This is the best explanation of musicality I have ever heard/read.  It tells you.  It shows you.  To me it sounds like the author isn’t setting one aspect of musicality in Lindy Hop over another, but showing how they’re all a part of what constitutes musicality.  This is awesome! 

bristolswing:

My Own Biggest Fan: Musicality Lecture

Read this. READ IT. READ IT. Ace article on musicality.

(edited to add in the whole thing so I can ram it into my followers’ faces)

gogettingit:

(I gave an 18-minute lecture on Musicality to our beginner swing/lindy hop class on campus last week, and I felt like I said only a quarter of what I wanted to say. And it will be good for you to have the videos yourself. So, here it is in text form.)

You should care about the term “Musicality” because it’s something people judge your dancing by in competitions, and outside of competitions too. Even though a lot of people don’t know what they mean when they say “musicality”, they still use it, and they’ll say “Oh I love dancing with him, he’s so musical”.

This post is for beginners, and all I want to do is explain different interpretations of what musicality means, so that you don’t get confused by the words, and to give some practical ways to apply the ideas of musicality to your own dancing. The broadest, most hard-to-argue-with definition I can come up with is that musicality is dancing with the music.

If you want to read the internet-controversy, there is a lot of it out there. You can probably start here: a post titled “Musicality is Overrated” at Rebecca Brightly’s blog (it’s for newer dancers, check it out!). It has many many thoughtful comments, though my personal belief is that most of the commenters fundamentally agree and they are just arguing about semantics.

As you read this post and watch the videos, think about how you can apply these ideas to your own dancing! This was not supposed to be a pedantic lecture. The whole point of the class is to help you dance.

What I want to talk about

• Matching the music
• Complementing the music
• Phrasing and form
• The swing feel/Groove

These are roughly in order of “narrow” to “broad”.

Matching the music , which some people also call micromusicality, is the easiest definition of musicality to see and probably also to evaluate. When you match the music, you copy the rhythms of particular instruments or the whole band. Here is an example:

Ann Mony & Michael Seguin

Note how at 2:02 Ann matches the rhythm of wrapping her leg around Michael and throwing her head back exactly to the trombone (or whatever that low instrument is). Later at ~2:07 Michael stops sharply as most of the band drops out, and Ann continues walking to the notes of that trombone. You can think of this type of musicality as almost copying the parts of different instruments.

Other examples:

Dax Hock, Thomas Blacharz, & Alice Mei

What is going on at 2:50? They are moving their feet fucking FAST! and, it matches the guitar solo. Awesome, and ridiculous. No way I can do that.

Complementing the music

Moving beyond merely matching the music, dancers complement it.

This is sometimes described as “a duet with the music”, or “the music is like another dance partner”— I believe Alec described swing dancing as a triangle where you, your partner, and the music are all equally important. These are all ways of saying the same thing

We start off with a tap performance to really emphasize how dancing can be a “duet” with the music.

Rusty Frank and Chester Whitmore

Note how through this whole video, they are usually not tapping the same rhythms as the band plays. Instead, they are like another instrument, complementing the music without matching it exactly. Sometimes the band drops out and lets the dancers have a “solo”, for example at 0:30. Also note that you may recognize some of the moves, because this contains a tap version of the shim sham! When you are learning/doing the Shim Sham in class, think about how the rhythms you are making fit with the music. :) Also note that they could tap the shim sham to a number of other songs and it would have looked and sounded great. The important thing is that they have a sense of rhythm and the patterns of the shim sham can fit around many many rhythms of swing music and still sound interesting and dynamic. Please note also that you can dance the shim sham to other songs, like they did in that video.

Now watch this video:

Thomas & Alice are dancing to recorded music that they’ve heard before, so at 0:14 Thomas matches his snap exactly to the music (This is a great example of the first thing we talked about— micromusicality, matching the music). At 0:18 Alice plays off that, but that slap is notin the music— but that’s fine! She’s like another musician, like the tap dancers, adding her own thing. Now notice at the end, at 2:28 Thomas slaps the ground with his feet a couple times— then he switches to silent kicks. But note the rhythm of the silent ones. A kick is a very percussive movement, I think, like a slap. And, the percussive part of a kick, I think we can agree, is the moment when the leg snaps out to the fullest extension it’ll get before pulling back in. If you watch the video and clap when his foot reaches that percussive moment, you’ll note that it lines up with where the slaps would have been if he had just kept doing them. It also lines up with the crowd clapping. And the crowd claps on the 2 and 4 because it goes with the music. It all lines up! Beautiful :) Through the whole danace, he is doing plenty of movements that don’t make any sound, but each movement still has a rhythm; those rhythms are what creates a dance and makes it “musical”.

An important idea: Our bodies, when we dance, are creating visual rhythms. When you dance, you are visually complementing the music. Think about that.

Here’s Thomas and Alice dancing again. Start the video at 1:50, and close your eyes and listen. After a couple phrases, the band will break for a full 8 count. Try to imagine what you would do if you were dancing there. Would you stop? Mess around?

The crowd goes crazy, so they obviously did something cool. Now start from 1:50 again and watch what they actually do with that 8-count break— it’s just an overrotated lindy circle! You don’t need to: a) stop when the music stops, or b) do a fancy never-before-seen move when the music stops. Note that they are also dancing to a live band, so they don’t necessarily how the band is going to play the song. “Micromusical” is harder when you are dancing to live music, but that does not mean you have to dance to recorded music to not suck. Otherwise what were all the original dancers doing? What recorded music has done to our dancing and perception of musicality is something explored in some of those blogs about musicality, I’ll try to find the specific one I’m thinking of.

Phrasing/Macromusicality

Please, please watch this video. This is Skye Humphries and Laura Keat, and they are professionals on a level wayyyyy above me (and probably you if you’re in our class).

If you are a musician, you can probably count to 8 (or 4) automatically. If not, try to watch this video and count 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8 out loud. You’ll notice that, after a brief intro, the music follows 4 8-count phrases (that is, 8 bar phrases, since there’s 4 counts to a bar). You’ll also notice (you fucking better, try to watch it again if you don’t and count out loud for real this time) that Skye structures the dance on these same 4 8-count phrases! He literally does: Charleston/Charleston-like kicks and walks for 4 8-counts, Swingouts/otherlindystuff for 4 8-counts, repeat, repeat, repeat. Watch it again. There is nothing crazy in there. (If you know what I’m talking about, he also shifts gears between each 32-bar chorus).

Swing music is predictable. It’s like the music you hear on the radio: You know that this female singer is going to be singing for a bit, then the guy is gonna rap for a bit, then you’re gonna get the vocals again, then he’s gonna rap again. And, you can probably subconsciously predict whenthe switch is going to be. Because usually these chunks are of fixed size. Swing music is the same.

90% of the swing music you’ll dance to is going to be in either AABA form (like the Skye & Laura video we just watched, where each 4 8-count phrase is one A or B section) or 12 bar blues (which is like AAB, where each section is 2 8counts.) It will benefit you to listen to a lot of swing music, because after a while you will realize that you sort of know what is going to happen, even if you’re not trying to count 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8. After all, swing was once the popular American music, and it was just as predictable as popular music is now.

And, 99% of the swing music you’ll dance to has phrases that are in 2 8count chunks, or 4 8count chunks. So really really learn to hear it that way.

Phrasing along the lines of the music, the way Skye did so clearly in that video, is sometimes called “macromusicality”. You can figure out why :P

Swing Feel is the last thing I want to mention. I know this is a little redundant because of the music lecture earlier, but it’s important to musicality as well so I’m including a bit in this text version. Here is a great video of Josh Collazo (drummer) demonstrating the evolution of swing drumming. He’s interviewed by Bobby White, who writes the great blog Swungover.

(The conversation after about 2:30 is less relevant to this lecture.)

Also, if you have trouble getting into the groove, I have some syncopation and swing feel exercises that involve clapping and stomping, so if you’re interested come find me— although I’ve never tried it on other people, there are things I do to make myself feel the music more. “Swing” is a quality of music that you may not have been exposed to much, so I’m not sure how successful I will be to teach you to appreciate music that “swings hard”, but feeling the music is a huge step to being able to express musicality in all the ways we mentioned.

Holy crap, what a long-ass write-up. Hope it was useful. TL;DR, read the section on phrasing and watch that video of Skye and Laura. That’s probably the most relevant to your skill level right now. Just try to keep everything else in mind. And listen to swing music as much as you can. The end.  Find me and ask me if you don’t understand anything I wrote.