not the end of the world?she just falls a little harder and takes a little longer to get up.

Growing up in Seattle, Morris, 46, went to Episcopal services to hear the choir. "Sitting in the dark alone?with others?was the crucial thing," he has said. "There was a commonality in feeling alone; Bach felt alone. But we were all alone together. And I became more myself, and I felt less alone." Gloria has the same effect.

Usually musicality in a choreographer means he responds minutely and acutely to the music's feeling, texture, rhythm, structure. Morris goes further, interpreting, often perversely, the music's story. When Vivaldi ascends the scales to Heaven, Morris, hearing the effort and unlikelihood of that ascent, turns to all those left behind.

His formalist strengths?making the score's architecture visible, translating its nuances into steps?may endow the dances with welcome clarity and brightness, but his ethical sense transports them from good to great. His musicality wouldn't be worth nearly as much if it weren't accompanied by his passion for people. Morris treats us neither mawkishly nor clinically but with a keen understanding, bluntly expressed.

But recently, while he's been just as interested in music, Morris hasn't been so interested in us.

For V, the latest reputed masterpiece, he attends as intently as ever to the score, Schumann's Piano Quintet in E flat. The music is batty. Imagine a Roberto Benigni comedy in which the hero strides about in exultant happiness until he remembers that someday he will die. After pondering his mortality for a few minutes, he decides, "Oh, who cares?" and orders his little brother?no, a squadron of little brothers?to run up and down the stairs bringing him stuff. The music describes joy without apparent cause?mania, in other words.

V's 14 dancers also depict myopic zeal. Mirroring each other's ecstatic steps, they're not so much people subject to skittering joy as shards of joy itself. The dance is so in tandem with the music that it is incapable of commentary, or much comedy.

There's a good reason the press can't stop talking about Morris's musicality: When dance is a bastard of music and motion, it makes the spirit flesh, like God did. Dance reaches its apotheosis when it binds itself to music, to the harmonies and melodies, as well as the rhythms: It creates metaphors.

The problem with V is that it substitutes symbol for metaphor. A metaphor maintains the integrity of both its terms: The girl who "is a rose" is still a girl; Gloria's dancers, who experience all sorts of sorrows and absurdities, are not reducible to those sorrows and absurdities; the movement doesn't disappear into the music; flesh doesn't dissolve into spirit. A symbol, on the other hand, uses one thing (the girl) as a vessel for another (the idea of romantic bloom); the girl is no longer herself. The dancers in V are mainly a vessel for the idea of joy; they are no longer much themselves.

If V, which Morris seems to have created with his nose in the score, is the more musical dance, maybe he should be less musical.