Introduction: Choreomusical Perspectives
Abstract
This article introduces the theme and contents of this double issue on choreomusicology. It summarizes the historical development of research focusing on the relationship of music and dance, or sound and movement, especially within music and dance studies, but also in other disciplines. The authors advocate the term choreomusicology as an umbrella term for the various approaches used to investigate music-dance interrelations and related topics such as embodied music interaction. The focus is on combining views from ethnomusicology and ethnochoreology, which offer new potential to choreomusical research with their culturally sensitive insights based on ethnographic fieldwork, often including practical understanding of the traditions studied.
... Moreover, current research has addressed the inseparable character of music and dance outside the Western art scene. The connections between music and dance are not simply defined, but the interplay is complicated and occurs on several levels simultaneously (Felfödi, 2001;Kallio, 2013;Seye, 2014;Stepputat & Seye, 2020). ...
The pedagogy and practices of folk music and folk dance are firmly separate in Finland. Furthermore, the expertise in these fields focuses heavily on folk music and dance as performing arts rather than communal activities. The situation has led to the differentiation and fragmentation of professional and amateur activities. To address this gap in knowledge and practice, the KanTaMus project intends to present a pedagogical model for a joint participatory folk dance and music pedagogy devised through practice-based development work. This article explains the basic premises of the model under development. We first discuss the legacy issues crucial in Finnish folk dance and music and its pedagogy. Secondly, we outline the values, pedagogical principles, and prior development work we see as fundamental to our work. Martin Seligman's PERMA theory serves as an overall canvas for our development work. The basic elements of the theory, i.e., positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment, work as a basis for our model, which emphasises embodied presence, inclusion, and interaction as crucial features of a shared learning situation in dance and music. Finally, we present the pairing process as a specific example of the application of the model.
Capoeira, Candomblé, and samba—three Afro-Brazilian expressive forms—are indelibly linked in the Brazilian popular imaginary, frequently listed in tandem in tourist brochures and academic literature alike. Yet their relationship remains undertheorized. This article explores the multisensory interconnections among the practices from the perspective of capoeira Angola and samba practitioners in backland Bahia. Practitioners consistently referred to Candomblé when describing their experiences of music and movement, revealing that the practices cultivate shared ways of orienting bodies to sound. More specifically, although the vital force of axé is a concept from Candomblé, practitioners experience axé as affective sound vibrations also resonating in capoeira and samba, bringing their bodies into motion and syntony (aligning frequencies). Ultimately, I argue that axé also resonates beyond the space-times of capoeira events, cohering a community premised upon shared ways of sensing that are grounded in Afro-Brazilian spirituality.
Ethnomusicology may contribute to a non-ethnocentric approach to musical embodiment in two ways: (i) by analyzing embodied interaction in performances that differ from those usually studied by Western cognitive scientists; (ii) by analyzing types of embodied interactions that are absent in the Western musical culture, such as interaction with " sonic agents " (intentional beings " personified " by music). Two field research studies in Romania and Brazil suggest that strong emotional experiences with music may be related to the co-presence of two different types of embodied musical interaction, one in the social domain, among the performance participants, and the other with " sonic agents " .
This essay takes the term choreomusical as a starting place for discussion of attention to the study of music and dance relationships within ethnomusicology and ethnochoreology. Extending this neologism, choreomusicology has been proposed as a distinct disciplinary perspective on its own. Recent publications advocating for the usefulness of this joint research perspective have begun to establish this terminology more generally. Explicit studies of music-dance as a unitary phenomenon in performance, however, long predate this development, particularly in the closely connected fi elds of ethnomusicology and ethnochoreology. This history is here acknowledged, tracing interest in this research topic to major founding fi gures in both disciplines, as they took shape in the 1950s. An examination of the application of the choreomusical perspective to the case of European and American dance fi ddling provides examples of how such inquiry has been carried out and identifi es emergent methods which make use of advances in digitally based sound and movement analysis. A more nuanced usage of the terms is advocated.
Within the second half of the twentieth century, music has moved from the realms of the special occasion to the everyday: from belonging to the ‘Sunday sphere’ of life, when work is over and all other duties are taken care of, music has become a major component of everyday life’s soundscape. At the same time, from being an activity for the few, those especially inclined, gifted or wealthy, music has become a pursuit in reach of almost everyone. To a lesser extent the same is true for dance: take Sweden as an example. Here, well into the twentieth century, dance was seen as an activity merely for the young. It was customary to stop dancing after marriage or at least after the arrival of the first child. Today, dance is a favourite activity not only among the young, but also among the middle-aged and the elderly. ‘Senior dance’, a genre of specially designed ‘folk dances’ for the elderly invented in Germany in the mid-1980s, has become a popular dance genre in Sweden since the early 1990s, and continues to spread fast (Ronström, 1994).
In this article I present an ethnotheory of the music/dance relationship in Swedish polska, based on dance fieldwork and interviews I have conducted with polska dance musicians. I discuss three mechanisms that these musicians use to communicate movement patterns to dancers: iteration (entrainment via repetition), metaphor (timbral weight conveying motional weight), and sympathy (musicians' movements mapping dance movements). I then discuss how musicians use these mechanisms to control four motional parameters: pulsation (rate and consistency of tempo), lean (degree and direction of tilt over the dance axis) viscosity (level of perceived air resistance), and libration (degree and timing of vertical motion). The work is intended in part as a case study of how theories of both music and dance can benefit from a focused analysis of the relationship between those two domains, as well as how studies of music/dance relations can benefit from the application of ethnographic research techniques.
The integration of music and dance among African people is a well-articulated phenomenon both within and outside of ethnomusicology (e.g., Blacking 1973; Hanna 1973; Nketia 1974; Stone 1998; Mans 2002; Gilman 2009; Mason 2012:5). As Ruth Stone reports, “African performance is a highly wrapped bundle of arts that are sometimes difficult to separate, even for analysis. Singing, playing instruments, dancing, masquerading and dramatizing are part of a conceptual package that many Africans think of as one and the same” (1998:7). Despite the ubiquity of this conceptual packaging, African performance arts are realized in very particularized ways and contexts throughout the continent. In his study of the vimbuza healing ritual among the Tumbuka of Malawi, for example, Steven Friedson concludes that music and dance in vimbuza are not independent, but “multilayered and complexly interrelated” (1996: 131). In fact, “without drumming there would be no dancing, and without the dancing, the vimbuza [ancestral spirits] would be unable to ‘play with their children‘” (ibid.: 129). Friedson's observation goes beyond the basic acknowledgement that people who create and view dance experience it as sound too; as a practitioner, he found the very act of drumming to be “dancelike” (ibid.: 131–32). Similarly, in the specific cases of Ugandan kizino, kimandwa, maggunju , and gaze . Alfdaniels Mabingo argues that “to embody these dances is to personify the music that accompanies them. Music represents, frames and influences the corporeal bases, capabilities, performance and choreographic sensibilities of the dances” (2015: 13; see also Makubuya 1995). In both of these cases, music not only helps to define the choreographic movements, but also determines the speed and vigour of the dancers.
In many parts of Africa, music and dancing are generally activities of 'social' occasions, that is, occasions on which the members of a community or a social group meet for recreation or for the performance of a ceremony or a rite. The dance arena may, therefore, be the village square, the street, the courtyard, the town plaza or sacred places where particular rites are observed. There are dances which may be performed any day, as well as others which are performed only on specific 'social' occasions or on specific days of the ritual calendar. They may be dances for general enjoyment or dances designed for limited participation, such as royal dances, dances of heroic and occupational associations and dances of cult groups. The diversity which characterises cultural usages in Africa shows itself in the organisation of these dances, for the same set of movement sequences is not used everywhere. In Ghana, for example, Akan dances are very different in form from the dances of the Anlo Ewe and those of the peoples of Northern Ghana. There is a characteristic way in which the Akan use the feet and more particularly the hands in their dances, which is either altogether absent from the dances of other Ghanaians or much less pronounced. Among the Akan group one may in this respect also distinguish between Fante style with its emphasis on rapid footwork, and Ashanti style with its emphasis on hand and arm movements. Different elaborations of the basic movements selected in a given society may be used in particular dances. Thus in the Akan area of Ghana, adowa, asaadua, kete, sikyi, ntan and so forth, are regarded as different dances because of the different elaborations of the basic Akan dance movements employed in each of them. The forms in which the dances are expressed may be prescribed by tradition. There are 'free' dances in which individuals participate as they wish, without very much regard to others, as well as organised St. Musicologica VII. (1965)