Dance: A Creative Art Experience

8. Dance and Music

Chapter 8 DANCE AND MUSIC Both dance and music have rhythm as the basis of their movement. Copyrighted Material Copyrighted Material A DISCUSSION of dance would be incomplete without some reference to music. It is quite possible to dance without music, and dance should be recognized and experienced as an independent art. But because of the very special and organic relationship of the two arts, much may be gained from building on this relationship and opening the resources of music to the dancer. Music is said to have come from dance, from the rhythmic impulses of man, and to have taken from dance its rhythmic form and structure. Such an alliance suggests the following development . The sensations of the varying intensities and stresses and speeds and irregularities of man's powers of locomotion and body exertion must have always delighted and satisfied his inborn sense of rhythm. The agitations of the muscles under strong emotional pressure stimulated the activity of his other natural means of expression . He used his voice; he shouted and yelled and cried. He uttered sounds of joy, sorrow, pain, and fear: the first music. In this stage, music was little more than tone and rhythm. Its rise and fall of pitch, its intensities and accents and tempo, existed as the tonal accompaniment of dance, enhancing and also revealing its emotional expression. Later, man became aware of the power that the sound of his voice had over his emotions, and discovered he could use his voice not only as the language of his feelings but also to arouse an answering state in others, and thus incite to action . As he developed a language, his cries and exclamations became words-thus music grew into song. Because of its new form and completeness as combined in melody and poetry, music sevCopyrighted Material DANCE: A CREATIVE ART EXPERIENCE ered its connection with dance and became an independent art, leaving dance a free agent of expression. As civilization advanced, words asserted their independence of music, and poetry made its flight into the broad realms of art. Thus three separate arts arose where one had existed. But even though music and poetry have achieved freedom, their rhythmic principles remain those sensed as the motor concomitants of emotional impulses, and as stored kinesthetic memories of past motor experience. Like all things, music has grown by minute increments. Centuries have faded into the past since the first cry of joy or pain and the first beating of sticks, which marked the rhythms of dance, became fused and elaborated into melody and harmony. It has taken all the resources of man's science and culture to develop the crude rhythms of the first music into the glorious symphonies of the last century. Although dance is older, how young and neglected it seems when compared with the maturity and expansion of music! When man accords to dance the same opportunities and interest he has granted to music, dance too will come into its own and rightly be recognized as an art worthy of sincere effort and study. Because of its transient phase, music has become associated with movement. And because of the dynamic urge of its rhythmic structure, in addition to its melodic and harmonic qualities, music is the most important of all the partners of the dance. The dancer in his response can translate the sounds he hears back into emotions which will be the substance of a dance. In its purest form . music, like abstract dance, has within its scope only the most genCopyrighted Material DANCE AND MUSIC eralized emotional situations. It does not depict literally, nor does it require of the listener knowledge of any particular facts. Rather it arouses moods without necessarily arousing associations that impel the mind to make a concrete interpretation. But the listener, if he so desires, may interpret what he hears in concrete Imagery. Although music involves an organization of sound in terms of time and stress values, what is more significant is its melodic and harmonic structure. Rhythmic structure alone has the power of exciting strong feeling states, but it is the melodic and harmonic structures that give music its particular power to express emotions reflecting mental states. In the history of music and dance we find that compositions were written especially to regulate the steps of conventional dances of the period, such...