Musicality
Top ten tasks to improve musicality
What can a student do to develop their understanding of music and begin to dance more sensitively to it? Here are my ten steps to improving your musicality:
1) Listen to lots and lots and lots of music!
The first thing for any student to do - whether they are naturally gifted in this area or not - is to listen to as much Arabic music as possible. The more you listen, the more the sounds, rhythms and phrasing will become apparent. Just as you can improve your spelling, vocabulary and general feel for grammar by reading a lot, you can improve your musicality by listening to lots of different artists.
Task: Listen to as much Middle Eastern music as you can. Choose folk pieces and longer, complex, classical pieces of music to listen to as well as the more accessible Western-influenced pop.
2) Learn to recognise the key rhythms
Being able to recognise the basic rhythms is immensely useful and any good teacher should be able to help with this. This will particularly help with interpreting complex Oriental pieces and drum solos. Rhythms will give you basic cues for the speed and style of the piece, and can suggest ways to accent your dance.
Task: Invest in a good rhythms CD. There are several on the market and hearing the rhythm on its own without the melody to distract will really help make it easier to recognise them. You could also take some basic drumming lessons.
3) Learn to identify key instruments
Find out more about typical Egyptian instruments and how they sound. Many dancers find that certain instruments suggest certain families of movement. So, for example, the higher pitched instruments such as the ney (a type of flute) often inspire hand and arm movements.
The quality of the sound has an effect as well as pitch with, for example, the rippling sound of the quanoon (lap harp) suggesting shimmies and the smooth sounds of the violin suggesting flowing movement. Instruments can also have a slightly different quality when played solo versus en masse.
Once you have established these interpretation “rules”, try putting them into practice while you improvise. When you are comfortable with them, you can try bending or breaking them. But beware! While a less obvious move can add interest and surprise to your performance, it can also be jarring. You need to know the rules really well before you can play with them!
Task: Listen to three or four different pieces of music and try to identify all the different instruments you can hear. Think about how their different sounds might affect how you dance.
4) Learn to identify the key styles
Once you have learned to recognise instruments and rhythms you are well on your way to being able to distinguish between styles. Each different style will generally have some key indicators of rhythm, structure or instrumentation, which distinguish it from other styles. Each style has its own feel, and will suggest particular families of movement.
For example in Egyptian style belly dance you might use hopping and jumping steps and simple arms for Saidi and flowing travelling steps and balletic arms in Sharqi (Oriental).
A good teacher should be able to define the key styles for the type of belly dance you are studying, and explain how they can be recognised.
Task: Ask your teacher to suggest tracks that are good examples of each key style. Listen to the recommended tracks carefully and try to hear for yourself the identifying factors. Ask your teacher for some more examples, but this time without telling you which song reflects which style. Try to categorise them yourself, then check with your teacher to see if you were right!
5) Pay attention to the music
Once you are more comfortable recognising rhythms, styles and instruments, start to pay attention to each individual piece and how it progresses. Be aware of pace, volume, mood, lyrics and so on, and to any changes in these. Your dancing will need to represent these things if you want to look like you are dancing to the music instead of over it.
Hossam Ramzy makes the point that in belly dance, “x = x”. What he means is that if the music is slow, you should be dancing slowly; if the music is loud you should make bigger movements and so on. After all, if the music is quiet and slow, with a sad mood and lyrics, do you really wanting to be flailing around like a mad thing with a big grin plastered on your face?
However having said that, following Hossam’s “rule” (or any rule!) too closely can make for dull dancing! Remember that good dancing makes use of variety and dynamics, and that you can still incorporate these whilst reflecting the overall pace and mood of the music.
Task: Take a piece of music and listen to it carefully. Try to answer the following questions: is the pace fast, medium or slow? Does it change pace or is it all at one speed? Is it loud or quiet – does the volume build or drop at any point? What is the mood of the piece – does this change? Are there any pauses or breaks? Any changes of style and rhythm? Are there lyrics? If so can you find out what they mean? Consider how each of these things might affect how you dance.
6) Delve deeper
To really successfully interpret a piece of music you should know it inside out and down to every last detail. Once you have paid attention to the larger picture – mood, pace etc – then start to really get into the fabric of the song. The smallest twiddle, tap or pause can be brought out, enhanced, or given meaning, by reflecting it in a move, a glance, a subtle weight shift, a wink.
As Westerners, we may choose to highlight certain elements where a native dancer would choose others. You can train yourself into a more native way of hearing by watching lots of native dancers perform and paying attention to what they pick up on (see Task 7 below) – but ultimately I feel that your dance should reflect you and that it is up to you to choose which elements you pick up on.
Task: Choose a piece of music and play it constantly. Are you sick of the song yet? Good! Look for the little details – hits, accents, twiddly bits, pauses and so on – particularly of key instruments like the tabla. How might you make the most of these details in your dance and bring them to the fore?
7) Watch other dancers
Watching everyone from your own classmates to a top Cairo diva will help you immeasurably with gaining insight into interpretation. It can be hard to watch live dance critically though as you get carried away in the moment, so I recommend getting some performance DVDs to pore over.
Task: Buy or borrow a performance DVD, preferably one with several different dancers. Pay close attention to the elements each dancer chooses to pick up on, and how they represent these elements. Would you have picked up on the same elements or different ones? Do you like their interpretation? You may also want to watch it with a friend and see how your opinions differ.
8) Improvise, improvise, improvise!
When improvising, you are forced to spontaneously pick up on music elements and interpret them, and this can help you unlock your own intuitive approach to music.
Task: Put a song you like on repeat, and film yourself improvising to it two or three times in a row (a mobile phone camera will do the job!). Watch it back and see what you did the same and what you did differently each time. Do you think your dancing went well with the music? Which parts did you like best? What is it about your interpretation in these bits that you like? Once you have analysed your improvisations, why not pick out the best bits and formalise them by creating a choreographed version!
9) Analyse other people’s choreography
When you learn dances created by other people, start to pay attention to how they structured the choreography, the moves they have chosen and how these express the music. This will help you can gain a deeper, or even alternative, understanding of musical interpretation.
Task: Try to find two choreographies for the same piece of music, either from different classes you attend or from DVDs/clips on YouTube. Compare and contrast the two choreographies to see how each dancer has interpreted the music. How different or similar are the pieces? Which do you like the most, or feel is most effective? Which elements would you take from each if you were going to meld the two?
10) Connect emotionally
Finally, there is no point in picking a piece of music to dance to if you don’t really like it. Pick a piece you love and let yourself travel into the music and really express your own feelings to add that final “je ne sais quoi” that makes a performance special…
Task: Find a song that you love to death. How does it make you feel? Shut yourself away, play it very loud and just DANCE! Let your emotions come to the fore and enjoy the music and how it makes you feel. If you struggle to let go even with no-one watching you could try drinking a glass of wine first! Did you manage to let go? If not, what do you think held you back? If so, how might you recapture that feeling when dancing for an audience (or without the glass of wine!!)? How was your dance different from normal?