Joy in Motion

Music and Dance as Social Ritual and Personal Meditation: Musicality Book Club, Week 7

Last week was very relaxed, with just a few thoughts on goodness and how we judge it, particularly in the context of dancing with a partner (see The Complexity of Goodness: Musicality Book Club, Week 6). This week I felt much more intellectually engaged with Bridge of Waves. Chapter 6, Music as Story, delves into music as both a social ritual and a personal meditation. Let’s jump right in.

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The Complexity of Goodness: Musicality Book Club, Week 6

This week we’re on Chapter 6 of Bridge of Waves: Music as Life. Only the second page into this chapter and I let out a big sigh. How many arguments have I listened to in which dancers have insisted that because dance is a form of self-expression anything goes and nothing is bad or wrong? While I appreciate their desire to emphasize personal freedom, I have always believed they have gone to the extreme in putting that freedom above connection, which is just as central to partner dance as freedom of self-expression. The point of partner dance is to communicate and connect to create a shared expression, just as the purpose of a conversation is to give and receive for mutual understanding, not to just get words out by talking at the same time.

Here are some thoughts from Mathieu on this:

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Technique, Expression, and How Things Blend: Musicality Book Club, Week 5

Over the past two weeks, we’ve read some of Mathieu’s thoughts on Music as Mind and Music as Heart. We’re now on Chapter 5, Feeling Mind, Thinking Heart, of Bridge of Waves: What Music Is and How Listening to It Changes the World. This chapter touches on one of the most heated ongoing debates in the world of dance, music, and probably every other art form, which is the (presence or lack of) relationship between technique and expression. Mathieu returns to the idea of name vs. nameless and develops it further through the concept of the ancient brain (more intuitive) and the new brain (more analytical). He argues for a balancing and uniting of the two:

As in any love relationship, learning to listen to music – even music you love – takes practice. Partners learn to compromise, negotiate, take turns and, eventually, cohabit in peace. Same with the partnering of intellect and intuition in every listener. Your mind and heart learn to be a nice old married couple, completing each other’s sentences and clipping each other’s toenails. [p. 95]

But Mathieu takes this even deeper than most by discussing the emotional investment behind our perspectives on this topic. Basically, he gets to the core of what this debate is really about, something I think we don’t do often enough:

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