Musicality

Music is the backbone for all dancers. It’s the heart beat to our expressive soul.

Understanding and knowing the music is something many dancers can overlook, but there’s more to the music than just the bass or snare that the choreographer is hitting. That’s just scratching the surface. Knowing the music is mastery of the song. It’s similar to knowing a few words in another language and claiming to be able to speak the language. Every song is like another language, every beat and snare is like an accent or pronunciation you’ve got to get right in order to speak it fluently. Here are a few things I’ve learned and have been taught to expand my musicality.

Listen to All Kinds of Music – Limiting yourself to one style of music is like working in tunnel vision, you’re only focused on what’s in front of you instead of the beauty around you. I try to listen to all kinds of music (yes, even country) just so I can feed my ears some different kind of flavor. Variety is the spice of life.

Study Your Music – There’s more to the music than just the overall beat you can hear. Listen to other things that make the song stick out to you like a random guitar strum no one’s heard. Listen to the song once and listen to one instrument the entire time, then listen to it again and follow another instrument. The better you know it, the easier it becomes to just switch between instruments or lyrics.

Play With The Lyrics – If you know the lyrics to a particular song, then you can go off and do something a few people call “lyricography,” which is pretty much doing choreography to the lyrics of the song. You can play with this even more by bouncing back and forth from the main beat pattern, to the percussions, to the lyrics. Or mix and match to experiment

What’s the Emotion? – Some songs give off a strong emotion right away and sometimes capturing that emotion can be more powerful than putting a combination of intricate moves together.

Is Shere a Story You Want To Tell? – You can use the songs you listen like to put together a personal story that you would like to tell to the world. You could tell a story of the artist or create a story of your own.

Experiment – Once you get a feel for what you’re going for, try mixing and matching; Jump from the percussion to the lyrics, act out the emotion, or ride out the beat all the way to the crescendo.  Find what works for you. It’s about trial and error at this point. You might fumble for a bit, but once you get it, you’re golden.

Building your musicality can be as difficult or as easy as you perceive it to be. But nonetheless, it’s a process that can be picked up by anyone. Just like how anyone can learn the rules and become decent enough to play any game. If you want to achieve mastery over it, then that’s where time and dedication to just listen is important. The great Jazz musician Charlie Parker once said: “Master your instrument, Master the music, and then forget all that bullshit and just play.”

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