It’s that time of year again – people are searching for holiday music for showcases and holiday party dances. So I decided to take another round at what I could do to improve that experience on the music4dance website. Take a quick look at my post from last year since that is still 100% applicable. Don’t worry, I’ll wait…
You’re back? Great! As you can see, I took some pretty big shortcuts to get the Holiday Music page up before Christmas last year. This year I spent a little while to improve the page.
First, I made the pages work like the other song search pages so that you get 25 songs at a time and can scale up to much longer searches. There are only 261 songs on the main Holiday Music page as of this writing, but I hope to get that number up to the point where loading them all on one page is prohibitive.
Second, I added the functionality to list all of the Holiday Music for an individual dance style. So if you are choreographing a routine for Quickstep or Rumba, you can now list just the Holiday Quickstep or the Holiday Rumba songs.
Over the course of this holiday season, I hope to add more music. If you are interested in helping, here are a couple of things you can try:
Sign up for our add song beta and add holiday songs yourself.
Browse our music catalog and tag songs as Holiday when you find them.
If you have a list of holiday songs categorized by dance style that you are willing to share, please send us an email at info@music4dance.net or contact us through our feedback form.
I’ll also get things set up to push these lists out to Spotify soon.
As always if you have comments or suggestions please feel free to reply to this post or contact me here.
One of the coolest things about the music4dance website was the ability to use the embedded Spotify player to play the results of a search. For instance, I could go to the site and list all the songs that are listed as Slow Foxtrot and also tagged as genre rock and order them from slow to fast like this. Then I’d be able to play the songs in the embedded Spotify player.
Unfortunately, Spotify turned off the feature that allowed me to do this and I’ve been wracking my brain and searching the web for viable alternatives. You can still go to the play buttons for individual songs and play a 30-second sample, most songs in the catalog have a sample available thanks to either Apple or Spotify. This works pretty well if you’re using the site to find an idea for a song for a routine, which is pretty common. You can also use the Amazon button to click through to the Amazon site and play a sample there.
As an aside, if you buy the song from Amazon through a link from the site a small percentage of the purchase price goes to support the music4dance site. So, by all means, please do this whenever you find music that you want to purchase via the site. Another interesting aspect of Amazon’s program is that if you buy something during that session, even if it wasn’t something that I directly linked to from the site, music4dance still gets a (very small) slice of that purchase.
But I still want to be able to listen to a full playlist of songs from the site. I haven’t found a full replacement1, but I have a partial fix in place now. I can generate a static playlist based on part of the music4dance catalog and embed players that point to the playlists. I’ve implemented this for each of the dances pages. So go ahead and browse through to try the embedded Spotify player for your favorite dance.
This solution also has the advantage that these playlists are available directly via Spotify. You can go to the music4dance Spotify Account and browse the public playlists there directly. Go ahead and follow the music4dance account or the individual playlists to make it easy for you to find them in the future.
If there are other song lists on the music4dance site that you are interested in seeing as Spotify Playlists, let me know by responding to this post or sending feedback and I’ll add them to my queue.
Update 2019: I’ve filled another part of the hole created by this change by enabling the export of the songs from a search to a Spotify Playlist – see this post or the help page for more details. ↩︎
The Meaning of TANGO: The Story of the Argentinian Dance by Christine Dennison
This is a fun book for Tango dancers of all types. The book is very centered around traditional Argentine Tango and does an excellent job of conveying that perspective. It’s also somewhat unusual in that it is predominantly about the history and philosophy of the dance but contains a section that is straight up technique with diagrams.
The book is a quick read and full of wonderful tidbits about the dance and its history. Rather than a full-fledged review, I would like to highlight a few points that I feel gave me some useful insight into Argentine Tango. I am someone with a ballroom background and I believe this book helped me understand the dance in a way that I didn’t have even after taking a number of beginning Argentine Tango lessons.
Dance to the Melody
There is a section called “One Name, Many Dances” where the author talks about the relationship between Argentine Tango and ballroom dances. In particular this quote from Freddie Camp, an early German Ballroom dancer:
In Argentina dancers prided themselves on their ability to dance the melody rather than the rhythm. Indeed, Tango orchestras almost never have a drum section. While most other dance music around the world is based on a strong, clear rhythm, generally emphasised by drums, newcomers to Tango music often complain that they find the rhythm of the music difficult to hear. This is one of the qualities that makes Argentinian Tango unique.
The idea of dancing to the melody rather than the rhythm goes a long way to explaining the thing that puzzled me about the practice music that was used in the beginning Argentine Tango lessons that I’ve taken. I felt that the teachers were choosing music where the beat was hard to find, which I would not expect of a beginning class. So I’m going to spend some time listening to the melody of Argentine Tango music and see if I can find myself moving to the melody.
Learning to Lead by Following
I found the description of how Argentine Tango was taught traditionally particularly enlightening. The men would learn in prácticas which were all male and composed predominantly of expert dancers. When learning to follow a young man would spend his formative years being led by experienced dancers. Then he would spend additional years within the práctica leading other men before he ever went to a mix sexed milonga and lead a woman. The fallout of this is that in the context of learning the dance, one was surrounded by experts. Contrast this with the current practice of dance classes where there are one or two teachers and a crowd of inexperienced dancers.
In addition, from a lead’s perspective, learning to follow is invaluable. I didn’t do this until I had years of lead experience and when I finally did spend some time learning to follow it fundamentally changed the way I lead.
The Tango Trinity
Finally, the author talks about the “Tango Trinity”: Tango, Milonga, and Vals. From some other research and some discussion with Argentine Tango dancers, this appears to be the purist’s set of Tango dances. I had originally categorized Neo Tango into the set of Argentine Tango dances, but that appears not to be the case. Based on this, I almost went down the path of pulling Neo Tango from the catalog as a distinct dance and reworked it so that Neo Tango (or Tango Nuevo) would just be a style tag on top of the Tango Trinity dances. But I’m glad I did some further research. It looks like Neo Tango is a distinct style of dance and related to traditional Argentine tango about as closely as Ballroom Tango is.
The main thing that I got from that set of discussions is that Argentine Tango dancers are even more concerned with the tradition of the music that other styles that I’ve studied. I got the impression that some would only consider “true tango music” to be that recorded by a specific set of artists from the golden age. Someday, I’d like to see if I can get things sorted out so that it’s easy to distinguish these from others.
If you have thoughts on the Argentine Tango, the music4dance website or corrections to anything I’ve said about Tango and Tango music, please feel free to comment here or send me feedback.
Also, if this post sparked your interest enough to buy the book, please follow one of the affiliate links below. And as a small aside, any of the Amazon and ITunes links on the site and blog help support the site, so if you find things of interest here, please use the links to make purchases.
There are enough people that visit music4dance regularly that I thought it would be worth revisiting how to make it easy to find the most recently added and changed music on the site. I did one pass at this back in November of 2016 when I had to change the default away from listing songs in order of most recently changed.
But that involved adding a link the home page and some options in the Advanced Search page and didn’t do a great job of leading people to that option if they didn’t know it was already there.
So I’ve added a “New Music” option in the “Music” menu. This will take you directly to a page showing the songs with the most recently added first as well as an easy link to switch over to the most recently changed songs. I hope this is a bit more discoverable than previous methods.
Once you’re on the New Music page you can use all of the usual methods of tag filtering to narrow down your search and we’ll preserve the sort order that you started with.
You can still use Advanced Search to do things like finding the most recently added Rumbas or Tangos.
We’re adding new music as we find it. You can help in a couple of different ways. Sign up for beta feature1 to add your own songs, mark exiting songs as danceable to a particular style, or send me lists of your favorite songs and what you dance to them – I can import any reasonably formatted list and will be happy to associate those songs with your account and set up a back-link to your site.
It’s great to see so many people use the site. Please let me know how you use the site, I’m always delighted to hear your feedback both positive and not so positive (the latter is often what leads me down the path of new and revised features).
Update: Adding songs is now out of beta – see the documentation for more info. ↩︎
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