Soon after, encouraged by her mother, she added music lessons to her dance training as she began taking instruction on the cello from Mary Lewis in Wrightswood, California.
Aldrich has had a remarkable succession of related careers as a performer, choreographer, workshop leader and lecturer, project manager and administrator, consultant, and curator and archivist of dance materials.
As a professional musician, Aldrich first joined the New England Consort of Viols as a player of the viola da gamba, a bowed, fretted, and stringed instrument similar to the cello that was popular during the Renaissance and Baroque periods.
In summer festivals at Castle Hill on the Crane Estate in Ipswich, Massachusetts, she danced in the first staged American productions with period instruments of Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, Jean-Baptiste Lully's Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, and Claudio Monteverdi's Orfeo, all directed by Thomas Kelly.
As a specialist in nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century social dance, she also created choreography for American Ballroom Theater, the Jane Austen Society of North America, the Smithsonian Institution, and Festival Folklórico de Taxco, México.
In 1997, she created a program of marches, reels, quadrilles, and waltzes for the centennial celebration of the Great Hall in the Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress in Washington.
In New York, Aldrich set dances for David Kneuss's 2002 production of Mozart's Don Giovanni, which was performed throughout Japan under the baton of Seiji Ozawa.
Her work has appeared in six Merchant-Ivory productions: The Europeans (1979), Quartet (1981), Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (1990), The Remains of the Day (1993), Jefferson in Paris (1993), and Surviving Picasso (1996), all directed by James Ivory.
In 1994, Aldrich was hired by the New York branch of Oxford University Press as managing editor of the International Encyclopedia of Dance, a reference project that had failed during development at two other academic publishers.
Working with founding editor Selma Jeanne Cohen, the editorial board (George Dorris, Nancy Goldner, Beate Gordon, Nancy Reynolds, David Vaughan, Suzanne Youngerman), and the staff of Oxford's Scholarly and Professional Reference Department, she was a major force in rescuing the project and bringing it to a successful conclusion with publication of a six-volume set in 1998.
Among them are a number of collections of early members of Graham's company: Jane Dudley, Sophie Maslow, Helen McGehee, Ethel Winter, and Yuriko.
Aldrich was also responsible for content and narrative for online presentations of library materials on the Ballets Russes de Sergei Diaghilev, on Bronislava Nijinska, and on Martha Graham.