Musicality: when?

This is a rather long-overdue response to a question posed by Kim Soon here, where it was asked

“at which time should the concept of musicality be introduced/emphasised and worked on?”

In the following, I will attempt to answer it mainly from the leader’s perspective.

Firstly, I have to say that since I generally try to stick to the KISS principle – think Occam’s Razor – so I prefer to think of musicality as meaning simply “to be able to dance to the music”. Now, in order to do this, there are two major components, in roughly progressive order of difficulty:

1. The structure: beat, rhythm (timing/duration), pauses, energy, the undertones/overtones expressed by the various instruments, etc.
2. The emotional content: melody, energy, how it resonates with you as a dancer?

Note that this list goes much beyond than being able to name the orchestras and make broad generalisations about their styles, which is what is commonly taught when discussing musicality.

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Driving beat

A few days ago, in my attempt to describe my subjective feeling towards the driving beat of some typical orchestras (for the identification of these orchestras), I came up with the following (in my opinion) simple descriptions. No doubt, the purists may baulk at these over-generalisations, but I like them anyway.

• Biagi, Roldolfo: head-on collision with a sledge hammer – in a nice way (eg. Golgota, El Recodo, Racing Club).
• D’Arienzo, Juan: light taps on shoulder (e.g. Pensalo Bien, El Flete).
• Pugliese, Osvaldo: ocean waves building, building until they become irresistible (here I am thinking more of the La Yumba, Gallo Ciego type of feeling, not so much Recuerdo, etc.).
• Troilo, Anibal: punched by nails (as in hammer and nails), sometimes difficult to work out where the pain is, sometimes itchy…

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Conversations in Tango

Tango has sometimes been described as a “private conversation between two people”. But if we cut through the proverbial hyperbole, what does it mean exactly? Is it just leading/following: “I speak, you listen?” By the way, from what I can see, even when people may disagree in principle to the last statement, they are ultimately betrayed by how they dance.

However, I believe that there can be a more literal interpretation to the “private conversation” question. In November, I was very privileged to attend a class on musicality where we looked at phrasing in Tango. Without going into the technicalities of music – which I am not qualified to discuss in detail in any case – I now think of dancing to the music (from leader’s point of view) as being quite similar to “punctuations” in my movements. That is, there are occasions where I complete a sentence, pause and take a breath, before starting the next sentence, and there are times where I increase the “volume” to emphasize a point, etc. Subsequently I think leaders and followers can both become more attuned to the music they are dancing to, as well as being less hurried in all movements – just like when we are having a friendly chat, no?

Incidentally, there are indeed specific techniques (ps. I am NOT talking about embellishments or adornos) for the follower to express her “voice”, in response to a leader’s intention, but that is something which I will elaborate in future.

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