Embodying Musical Space

2012 ◽  
Vol 2012 ◽  
pp. 132-139
Author(s):  
Stephanie Schroedter

The epoch-making dance reforms of the early twentieth century did not only lead to new dance techniques, styles, and movement concepts, but also to an intensive search for new dialogues between music/sound and dance/movement. These new interactions were notable for their reliance on pre-existing music that was usually not intended for dance. Analogous to the choreographers' search for new movements in new (sound) spaces, composers looked for a new physicality of sounds (musical gestures), as well as for new spaces inside and outside of these sounds. Following these mid-twentieth-century developments, choreographers have increasingly chosen “new music” for their creations—compositions beyond the classical repertoire. In my paper, I will explore the choreographic possibilities of “new (non-dance) music” by comparing two examples: Bill T. Jones' solo danced to Edgar Varèses' Ionisation and a solo created by Martin Schläpfer using György Ligeti's Ramification. These examples will serve as case studies to argue for my concept of “kinesthetic listening,” which can be applied to a more general approach to discussions of the embodiment of music. This concept includes not only the perspective of the choreographer and interpreter/dancer, but also the perception of the spectator/listener. As a precondition, music/sound is understood as movement: an audible but not visible, rather an imaginable/imaginary movement that can (but need not) interact with body movements. Body movements/dance, in turn, can interact with music according to different choreographic strategies. To analyze these choreomusical dialogues, a special combination of (and training in) listening to and watching movement is required—informed by models of analysis from musicology and dance studies as well as from phenomenology and cognitive sciences.

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-242 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Johnson

The late nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth century saw the drum kit emerge as an assemblage of musical instruments that was central to much new music of the time and especially to the rise of jazz. This article is a study of Chinese drums in the making of the drum kit. The notions of localization and exoticism are applied as conceptual tools for interpreting the place of Chinese drums in the early drum kit. Why were distinctly Chinese drums used in the early drum kit? How did the Chinese drums shape the future of the drum kit? The drum kit has been at the heart of most popular music throughout the twentieth century to the present day, and, as such, this article will be beneficial to educators, practitioners and scholars of popular music education.


2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-22
Author(s):  
Anh Pham Thi Kim

Students’ competence development teaching has been discussed and researched quite a lot since the 90s of the twentieth century, especially after the Resolution No. 29-NQ\T. of the Party Central Committee (2013) about basic and comprehensive innovation in education and training in Vietnam. However, not all general teachers have correctly and explicitly understood competence development teaching. To help teachers understand this issue, the article focuses on clarifying: What is competence development teaching?, What are the characteristics and meanings ?; What is new and different from competence development teaching with traditional teaching; What are the typical signs of competence development teaching?


Author(s):  
STEPHEN BANFIELD

Between the early nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, a cultivated relationship with the music of a favoured period in the distant national past was a pervasive aspect of high, and sometimes lower, musical culture in England. This chapter first sketches a general picture of that relationship before presenting some particular case studies. It addresses the following questions: to what extent does Tudorism in music refer to the revival of music itself, to what extent to its stylistic emulation in nineteenth- and twentieth-century English compositions? Was it a matter of appealing to the Tudors to set a political agenda for music? Tudorism in English music was many things but also one very definite thing — a conscious modelling of style or atmosphere in musical composition on that of a perceived golden age of national culture. It was in some respects part of the early music movement that Harry Haskell identified as beginning in 1829 with Mendelssohn's revival of J. S. Bach's St Matthew Passion, yet not the same thing insofar as that movement was about reviving discarded old music and Tudorism was about creating new music in an earlier image.


Author(s):  
Violeta Nigro-Giunta

Juan Carlos Paz (1897–1972) was an Argentine composer, critic, writer, and self-described "compositional guide" who played a key role in twentieth-century Argentine contemporary music. Known for his rebellious attitude towards traditional institutions and academia, and as an advocate of avant-garde music throughout his life, Paz was a pioneer in the use of the twelve-tone technique in Latin America. Paz founded such groups as Grupo Renovación [Renovation Group] and Asociación Nueva Música [New Music Association], both devoted to promoting and performing new music. Paz wrote music for solo instruments, chamber music, orchestra, and theatre, as well as film scores. He published three important books dedicated to new music and three volumes containing his memoirs, and collaborated intensively with the press and magazines (Crítica, Reconquista, Acción de Arte, La Protesta, La Campana de Palo, Argentina Libre, among others).


Daedalus ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 148 (2) ◽  
pp. 36-51
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Wells

Central to dominant jazz history narratives is a midcentury rupture where jazz transitions from popular dance music to art music. Fundamental to this trope is the idea that faster tempos and complex melodies made the music hostile to dancing bodies. However, this constructed moment of rupture masks a longer, messier process of negotiation among musicians, audiences, and institutions that restructured listening behavior within jazz spaces. Drawing from the field of dance studies, I offer the concept of “choreographies of listening” to interrogate jazz's range of socially enforced movement “scores” for audience listening practices and their ideological significance. I illustrate this concept through two case studies: hybridized dance/concert performances in the late 1930s and “off-time” bebop social dancing in the 1940s and 1950s. These case studies demonstrate that both seated and dancing listening were rhetorically significant modes of engagement with jazz music and each expressed agency within an emergent Afromodernist sensibility.


2016 ◽  
Vol 2016 ◽  
pp. 191-197
Author(s):  
Nicole Haitzinger

This paper is concerned with resonances of the tragic in twentieth-century central-European dance theatet, to be discussed with particular reference to Pina Bausch's 1975 Orpheus and Eurydice. In my study Resonances of the Tragic: Between Event and Affect (2015), I have argued that in terms of a history of the “longue durée,” the evocation of the tragic occurs in a field of tension between technique, the mise-en-scène, and conceptions, as well as procedures and moments of interruption, of suspension, of disruption and of the indeterminable resulting from ecstatic corporeality. Its structure and function can generate an event in the emphatic sense of the term; consequently, it provides a paradigm for recognizing structures of form and of an aesthetic of reception, structures emerging from individual constellations of the fictional and choric, absence and presence. From the perspective of dance studies, the tragic emanates from the representation of horrendous monstrosity testing the limits of what can be imagined by means of the moved body in all senses of the word; but how exactly does Bausch produce the qualities of the ambivalent, ambiguous, and paradoxical—and, consequently, the tragic?


Author(s):  
Jared Snyder

This chapter explores the history of the Creole accordion. Black Creoles in Louisiana have created their own, distinctive accordion music adapted from French, Native American, and African cultures. While Creole musicians in the early twentieth century were often hired for Cajun dances, where they played Cajun dance music, at their own gatherings they played a uniquely Creole repertoire that drew from the African American blues—a repertoire later developed by accordionists such Clifton Chenier and Boozoo Chavis. Zydeco, as this music eventually was labeled, has become a symbol of Louisiana Creole culture. It is argued that despite the pressure on modern zydeco bands to adapt to the demands of the music industry, the traditional accordion and rubboard remain the core instruments, and zydeco accordionists keep playing in a distinctively Creole style.


2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-83
Author(s):  
Man Wang

“Link stress analysis method” is a method to determine to cause the original dynamic muscle of the body movements. In the basketball sports and training, it gets more and more attention. The writer tries to base the teaching practice, to make some supplement and discussion of the theoretical definition, the methods of the analysis of the original muscle and the problems that should be noticed.


2016 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-130
Author(s):  
Susan Teneriello

Gabriele Brandstetter's Poetics of Dance has remained unavailable to English-language readers until now. Widely considered a landmark book of dance scholarship when it first appeared in Germany in 1995, this provocative analysis of the early twentieth-century avant-garde in Europe is sure to continue to influence a new audience. The book's initial publication advanced the application of critical theory and interdisciplinary approaches to dance that now constitute the field of critical dance studies. Caringly translated by Elena Polzer with Oxford Studies in Dance Theory series editor Mark Franko, this work remains a unique analysis of modernity that illuminates dance as an “act of transmission,” a bridge through theatre, literature, and visual arts altering relationships to how movement is reproduced and how space is conceptualized. Brandstetter's central premise expands through reading body imagery as a historically specific context from which the iconography of pictorial patterns open up perceptual concepts. The interdependency between new models and vocabularies of modern dance and literature appearing at the turn-of-the-twentieth century brace the argument that avant-garde aesthetic debates and concerns moved through body imagery and figurations in space. The poetics of free dance (and later forms of Expressionist dance appearing in Germany) as it took shape in Europe foregrounds the dancer's movement as a transformative language and symbolic system of cultural deconstruction and renewal.


2012 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 349-359 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edith Van Dyck ◽  
Dirk Moelants ◽  
Michiel Demey ◽  
Alexander Deweppe ◽  
Pieter Coussement ◽  
...  

The present study aims to gain better insight into the connection between music and dance by examining the dynamic effects of the bass drum on a dancing audience in a club-like environment. One hundred adult participants moved freely in groups of five to a musical sequence that comprised six songs. Each song consisted of one section that was repeated three times, each time with a different sound pressure level of the bass drum. Hip and head movements were recorded using motion capture and motion sensing. The study demonstrates that people modify their bodily behavior according to the dynamic level of the bass drum when moving to contemporary dance music in a social context. Participants moved more actively and displayed a higher degree of tempo entrainment as the sound pressure level of the bass drum increased. These results indicate that the prominence of the bass drum in contemporary dance music serves not merely as a stylistic element; indeed, it has a strong influence on dancing itself.


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