Music 43805
Seminar: Music
and Dance
Lawrence Zbikowski
University of Chicago
Department of Music
Spring Quarter 2005
Friday, 9:00—11:50
Regenstein Library 264
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Music 43805
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This seminar explores the relationship between music and social dance, with a special focus on three issues:
April 1Introduction: construals of dance and music
I started our first meeting by retailing my personal history with dance music, which included playing in various bar bands in northern Minnesota back in the dawn of time. I've thus both been involved with dance music for quite a while, but principally as a member of the band—I haven't spent much time actually dancing, and even less reflecting on the relationship between music and dance. I have, however, been interested in the relationship between music and embodied knowledge for some time (through my work applying recent work in cognitive science to music). This relationship is, for me, at the heart of the process of conceptualizing music, and leads to inquiries into the origins of concepts and the relationship between concepts and emotions; both are connected to the study of how information from and about the body informs our thought. And what better way for a musician to explore this than through dance? This possibility was brought home by a passage from A.B. Marx's 1837-38 Die Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition, in which our favorite theorist of Beethoven's most complex compositions discusses how to write a waltz. Marx begins with a description of how the waltz is danced, and goes on to argue that these steps are the basis for the dance's musical motives. As Marx shows through an analysis of a well-known waltz from Weber's Der Freischütz, every aspect of the dance—its melody, rhythm, dynamic accents, and so on—needs to support these physical motions. The music, then, has to reflect at every turn the gestures of the dance. A topic raised in the discussion that preceded our consideration of the Marx was whether music served as a sonic template onto which bodily motions might be mapped (using a somewhat loose notion of "mapping"), or whether the bodily motions came first, and the sonic organization of the music later. From Marx's perspective it is the latter that holds; however, given this it should also be possible to derive, with greater or less precision, dance moves from dance music. (I explore this possibility briefly in my recent "Modelling the Groove" in connection with the groove of James Brown's "Doin' it to Death.") With these thoughts in mind we turned to three dances brought in by students as part of the first assignment: offered for our delectation were the macarena, Texas line dancing, and the tango. In the latter part of the seminar we learned each of these (to the extent that each of us was educable with regard to patterned bodily motions) and briefly considered correspondences between the music and the dance.
April 8Social dance as topos and structuring element Our point of departure was the essay John Blacking used as an introduction to the volume The Performing Arts: Music and Dance. There, Blacking made a strong argument for what the study of music and dance can bring to the study of anthropology: namely, a better sense of the origins and basis of human communication. Key to this perspective is the notion the human knowledge is embodied knowledge, in the sense that information about the body is part and parcel of the concepts through which we organize our understanding of the world. These notions have found recent support in the work of the philosopher Mark Johnson (The Body in the Mind, 1987), the psychologist Merlin Donald (A Mind so Rare, 2001), and the neurophysiologist Antonio Damasio (Decartes' Error, 1994; The Feeling of What Happens, 1999; Looking for Spinoza, 2003). All of this research makes a strong argument that information from the body contributes consistently and dynamically to the substance of our thought. Music and dance, as modes of human communication that are anchored in bodily interactions with the environment and not tied in a rigid way to language, thus have the potential to give singular insight into what it means to be human. Wendy Allanbrook's approach to the relationship between music and dance (and the significance of this relationship) is decidedly different from that of Blacking, although, in the main, complementary. Building on the work of Leonard Ratner, Allanbrook argues that the various social dance types in circulation in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries served as topics that composers could exploit to construct musical meaning. In the case of the second movement of Mozart's String Quintet in C major (K. 515), this process arose as Mozart complicated the minuet topic basic to this movement (which was, after all, a minuet) by introducing thematic material less amenable to the steps of the minuet and (in the latter portion of the trio) with a shift to a waltz topic. These things became all the more evident as we tried out the typical steps for a minuet to the music. Even given the exclusively instrumental context of the performance that we used (which even shifted this movement to third place within the four movements of the quintet), it was apparent that, for Mozart, the minuet topic was both something to be invoked and to be challenged. A similar, if more artful, situation arose with the final movement from Haydn's String Quartet in Bb major, op. 76, no. 4. Allanbrook correctly identifies the opening topic of the minuet as a bourrée, but (once again with the steps under our feet) it was quite evident that Haydn was interested in exploiting the dynamic gesture basic to the dance (which moves toward the third beat of the measure) rather than simply instantiating it. Haydn's exploitation is subtle and ingenious: the bourrée gesture marks out the theme of the movement and also gives the opening statement of the tonic area a rather too-tightly wound character, which consistently takes it past the point of repose associated with tonal closure. To offset this Haydn appends (after the final pass through the theme) a high-spirited conclusion that changes, for once and for all, the dynamic character of the movement and also gives a firm—even comical—emphasis to the home tonic. What begins as a dance then becomes a parody of the dance, but both in the sense of a kind of variation and in the sense of gently mocking the dance's propriety.
April 15The anthropology of dance Closing off our topic from last week, we returned to the waltz from the first week. After considering some of the points about the structure of the waltz that Sevin Yaraman extracts from A.B. Marx's observations, we took a closer look at the main example Marx uses in the first edition of his Kompositionlehre: a waltz from the first act of Weber's Der Freischütz. Many of the points Marx (and Yaraman) make about the waltz are borne out be the score, but other details complicate matters. In particular, the notion that an anacrusis is key to setting out the first beat of the dance demands reinterpretation once we see (or, more properly, hear) that Weber begins his waltz with a four-measure introduction. The anacrusis thus operates within the context provided by these four measures: it does not so much anticipate beat 1 as it marks out a portion of the larger gesture that comprises two measures (that is, the two-measure "motive" of the waltz identified by Marx). The point became all the more clear when we compared two recordings, a relatively recent studio version conducted by Kleiber and a 1954 live version conducted by Furtwängler. Where the Kleiber recording was almost too fast to dance to, the Furtwängler recording was so slow and stomping that it was closer to a laendler. Just how one regarded the anacrusis was thus further complicated when these widely varying tempos were taken into account. We then turned to Andrée Grau's discussion of Tiwi dance, explicitly framed by Blacking's argument that dance was a means of enacting culture. Grau's work led us to explore in a bit more depth just what advantages there might be to "non-verbal" communication. (The scare quotes here necessary in that "verbal" communication relies, to at least some extent, on "non-verbal" means such as gesture and pitch inflection.) At length I proposed that the efficacy of non-verbal communication lay in our ability to imaginatively and effortlessly reconstruct dynamic processes as we attend to them. This sort of empathization is immediate (or virtually so—it is in fact heavily mediated by a number of perceptual and cognitive processes, but which are largely below the threshold of consciousness) and, in its reliance on embodied experience, rich in meaning. The last reading we engaged before ending seminar was Barbara Browning's treatment of samba. Where the dance of the Tiwi was rich in ritual and meaning, samba was a more distributed and diffuse phenomenon, but one that also admitted of rich readings. Although we took issue with a portion of Browning's readings, in the main they opened up a perspective on the anthropology of dance much richer than we had heretofore entertained.
April 22The specification of bodily motion—dance notations and theories of gesture Expansion and its cousin digression are dangerous playmates, and in this meeting of the seminar we fell prey to some of their guiles. But not unproductively. I began by considering some of the challenges of the anthropology of dance in light of two ideas from cognitive science. The first was the notion of a material anchor, as developed by Ed Hutchins. Material anchors help people organize their thought about highly abstract or substantively ephemeral domains by instantiating some aspect of that domain in a material object. (The starting point for the notion can be seen in Hutchins' 1995 Cognition in the Wild, but is developed more fully in recent work. There is a discussion of this work in chapter 10 of Fauconnier and Turner's 2002 The Way We Think.) In the case of music and dance, the steps and gestures of dance could be seen to be a material anchor for the music—this perspective conforms, in the main, with A.B. Marx's close linkage of dance and music in his treatment of how to compose a waltz. For a dancer, however, music could be seen as a material anchor for the dance: certain moves have to correspond with certain places within the topography of the music. In that both music and dance present challenges to conceptualization, there are also traditions for providing material anchors for each domain: score notation for music (for instance), or Labanotation for dance. The second notion from cognitive science, cross-domain mapping, involves using knowledge from one domain to structure the understanding of a second domain. Material anchors can participate in such mappings (as when we use our knowledge of the musical score to structure our understanding of musical compositions, leading us to call simultaneous events "verticalities"), but such mappings need not draw on source domains that concrete (at least in any obvious way). We brings us, at length, back to the problems of the anthropology of dance, in that it is possible to map all sorts of complicated conceptual structures onto dance. Whether the mapping is productive or not is another matter. With some of these thoughts in mind we turned to Steve Friedson's discussion of Tumbuka drumming in his 1996 Dancing Prophets. One concept important for Friedson was that of a multistable structure (such as a Necker cube), since this provided a way to describe the various ways drumming patterns could be interpreted. These different interpretations then provided dancers with changing ways to construe the sonic environment within which the Vimbuza spirits could appear. To ground our discussion we viewed a portion of the 1989 movie that came out of Friedson's field work. It was soon obvious that the relationship between music and dance within the particular rituals that Friedson had captured was not a simple one—certainly not as simple as that proposed by Marx for the waltz—and that the trance states that arose in these rituals presented yet another challenge to how we might think about the relationship between music and dance (for instance, to what extent—if any—is a trancer "conscious" of any "relationship" between music and dance?). In an endeavor to clarify the issues I put forward the idea that one might view the relationship between music and dance as occupying a continuum, with clear sets of relationships (such as those described by Marx) on one end, and thoroughly intertwined relationships (such as those documented by Friedson) on the other. After proposing the continuum I suggested that it somehow missed the point (in that it necessarily relied on a reification of the notions of "music" and "dance" argued against by most of the music and dance we have considered thus far). Perhaps, then, music and dance are manifestations of a more general capacity for non-verbal, temporally dynamic communication. This perspective suggests a rather profound change in methodology, since the appropriate object of study becomes not "music," or "dance," or even the relationship between them, but the structure of this particular sort of communication. We explored some of the groundwork for such a methodology through a discussion of a chapter from Eric Clarke's forthcoming Ways of Listening. Clarke is interested in developing an ecological approach to music perception (building on J.J. Gibson's ecological approach of the 1960s and 1970s), and in the chapter we read is interested particularly in how musical information suggests types of motion. His examples—from Berg, Fatboy Slim, and Mozart—generated brisk discussion but rather less agreement. The expansion and digression that occupied the first portion limited our time for further consideration of these topics, so we'll have to take them up in our next meeting.
April 29Cognitive theories of bodily representation and meaning We began our meeting with a brief review of Dalcroze's theory of eurhythmics, with a focus on his notion that the development of gross motor motion leads to thorough musicianship. We tried our hands at a Dalcrozian exercise, reflected on the overly cerebral approach to music against which Dalcroze was reacting, and considered the aim of the whole, which was summarized by Bachmann as follows: “Eurythmics helps the pupil to develop ‘a swift and economical communications system between all the agents of thought and movement’ . . . and consists . . . in multiplying opportunities for accommodating his actions (thoughts and movements) to his immediate surroundings” (p. 134). Although the summary is intended as a justification for the practices developed by Dalcroze, it also applies to perspectives on human cognition that seem to inform, at every turn, the study of music and dance. We then turned to a consideration of the dance (or, more properly, movement and force) notation developed by Rudolf Laban. This led to a fairly lengthy discussion of the function of various sorts of notations (with music notation serving as a ready—perhaps too ready—touchstone), and the relationship between a given cultural product and the notations developed to represent key (or perhaps salient?) aspects of that product. We were reminded, at length, that dancers only rarely make use of Labanotation (as important as it might at times be for choreographers), which not only suggested something about the limitations of the notation but also about the ultimate goal of our efforts to have it "represent" dance. The final portion of our meeting was given over to a discussion of the theory of emotion (and feeling) recently developed by Antonio Damasio (a theory that assumes that a sharp distinction between "the body" and "the mind" may be impossible to make), and current work on embodied psychological processes by Lawrence Barsalou and his associates. We were not able to dedicate to these topics the time that they really deserve, but we were able to get a sense of how theories of dance and music (recognizing both as embodied) could be grounded in recent work in the mind and brain sciences. Put another way, this work makes it possible to conceive of an approach to music and dance that views the relationship between the two as something more than fortuitous, and grounded in the basic cognitive processes that give human intelligence its distinctive cast.
May 6John Blacking’s work on Venda dance The waltz (mascot of the seminar) was again on my mind during the first part of the seminar, but in this case it was Augustin Barrios's Vals op. 8, no. 4 for guitar. Although the piece is clearly a concert waltz (something particularly evident in the showy campanellas section in the midst of the trio), it also owes much to the ballroom. This was clear in the introductory gestures, and in the two-bar phrases that predominate in the A and B sections. Barrios, however, stretches the ballroom figure somewhat, and in a number of cases creates melodic phrases that reach across two-bar units, creating brief moments of vertigo before the two-bar phrases reassert themselves. This then suggested an expansion of the theoretical perspective on the relationship between music and dance that we have developed thus far. According to a perspective I have recently developed (and which owes more than a little to the construction grammars proposed by some cognitive linguists), music involves sonic analogues for dynamic processes. If we put this together with A.B. Marx's approach to composing a waltz, we could say that the music of the waltz should present a sonic analogue for the steps of the dance. ("At the very least," Marx writes, "the waltz must bring into prominence this basic motive of movement [that constitutes the steps of the dance]. Each measure, or, better, each phrase of two measures, must answer to the dance motive marking the first step firmly, and also the swinging turn of the dance." [1837-38, v. 2, p. 55]) The analogy, however, is only approximate—indeed, the schematicity of the musical analogue is perhaps its most important feature. The steps of the dance are thus not literally present in the music, but the correlation between the two processes is robust enough that one can get from the music to the dance, and from the dance to the music (as Mitchell and Gallaher's research suggested). To return to Barrios's waltz, the vertiginous phrases stretch the correlation between music and dance even further (in the interpretation I pursue here), thus underlining the independence of the two processes. In consequence, at least one of the effects of the dance (for participants and perhaps for observers) is cumulative, a result of the various ways the two different dynamic processes interact. After the Barrios we moved to the readings for today. The chapter from Judith Lynne Hanna's To Dance is Human gave us a somewhat idealistic, but nonetheless provocative, view of the import of dance. A difficulty for Hanna was specifying the basis for the communication basic to dance (but which might be found in Damasio's and Barsalou's work); nonetheless, it was this communication that was central to her argument: “The communicative efficacy of dance lies in its capacity to fully engage the human being; it is a multidimensional phenomenon codifying sensory experience. Furthermore, it can lead to altered states of consciousness.” (p. 66) The latter point then led us to our readings from Judith Becker's recent Deep Listeners. Here the connection to Damasio's work was explicit, although Becker's extensions of this perspective (moving in part through Indian rasa theory, and toward an account of trance) where completely her own. The regular appearance of the topic of trance may seem slighly quixotic (or perhaps disorderly) in a seminar nominally on music and dance, but the connection of these topoi is really relatively straightforward: music, dance, and trance, along with a select group of associated cultural practices, have long been associated with the irrational (at least to the extent that the rational is constructed in terms of the verbal). That these practices should all be realized by such a "rational" species as ours is puzzling only if one assumes that the terminus ad quem of human development is the rationality of the word, an assumption difficult to accept in light of the cataclysmic and idiosyncratically human carnage whose end sixty years ago has of late been commemorated.
May 13Mark Butler’s work on EDM (and a bit on origins) We began with a return to the seventeenth (and early eighteenth) century with a discussion of a choreography for a passacaille from Lully's Armide. Although we were hard pressed to accept the narrative/rhetorical structure that Judith Schwartz found in the dance (and outlined in her essay in Early Music), we were able to see and hear (through a viewing of a videotaped modern performance) some of the intricate relationships between the music and the dance. This led to a somewhat circumspect consideration of what the dance added when we considered it together with the music. I proposed that part of the answer could be found in considering dance and music as a form of multimedia of the sort treated by Nicholas Cook in his Analysing Musical Multimedia. Although such an interpretation could be seen as simply returning to the reified construals of "dance" and "music" that we found it prudent to reject a few weeks ago, it is perhaps better seen as reflecting how an audience would apprehend them: for members of the audience, "dance" is something apprehended primarily through vision, whereas "music" is apprehended through hearing. Leaving aside the matter of how dance and music are conceived by performers (and that is something quite important to leave aside), this perception suggests that it may be useful to at least provisionally consider them to be different media, and their conjunction an instance of multimedia. The question then becomes how the media are connected to one another. While I did not engage this issue in any thoroughgoing way, I suggested that what we are coming to understand about perception and its role in the construction of abstract structures (here thinking of Barsalou's work on perceptual symbol systems) may help us to understand connections between dance and music. In the latter portion of our meeting we moved rather quickly through Ian Cross's ideas about the relationship between music and biocultural evolution (which emphasized, from a different perspective than what we have heretofore developed, the importance of embodied processes to human understanding), and Georgiana Gore's Birmingham-style theorization of rave (or, perhaps, The Rave). The discussion of the latter was rather diffuse (perhaps reflecting aspects of Gore's style of argumentation), but gave us at least something of an introduction to scholarly work on electronic dance music. This we explored further through a rather brief discussion of Mark Butler's work on the topic, with a special focus on his use of contemporary theories of rhythm and meter to describe unique features of EDM. It seems we may need to take this up in a bit more detail at our next meeting.
May 20Eugene Montague’s work on music and motion, and a return to samba The first portion of our meeting was given over to a discussion of how best to approach the metric organization of music in general, and EDM in particular, both prompted by our reading of Mark Butler's dissertation. Two main issues came to the fore. The first was the relationship between theoretical characterizations of musical meter and likely conceptualizations by performers of and participants in a particular musical practice. There is no reason, of course, why the two should be the same, and yet we have some expectation that there should be a way to get from the one to the other. Exploring these paths took us a while, not the least because we found that the contexts for both metric theory and for construals of a particular kind of music were often as not rather involved. Consider, for instance, a 3+3+2+4+4 grouping of sixteenth notes of the sort not uncommon in EDM (and indeed is related to the clave rhythm of Afro-Cuban music). While there are a number of different ways to construe this particular group (especially if the focus is taken away from the sixteenth-note level and directed to the attack points that initiate the groups), a case can be made that the pattern is always understood relative to a bass-drum pattern in even quarter notes. This would then mean that the 3+3+2+4+4 grouping cannot be theorized in isolation, but has to approached as but one element of a larger whole. The second issue was the general problem of analysis. As the linguist Ronald Langacker has noted, “there is certainly some truth in the view that analysis and description inevitably distort subject matter since they cannot be subject matter” (Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, vol. 1, p. 14). Given that some sort of distortion is an inevitable part of analysis, it is not a question if things get distorted but only whether, given the circumstances at hand, we deem the distortions acceptable. If one is interested in developing an account of how rhythmic patterns are organized and how patterns from different musical practices relate to one another, focusing on a 3+3+2+4+4 grouping in a swatch of EDM may be perfectly appropriate. If the goal is to understand the music in as holistic a fashion as possible, what passes for "focus" will actually be regarded as a rather wilful distortion of the subject of the investigation. With a bit of prompting we wrenched ourselves away from these speculations and took up the matter of samba in Wales. There was a fair amount of dissatisfaction with Eisentraut's ethnography as well as the conclusions he drew from his research—a bit too much of the context for samba (within and without Wales) was left out for comfort. At the same time, a case could be made for his attention to the role of adopted music in creating a sense of community, especially where the association of that music with bodily motion (both in the creation of the music and in responding to it) was one of its chief attractions. Indeed, the notions of inclusivity, community, physicality and sexuality, wellbeing, celebration, and empowerment around which Eisentraut organized his analysis have all proven important at one time or another in our consideration of dance. We concluded our meeting with a discussion of Eugene Montague's dissertation research. Montague's approach, informed by Chris Hasty's theory of meter (as rhythm) and echoing of phenomenology, was not one that met with resounding approval. Indeed, it prompted rather heated negative reactions. Nonetheless, two aspects of his work seemed worthy of further consideration. First, the difference between the present and the past that is at the foreground, as well as the difference between being-in-the-moment and reflection, provide the basis for interesting contrasts. In fact, it is these differences that, from Montague’s perspective, are the proper subject of analysis. Second, the fine-grained analysis that Montague was able to produce in his treatment of the sarabandes by DuManoir and Lully deserves attention, for one really gets a sense of the different dynamic properties of the two dances. This is something that is not always forthcoming in rhythmic analyses, and while one might reasonably argue with how Montague reached his conclusions such a striking result surely should not be dismissed out of hand.
May 27The waltz, the groove, and conceptual models
June 9Quasi-conference on music and dance
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Copyright © 2005 Lawrence M. Zbikowski For inquiries about this page, or suggestions, contact Lawrence Zbikowski, Department of Music, University of Chicago. |
