Dance The Music


American Pop music is basically boring.


I don’t mean it is bad. Far from it. American Pop music is endlessly ​fascinating. My iPod has 7,000 dance songs, spread across the past hundred ​years, and covers styles from blues to country to rock to electro to…. Well, ​about everything! ITunes and Spotify have millsions of songs..... pretty much ​all variations of the "one American Pop song", which goes back to the Civil ​War era and beyond.


Speaking musically, though, American Pop music is extraordinarily "simple". ​Ask any classical musician.


Somewhere around 99.9% of all Pop music, from every decade and every ​style, has the same structure:


8 bar phrases. One after another.


Simple!


Most Pop music is 4-beat bars, so 32-beat phrases. There are a few waltzes, ​with 3-beat bars, so 24-beat phrases.



My wife, classically trained musician, used to rib me: “Do you think Pop ​Music could expand to TWO songs?”


Once you start listening carefully to lots of tunes, you will start hearing ​those phrases without thinking about them anymore. One year, I counted ​songs at every opportunity, hundreds and thousands of them… and it became ​easier and easier just to hear them and move to them.


And it became a game, to find the ones that break the rules. Try counting ​Merle Haggard’s "My Favorite Memory" sometime. One of the best songs ​ever, but it is bizarrely phrased….. delightfully so!


But... Those are unbelievably rare.


The most dominant outliers I have found are 12-bar blues, which heavily ​influenced 1950s rock-n-roll and rockabilly.


Here is the beauty of "simple": essentially all dance songs have exactly the ​same shape:


There is a little intro and a little exit music. Between those, a series of 8 ​bars.


Sometime the phrase focus is 4 bars, or 16, or even 32.. but if you are ​dancing 8 bars all the time, you are going to be right 99.99% of the time.


I am often told on the dance floor: “You must know this song." Actually, I’ve ​often never heard it before. But I know how it is going to go!


Except.. that is just dancing the notes. Just dancing the notes means it is ​just going to plod along, uninspired.


To inspire your dancing, you have to put "music" into it.


Long ago, in an All-State high school jazz band, we were preparing for an all ​Cole Porter concert. Steve Fowler, the director, keep saying over and over ​again, in a hundred different ways:


"I am not interested in the notes. You are good ​musicians and I expect you to know the notes. I am ​interested in the music."


Most of us, including me, had NO idea what he was talking about, at first. By ​the time we went to our concert, I think we actually managed to put some ​music into those great old Cole Porter songs.


Musicality is FEELING the music and building that arc of feeling into the ​phrasing of the song. It is emphasizing this note a little more, and that one a ​bit less. It is picking up on the next note a micro-second early, and holding ​another note a bit too long.


"Music is the space between the notes."

Debussy


"The music is not in the notes,

but in the silence between."

Mozart


My dance version:

"Dance is the connection between the moves."


The purpose of social dance is not to do moves and patterns. The purpose is ​to connect. Moves and patterns are not the end result, but a means to create ​connection.


It is wedding together the emotion of the song and the magic of your ​connection with another dancer into a musically magical shared moment.


Musicality.


Get it!


Aisle 13, at Walmart.


PS - This is an interesting article on why modern music production ​techniques, while making it much easier to produce music, are squeezing ​the “music” out of it... by a guy who has been producing music for decades..