Tag Archives: Musicality

Book Review: Partner Dance Success

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Partner Dance Success by Don Baarns is a great collection of practical advice for anyone new to partner dancing.  The author is a professional drummer turned social dancer who brings experience from building skill as a musician to the dance floor.  The subtitle “What I Wish I Knew When I Started Dancing” is very on point.    While I come from a Ballroom background rather than social dancing background, I wish I had heard this advice early on.

The book is a series of independent chapters with good advice on many aspects of partner dancing.  It appears to be a cleaned up “best of” plus some extras from the author’s blog.  Unfortunately, it appears that the blog is no longer available.

His chapters on how to learn to dance are as relevant to American style Foxtrot as they are to social Salsa.  And while the club scene is significantly different than the social/practice dances at the Ballroom studios that I learned in, most of the snippets about etiquette and optimizing your dance experience work in both contexts.

Some of my favorite chapters are the ones where he emphasizes listening to songs many times and to listen deeply to the music off the dance floors as a form of practice.  I also particularly liked the chapter about protecting your partner.

I am particularly interested in a drummer turned dancer’s perspective on the relationship between music and partner dancing.  While his blog seems to no longer be available, his YouTube channel is still up and running as of the time of this writing – Music4Dancers – YouTube.  I’ve listened to a number of episodes and while there is less actual music than I would prefer, I will likely go through the rest soon and post if I find any special gems.

As a quick reminder: If you buy this book by clicking through a link on this site, it helps support music4dance.  Also, if you are feeling particularly generous, clicking through any Amazon link on this site before doing even unrelated shopping help a little.

And as always I love to hear from you – so please send me feedback about the site or with questions about this post.

P.S. As I was putting the finishing touches on this post, I realized that there is a Second Volume to this series, so I’ll give that a read.  If there is anything to say beyond “more good stuff” I’ll post again.

Book Review: Hear the Beat, Feel the Music

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As anyone who has spent any time reading my blog or interacting with my website should know by now, I’m very passionate about music, dance and the relationship between the two.  I’m also very analytical about those subjects.  And, yes, I believe passion and analysis can co-exist, don’t you?

The fatal flaw with my perspective for people who are learning to dance but don’t have a musical background is that I came at music first and dance much later.  So as much as I try, the way I think about the relationship between dance and music comes from a music first perspective. 

That’s why I was thrilled to happen upon the book Hear the Music, Feel the Beat by James Joseph.  This book is a well crafted dance first perspective to understanding how dance and music relates.  He does a terrific job of walking through the basics of music theory with pretty close to the minimum amount of information that a dancer needs to get by.  And he is very careful to call out the places where he goes deeper than absolutely necessary so those that aren’t interested in those details can skim past.

On the subject of going deeper, one thing that I took away from this book that I hadn’t heard before was the term mini-phrase.  This is a nice term for what I think of (and Mr. Joseph also refers to) as an eight count (or six count in Waltz).  For many dances this is the basic unit and I’ve heard dancers refer to this unit simply as a phrase, but that causes substantial cognitive dissonance with my musicians brain which insists on thinking of a phrase as the substantially longer chunk of generally 48 to 64 beats (although that varies depending type of music or even the particular song).  So mini-phrase fits perfectly, and that even lets me use the term “phrase” out loud with dancers while tagging on the “mini” part in my head.

This mini-phrase is also something that I would like to incorporate in my tempo counter tool.  When I wrote this years ago I set things up to consider tempo in beats and in measures (of different meters).  But I’m in the middle of a rewrite, so I think having a 8 count and 6 count mini-phrases would be a valuable addition.

Overall this is a great read.  And the bonus videos with practical exercises will be an immense help to anyone learning to dance that is struggling with “musicality.”

As always, I welcome feedback both on this post and the site in general.  I’d like to thank everyone who has contributed to the site in any of the many possible ways.  And if you enjoy the site please consider contributing in any way that makes sense to you.

Hear the Beat, Feel the Music: James Joseph

Hear the Beat, Feel the Music: Kindle Edition

Hear the Beat, Feel the Music: Paperback Edition

Note: If you found this book through this blog, please be kind and click on the link above to purchase it. This helps support the blog. If you’re feeling especially generous (or just like the blog a lot) clicking on the Amazon links in the blog or on the music4dance site and then doing your regular, unrelated shopping which also help support the site as a very small fraction of those proceeds will be directed to musci4dance.