[Tango-L] Musicality. What is it?

[Bruno Afonso]

hi Koos,

For the sake of mis-using my words (not your fault, I was ambiguous by
choice) I actually have to say don't agree that much with Igor's post
and I found offensive the way he replied. I honestly believe we must
have very different notions of what musicality and fully immersing
oneself into a music means. I don't appreciate splitting tango into a
common set of known structures and missing all the nice nuances. But
I'll respect it.

I also feel that this kind of things are not very profitable to
discuss over email, so I haven't bothered to reply anymore. There's
also too much conceptual talk about elusive concepts and that bothers
me a bit.

I find interesting people here saying that classes on musicality are
worthless when even top musicians in schools like berklee school of
music have them from others. And those are soon to be professional
musicians. But hey, I'm sure a tango aficionado knows more about music
than some of the best musicians in the world... people here tend to
know more about everything than anyone else, so that wouldn't surprise
me :)

There's a widespread misconception among class-haters that classes are
uni-directional. I'd say a good musicality class is bidirectional. A
good teacher will ease your way to reach enlightenment ;-)

enjoy yourselves on the dance floor ! I sure haven't been there for a
while and I miss it now. Koos, I think I'd rather build my
interpretation of a music every time I dance it. That is what I like
the most in tango, the lack of set rules (which, btw, some followers
will hate and never want to dance with you again). That said, even the
best jazz musicians use pre-studied sets of phrases in their
"chops"... so take that with a grain of salt.

oh well, I've written too much and not necessarily gained any
knowledge by it. Now if I was dancing...
b

On 12/5/07, Koos de Wit <koosde.wit at hccnet.nl> wrote:
> To Huck, Igor, Chris, Bruno, Andy and others,
>
> I strongly underline Igor's "A musical piece has enough hints what is
> going on" and I love Andy's ideal milonga with only unknown music. I
> disagree completely with Huck's "We want to know precisely everything
> that is coming, so we can dance with as much musicality as possible".
>
> I agree with Chris that musicality can not be taught in a class.
> However, teaching is feasible to improve the ability of dancing with
> musicality. I differentiate between musicality itself and dancing with
> musicality. I explicitly don't mean the money consuming group-clapping
> musicality classes or listening to some teacher droning on and on
> abstractly about various qualities of orchestras as already rejected by
> Huck.
>
> For learning to dance with musicality one should be taught how to
> translate particular structures in the music into corresponding
> structures in our tango dancing movements. It is a technical thing, a
> toolkit. The more conspicuous the musical structure of the songs used
> is, the better this translation from music to movement can be displayed
> and taught. The final result on the dance floor depends on the not
> teachable musicality skill of the dancer. As Bruno stated, some take 5
> seconds, others take 10 years.
>
> This knowledge about translating music to movements will not change a
> poor dancer into a rich dancer overnight, but it will be helpfull and
> inspiring.
>
> Koos de Wit
>
> _______________________________________________
> Tango-L mailing list
> Tango-L at mit.edu
> http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/tango-l
>


-- 
Bruno Afonso
http://brunoafonso.com (personal, mostly portuguese)
http://openwetware.org/wiki/User:BrunoAfonso (Professional, english)