If I don’t perceive music very well, I will not be able to translate it very well either.Īnd if I want to translate the music into dance in a good way, I also need to know the target language, dance. The better I can perceive the music, the better my understanding of the source language. I am the dancer and therefore I am the translator, but none of the languages is my mother tongue. I would like to think of music as one language (the source language) that we have to translate into another language – dance (the target language). Now I would like to introduce a metaphor here, something that we will return to over and over, and which will hopefully make it easier to understand. And we need to be creative to connect the music with the dance in a good way. And just being able to express it doesn’t help that much if we can’t perceive all the nuances in the music. Just perceiving the music doesn’t help us expressing it in a creative way. And we also have to be creative in how we interpret it and express it. So, to be musical we have to be able to perceive the music. There needs to be a connection between the sound and the move. Or maybe the move should look like it could produce that sound. In a way it should feel as the sound sounds. Does that make sense?Īnd a move should “feel right in the body”. Even if we would turn the music off, the moves should still look like the music sounds. In a way it should be possible to “see the music” when we see dance. If I make a more personal interpretation I would say that the creativity for a dancer can be expressed as an ability to connect with the music and interpret it, making movements that relate to the music in a way that makes sense, both visually and in how they feel in the body. So, a dancer would need to be able to perceive differences in aspects of music, interpret them in a creative way and then also express these differences in the dance. These are the core elements of musicality for dancers. Our instrument is our body, or bodies in the case of couple dancing. We would still need to be able to express different aspects of music, but we are dancers. The second part would be a bit different though. How good are we at noticing what is happening in the music? How well do we hear the different aspects of music? The ability to perceive music would still be the same. For a dancer, the exact definition of musicality can be similar, but not exactly the same. Two types of musicality may be differentiated: to be able to perceive music (musical receptivity) and to be able to reproduce music in addition to creating music (musical creativity).” “A person considered musical has the ability to perceive and reproduce differences in aspects of music including pitch, rhythm, and harmony. The definition we will use in this book is from Wikipedia: We need to have a starting point, some kind common understanding of what it is so that we can figure out how we can improve it. Musicality is personal, but if we want to improve it, we need to start from somewhere. There is no clear definition accepted by all, and even though many people say they want better musicality, what they mean by it might differ, since musicality is also something personal. We like different music, and our way of hearing and expressing music is also different. Returning to musicality, it can be different things for different people. This is good to have in mind when we talk about it. Some kind of idea behind the sounds that we hear when we listen to music. And since it is contrasted with randomness, music should also be deliberate and planned in some way. Noise is not very pleasant, so music should hopefully be pleasant to listen to. Quite often it is contrasted with noise and randomness. It is not that easy to define, but we will give it a try.īut before we dive into that, let’s first take a glance at what music is. It is not something purely intellectual, like “understanding”. To vague, because what does that really mean? Understanding the music?Īnd too limited because I think musicality is more than that. Some would simply talk about “understanding the music”, but I think that is both too vague and too limited. I think there would be a lot of different answers. This is an excerpt from my book about musicality - " The Secrets of Musicality for Dancers - Learning Nine Essential Skills for Musicality in Dance" Just click the link. But can we explain it? If I would ask you what musicality is, how would you define it? And would others define it in the same way? And quite often we know it when we see it. We try to be “musical", but what does it really mean? We have some kind of idea. Within the dancing world, we use the word “musicality”.
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