Dance Gestures

This article is brief, but the animations are worth a thousand words. The title of the article is, What women want on the dance floor, according to science. Some dance gestures are more attractive than others. My sense is that this is also the case for gestures made while making music, some of which are embedded aurally in the music. And when watching a music performance we don't generally spend all our time trying to logically deduce the meanings of gestures - we simply react to them as we do watching these animations.

Horn Diary

This is the cover of the program for the two performances of the Brahms Requiem put on by two local vocal groups with instrumentalists from the community band (with one exception). Both performances went well with standing ovations at the conclusion.

My horn playing was as good as I could have hoped for. I got all of those amazing long held pianissimo descant type harmonies which had been the hardest things for me to learn. In the second performance I got the high G in the first movement way better than I ever had when practicing. Also hit better than ever that repeated high E in the first movement that's a bit of a solo.

I was the only horn (along with two oboes of professional quality, two flutes, two clarinets, a trumpet, bassoon, tuba and timpani - along with the piano and organ) and had cut and pasted bits from all the horn parts together so as to cover all the exposed horn playing. That meant I played pretty much the entire hour and was traversing through parts written in F, E, Eb, D, C, and low Bb.

The toughest thing ended up being the long held low notes like the middle C at the beginning. With no strings it was completely exposed and my autonomic nervous system kicked in due to anxiety and there was a slight quaver in the tone (which I'd never experienced practicing). No amount of conscious control could completely eliminate it, though it was slight enough that apparently few people noticed.

Got some very nice comments from fellow musicians and the community band director - but the best was from a lady in the audience I'd never met before who came up and said she'd watched me the entire time and had marveled at the horn playing. I explained that Brahms's father had been a horn player, that the horn writing was extraordinary, and that if I merely sketched it out it has profound effects.

She could see me easily because all the instruments were in front and because I'd taken a piano bench which had me sitting a bit higher than other players (because I wanted every possible molecule of lung capacity and I'm tall and sitting on a folding chair gives me an acute rather than right angle between thighs and torso). 

I would have much preferred being hidden back behind the chorus and standing, and putting body english on every single note. As it was I tried to not sway too much with the rhythms and to keep my facial expressions somewhat in line - but I will never be able to sit rigidly like an emotionless robot and play the horn well, just as I can't not dance a little bit when playing the guitar/banjo and singing in front of a crowd. 

Engaging the horn parts in this piece has changed my musical life. A door has opened into a world of musical expression I'd never quite realized was there. It also confirmed for me that it's playing the horn with voices that puts me in a musical world I can't get enough of. And for any horn player - working through all these parts is an absolute clinic on what the horn can do.

It's also made me realize that part of what makes the horn such an amazing instrument to play is just how emotionally vulnerable I have to allow myself to be to get that exquisite expression to manifest. I was basically in an altered state during the performances and for at least a quarter hour afterwards. Carrying on conversations with people right after the performances was an ordeal - I simply was not in a verbal state of mind and everything I said sounded trivial and trite and felt like it was pulling me back to the everyday world when I wanted to maintain that blissful state.

Dancing and Personality

This article is about research looking at how one dances can reveal personality traits. They had a bunch of people go through personality tests and then put that info with results of their dancing being analyzed via "motion capture" technology. 

The researchers found strong correlations between certain dancing styles and each of the personalities. They also discovered that different personalities danced in different ways depending on the music.

This sort of research is in its early days, but it makes intuitive sense. In my experience, various personality types go about learning how to make music in different ways in the physical realm as well. 

This post is also a good place to paste in the final couplet of a W. B. Yeats poem (Among School Children) sent along by our Vermont readership in response to my talking about gesture.

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Dixieland

Last Friday evening A Touch of Dixie played an unamplified outdoor set over at the Orange County Fair, just over Chicken Mountain on the grounds of James Madison's Montpelier. If you've ever been there, the fair was in the open space back behind the old Montpelier Store, across Rt 20 from the Montpelier Station Post Office.

Just like every other time we've played, I'm always struck by how live Dixieland jazz can just make folks feel happy. We had some children come up and dance with the music, and afterwards a number of people came up with sparkling eyes and broad smiles to say how much they'd enjoyed it. Sometimes I think I might have had more effect as a music therapist by simply playing banjo in Dixieland bands all this time.

Synesthetic Gesture

Just came across this over on Boing Boing, a post about a book on synesthesia has this quote form the author:

For example, sight, sound, and movement normally map to one another so closely that even bad ventriloquists convince us that whatever moves is doing the talking. Likewise, cinema convinces us that dialogue comes from the actors' mouths rather than the surrounding speakers. Dance is another example of cross-sensory mapping in which body rhythms imitate sound rhythms kinetically and visually. We so take these similarities for granted that we never question them the way we might doubt colored hearing.

Henry Purcell

I just got a book of Purcell's keyboard music and am having a great time working through it. His music is closer to Renaissance dances than that of Handel by at least a generation, and it shows. There's a clarity of movement that's more suggestive of the physical dances than you find in Handel. After Handel the dances are pretty much abandoned.

This music also seems a touch more modal than well tempered, which makes it all the more appealing to me. And the lack of complexity means its a treasure trove of materials to break out into three and four voice pieces for small ensembles.

The book is the Schirmer Oesterle edition, and as I worked though some of the pieces, they sounded very familiar. Turns out I'd gotten the Dover edition years ago, looked through it a bit, filed it away and forgot I had it. The thing is, the Oesterle edition has ornaments I'm fairly sure are inauthentic, but they sound great, and I prefer them to the authentic ones listed at the beginning of the Dover edition. Made me wonder if the piano (or in my case, electric keyboard) wants different ornaments than those that work well on the harpsichord or virginal.

Speech|Music|Dance

In setting the stage for understanding how music works, the current draft of the learning materials uses the idea that there's a continuum from speech through music to dance. The Horndog Blogger mentioned immediately below has various quotes that show up on his posts. The one that's currently on the compression post is:

"Music rots when it gets too far from the dance.
Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music."
-- Ezra Pound

Such a shame the man had to end up a fascist for Il Duce and then on to St. Elizabeth's. His early stuff has amazing flashes of insight.

CDs vs. mp3s

I've always thought of hearing as more of an extension of touch, not a completely separate sense. Your eardrum is really just skin with extra sensitivity than can feel sound waves. Then all the amazing mechanisms behind the ear turn that information into something the brain can process. 

If music has a strong bass line, or is just loudly played, we can feel it tactilely throughout our bodies. To my mind, that has to be part of how music can so affect us.

If all that's true, then listening to music via earbuds or headphones means your experience of the music is diminished. Terry Teachout, of the About Last Night blog over in the blog list, said sometime back that earbuds were fine, as most folks his (our) age are losing the ability to hear the higher frequencies that are lost turning CD quality sound into mp3 quality sound. 

Part of all this might be that we all listen to music differently. A critic has to be very analytical if he's going to be able to say anything interesting about the music. If you're dancing to the music, you're probably listening to and feeling the music differently, in a more non-verbal mode.

A great experiment would be to have a one group of folks dancing to a live band behind a curtain and another group dancing to that same music via earbuds off in a different room. My guess is the people who can feel the music as well as hear it are going to have more fun, and that their dance movements will be more fluid.

UPDATE: Here's a post on The Overgrown Path, one of the very best music blogs, talking about this subject.

Crumb's music just doesn't make sense unless you can physically experience the visceral quality of the sound, and you need serious loudspeakers to do that. Yet, much listening today is done on PC speakers, or even worse in-ear headphones that are prevented, again by the laws of physics, from reproducing the soundstage in front of the listener lovingly created by the recording engineer.

Athletic Music

    A piece from the WSJ going into the uses of music in athletics. Many athletes use music to help improve their physical performance. In the learning materials I'm developing, one of the ideas used in explaining the workings of music and music making is that there's a continuum from speech to music to dance, with there being a lot of overlap between speech and music and between music and dance.

     "Music and movement appear to have evolved together," according to Dr. Trainor. "There are multi-sensory connections between the auditory system and the movement systems"

     Dr. Solomon H. Snyder, chairman of the department of neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore, emphasizes that much remains to be learned in the field, but he acknowledges that music is "well known to involve the auditory part of the cerebral cortex, the temporal part of the cortex. And the temporal lobe of the brain is intimately linked to the limbic system, the major regulator of emotions." These emotions, he observes, include one's "readiness to perform."