Any youngster not close beside its mother is vulnerable grunts and howls were the only way to keep track of wayward children. Mothers, obliged to warm, protect, feed, and shelter their offspring, frequently needed to put them down in order to forage. The evidence suggests that music and dance are even older than speech. Other studies offer a much earlier date for the development of walking, as far as 7 to 9 million years ago, and there is also uncertainty about whether our ancestors may actually have been tree-dwellers. Evolution favoured a skeletal development of lower limbs and spine to upright stance. Individuals who failed to do so lost their offspring, and their tribe died out. Infants could no longer cling to the fur of their mothers now they had to be carried in both hands, which forced the species to adapt to walking erect. One theory suggests that some 6 million years ago, a gene mutation for hairlessness appeared in our Chimpanzee/Human Last Common Ancestor, and over generations they became, literally, naked. Scientists are still trying to find out why and when this happened. This intimate musical relationship raises the intensity of danced performance.Īs the great American choreographer George Balanchine pointed out, “Dance is music made visible”.ĭance has been part of us since our forebears began to stand on two legs.

Musical dancers literally use the moving body to become part of their music, revealing its highlights and secret places. Dance exists symbiotically in and through the music, and the music flows in and through the dancer, directly affecting the audience. Musical dancers select components of music and make these crucial to every nuance of what they do, sharing their experience with the spectator. And yet - all the possibilities we have listed, and more that we haven’t, display one essential, unifying trait. Perhaps “musicality” cannot be precisely defined in words. With it you reach deep inside the soul of the audience, pull them along with you, make them want to dance. The interplay between what spectators hear and what they see can be powerful, disturbing, hypnotic – it’s an effective performance tool. You could dance slow, sustained, movement against a background of punchy, insistent, inescapable drums, to convey supernatural calm or mounting tension. Another type of musicality could be to work directly against the music. Does a vocal line give you something specific? Then you might want to interpret the song as dance, possibly dancing the lyrics, possibly doing the opposite. Your entire body: head, arms, legs, spine, even eyebrows, can move specifically and precisely with what you hear, expressing what you as an artist want to say. In fact, you literally “embody” the music you hear, dancing with every part of you to make the fusion of music and movement real and personal, for you and for the onlooker. There’s music of some sort all around you, and even inside you – (they say your heart, for example, beats in waltz time…)Īs a musically skilled performer, you respond selectively to all of these, using musicality to affect the perceptions and instincts of the audience. Is there a recurring Leitmotif, regular or irregular, for which you might dance a corresponding dynamic? Maybe you want to work just to snapping fingers, or live feedback from yourself and others, or even silence, within which your movement reveals latent rhythm – this too is music. In the orchestra, you could run with a kinetic impulse from the strings, or hook onto the brass, or hang with a single percussion instrument, or stay inside the bass pizzicato which underpins the whole piece. You might coordinate your movement within phrases of music, or follow the dynamic contours of a melody, syncopated perhaps, or smooth and legato, or broken into jagged, staccato accents. Using piano, you could dance to the melody in the right hand, or the rhythm in the left, or switch back and forth between the two. There are other parts of music besides the beat - you can hear them all if you really listen. Musicality is not just dancing on the beat (it’s not that simple, although rhythm of course is fundamental). The question is, what does “musicality” actually mean? Does it really exist, or is it just some subjective idea? What is it? How can we get it? If we haven’t got it naturally (and how do we know, anyway?) we’re going to have to learn it, somehow.

As dance students, we’re required to have this musicality trick. Watching great dancers, you are supposed to be able to sense their musicality in every move. Musicality is one of those things teachers go on about, like placement, or not rolling your ankles. Dancers and dance students hear this word in class, over and over again.

Definition of musicality