Musicality again: Name that tune

16th February 2011

Introduction

So, I was thinking a bit about musicality recently (in preparation for the upcoming Tango Nuevo musicality and style workshop, shameless plug), and I had a couple of thoughts on the issue.

Technically, musicality is simply the art of matching your movements to the music. Or, in other words, dancing.

Practice makes musical

But lot of "musicality" is simply knowing a particular track thoroughly, having danced to it hundreds of times, and experimenting with different possibilities for movements to match the different phrases of that track.

In other words, practicing to the same music. Which, in a sense, is more like choreography than musicality. And within the context of Argentine Tango, I suspect this is largely how these 89-year-old guys manage to be so good - they've had 70 years of dancing to a fairly small set of music, and they've danced each one hundreds or thousands of times, so they know exactly what to do, to best interpret each phrase.

And even if a tango track is new to them, they'll almost certainly have more than enough experience of the structure of tango music to be able to anticipate what's coming in the next phrase, and to adapt their tactics and movements to that phrase.

(of course, this is why experienced dancers have a very high tolerance for the old classics - far higher than most DJs realise, I think. If a track is perfect for dnacing to now, it'll still be perfect in 10 years' time; and more importantly, we'll have ten years' experience of exactly how we can experiment and interpret that track.

It's not just practice

However, this ability is based on practice - it's not so much "musicality" as "experience" at work here.

There's nothing wrong with that - we all have to specialise in something if we want to be good at it. But I wonder how good these 89-year-old dancers would be at interpreting a track which is outside their normal musical experience...

You may ask, does it matter? If someone's dancing well and musically to a track, does it matter whether this has been achieved through experience or not?

Yes, I think it does matter.

Let's take painting as an analogy. If you've painted the same single scene 1,000 times, you're likely to be extremely good at painting that scene. But you may be poor at painting anything else. You're not necessarily a good painter - you're simply someone who's good at painting one specific scene.

Of course, painters do indeed specialise - a portrait artist may be useless with landscapes, as an obvious example. But too much specialisation will not help you develop your overall ability to paint.

And I think, similarly, over-specialisation in Tango (in venues, in partners and in music) will lead to some of the same limitations.

So I'd suggest that musicality starts with familiarity, but also that there's much more to the skill than that.

So what is it?

To me, musicality is the ability to read the music, and interpret it, in an improvised way.

Dancing in a truly improvised way, to an unknown track, is much harder than dancing to one you know well, because you have to guess at what's coming up, or you have to improvise continuously on the fly as the music changes.

How do you get it?

Of course, you have to start somewhere...

Here's a suggested plan:

  1. Rehearsal: take a track - or, preferably, several different tracks - that you like. Listen to those tracks, and consider how you can move to different parts - ideally, analysing how the music changes, and developing possible types of movements to those changes. Which is a bit like an accelerated practice for that track, of course, but with the added discipline of - hopefully - being able to apply these principles to all music tracks.
  2. Research: study music, understand the key structures and cues within musical tracks. This may well help you to develop musicality within your dancing; you can understand more about musical structure, phrases, breaks, accents, and other areas. You'll have some background to give context to the movements you make at particular points.
  3. Experiment: Now, take the opposite approach to Step 1. Dance to totally unfamiliar tracks, and try to interpret those unknown tracks using some of the techniques and ideas you developed earlier, and see how you can apply those techniques to these tracks.

Rinse and repeat...

How do you know?

You know what the difference is between you and me? I make this look good. ~ Agent J, Men In Black

How can you tell if a dancer has true musicality? Get them to dance to a track they've never encountered before, and see if they make it look good.

- David Bailey, 16th February 2011

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