Tag Archives: Phrasing

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

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Do Dancers Think in Eights?

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I was tickled to hear Nigel Lythgoe talk a little about choreographing tap on a recent episode of So You Think You Can Dance. The commentary is at about 1:13, but please start at about 1:10 so you can see the performance that he’s referring to.  It’s a tap piece that Emma, one of the young competitors, choreographed to “Rather Be” by the Pentatonix.  Just amazing – pause for a moment of silent appreciation for some real talent.

Nigel asked if she choreographed by listening to the rhythm or by counting eights. Quickly followed by the statement – “Musicians only count to four, dancers count to eight.”  Funny!

Besides making for a pithy quote, it ties right into a project that I’ve been working on recently.  I am experimenting with a phone application that I hope will be useful to choreographers and one of the things that I’ve been thinking about is phrasing of music.  It’s a variation on the web-app that I have on the site for counting out tempos. When choreographing for many ballroom dances, the basic unit of measure tends to be a two-measure mini-phrase, which would be 8 counts in most dances and 6 for the waltz.  And then there are longer phrases, which are closer to what musicians think in.  Here’s a quick mock-up of the phrasing page for the app – the idea is that you can count out (or just enter) the tempo of the song, choose a standard length and get a quick cheat-sheet of the number of phrases of various types that one would need to choreograph to fill the song.

Phrasing Page

Would this be useful to you as a choreographer?  Are there other features that might make as much or more sense to have your phone figure out for you?  I’m always looking for feedback, and the early the better since most of this isn’t even coded yet.