Much of the history of dance lies in the history of music. Now and again something happens to make us reconsider that history. One such event occurred over the weekend when, in a brilliantly enterprising program at the Juilliard School, the conductor James Conlon, the Juilliard Orchestra and Juilliard Dance presented three world premieres choreographed to long-forgotten scores, written from 1911 to 1935 by German composers whose work the Nazis had banned.

The three scores were by Franz Schreker (1879-1934), Alexander von Zemlinsky (1871-1942), and Erwin Schulhoff (1894-1942). Though I had heard some Zemlinsky music, Schreker's and Schulhoff's names were new to me. And Schulhoff's score, ''Ogelala'' (Op. 53, ''Ballettmysterium''), which closed the program, proved to be a major discovery and prompted the most remarkable dance.

Schulhoff, who was denied employment after the Germans occupied Czechoslovakia and whose applications to emigrate were blocked, died of tuberculosis in a Nazi camp. His 1925 ballet ''Ogelala,'' a large-scale example of what has been called neoprimitivism, was based on Mexican themes discovered by ethnomusicological research. You can hear what it owes to the dramatic modernism of Stravinsky's ''Rite of Spring'' and its (accidental) resemblance to Bartok's ''Miraculous Mandarin'' (which had its premiere a year later) and still find it a cauldron of newly exciting rhythm and varied sonority. I recommend it for consideration by any dance company with a large orchestra.

At Juilliard the choreographer Robert Battle, staging this score under the title ''No Longer Silent,'' rose to its demands with a dance that evoked multiple primitive rituals in complex and modern terms. From the very start he seizes attention with his skill in handling four groups moving in different rhythms, and from then on he kept his stage society compellingly -- and always mysteriously -- subdivided, often isolating individuals. Pounding machinelike rhythms, imagery of shame or torment and more than one self-immolating dance solo succeeded another in structures that told not one story but suggested many.

His dancers were dressed in black. Feet, hands and faces often gleamed out against the surrounding darkness. Nicole Pierce's wide range of modern lighting effects, sometimes silhouetting the dancers and shining lights at the audience, often lighting the dancers from new angles, kept changing the drama. In the final section Mr. Battle and his dancers resorted to one or two clich? notably the audible but stagey gasps that accompanied some ''possessed'' dances, and the silent scream presented by one entire group as the work ended. Nevertheless ''No Longer Silent'' looked better than many new stagings for major dance companies. I immediately imagined the Alvin Ailey company, for which Mr. Battle already choreographs, staging this to great effect.

For the choreographers Adam Hougland and Nicolo Fonte, the main problem was that they were staging nondance music that would have vexed the most musical of choreographers. Mr. Hougland's ''Prelude to a Drama'' used Schreker's overture to his 1913 ''Gezeichneten'' (''The Marked Ones''), to have its American premiere in 2010 with the Los Angeles Opera; Mr. Fonte's ''Proximity Effect'' was set to Zemlinsky's ''Sinfonietta,'' Op. 23 (1935). Mr. Hougland, coping with a score that has any number of climaxes in quick succession, employed dance movements and structures of routine modern-dance intensity, though with an ear that clearly responded to the music's changing moods. Mr. Fonte's use of stage space, dramatic physical stance and gesture, and changing subgroups brought out the Expressionist pressures in Zemlinsky's music, but often without serious response to its detail.

At every point the Juilliard dancers looked skilled, attractive and extraordinarily committed. Mr. Conlon's conducting of the Juilliard musicians ensured that the music was central to the experience of all three works. The ovations that followed each work peaked when the musicians and Mr. Conlon joined all the dancers onstage.

PHOTO: The Juilliard Dance company in ''No Longer Silent,'' choreographed by Robert Battle to a 1925 score by Erwin Schulhoff. (PHOTOGRAPH BY ROSALIE O'CONNOR)