6: Music for Dancing
- Page ID
- 376419
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Since we recently looked at music for marching, let's now focus on another musical category that goes with human movement. Dance music has many of the same demands as march music. It needs to be loud, so that the dancers can hear it over the sounds of their movements. It needs to have a steady tempo, so as to propel the dance forward. It shouldn’t be too melodically complex, since the dancers won’t be playing close attention. And it often needs to be repetitive, so that dancing can carry on at length.
Dance is obviously a HUGE topic that covers many cultural examples. We start with dance music in the United States, including Appalachian square dancing, swing dancing, disco, and break dancing. This list spans many years and many different American sub-cultures and time periods. Understanding dance (and the music that accompanies it) is so important to understanding what was happening with people within a culture.
The great thing about dance is that so many of us have personal connections to it. We dance at weddings and family parties, we dance with our friends at clubs, we dance alone to our favorite songs. Some of us have studied different kinds of dance (ballet, tap, jazz, hip-hop, salsa, cumbia, tango, etc.), enhancing our understanding of the cultures they emerged from. Dance is an amazing lens through which we can study music.
We will begin our tour of dance music in the United States with one of the oldest traditions: The fiddle-driven dance music of the Southern Appalachians.
- 6.2: Dance Music in Concert Settings
- In the next section, we will consider dance rhythms and forms adapted to purely musical ends. This essentially takes us back to where the chapter started, with John Philip Sousa’s concert marches. Here, however, we take a look at two dramatically different composers who each used the popular dance styles of their time and place to inform music that was meant primarily for listening.