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Well Noted
by
Sandi
& Dan Finch
We all know good music when we
hear it. It makes you want to
get up and dance. It stirs an emotion or excites you. Sometimes the
lyrics make
you smile, but always, what you sense is that it feels right.
That rightness comes from the
tempo (Italian for time), the
speed of the music. Great music played too slow is dirge-y, or if too
fast,
dancing to it becomes work. Every rhythm has a tempo range where it
will feel
“right.” That is expressed in beats per minute (BPM) or measures per
minute
(mpm) [also called bars per minute (bpm)]. To determine the speed of
music,
count the number of beats or (easier) count the number of measures you
hear
over a 60 second period and you have your speed. You need to know how
many
beats are supposed to occur in a measure, which is fairly easy since
almost
every rhythm we dance is in 4/4 time except waltz, which is 3/4 time.
(Technically, samba, paso doble and tango occur in 2/4 time but to
simplify
choreography, they are considered to be 4/4.)
You can find the time signature
on sheet music. It occurs as
the tall S-like figure with a slash followed by a fraction, as in the
left part
of the staff pictured here. The top number of the fraction is the
number of
beats in a measure. The bottom number tells you the length of each
beat, in
this case that each quarter note receives one beat. This is also called
common
time because (why not) it occurs so commonly. (The C with a slash in
the right
side of the picture means “cut time,” far too complicated a musical
concept for
here, but basically it tells the musicians to manipulate the rhythm, to
play
common time with a downbeat on every other beat, like a march or a fast
4/4.)
You don’t need to know all that
to understand that music
feels best at a certain speed. What you do need to know is how time
signature
translates into steps: 4/4 means four beats in a measure, which could
be a step
on each beat (QQQQ) or three steps spread over the measure (SQQ or
QQS). Then
you need to be able to feel where the beats occur. Some dancers feel it
naturally, but for most, getting it right means taking the time to
practice
hearing the timing before trying to dance to it. Clap or tap your foot
as the
music plays. Try to feel where each predominant downbeat occurs
(signifying the
start of a new measure generally). When you can feel that, you will
know if you
are on time.
This works best when music is
played in strict tempo,
meaning it stays pretty close to that “perfect” tempo throughout. When
you
dance to Emily, Emily (Childers phase VI waltz) or Memory (Easterday
phase VI
rhythm dance), you quickly understand that they aren’t strict tempo. No
surprise that this would occur at phase VI. But at all levels, you can
come
across music that has an underlying beat and a rhythm section doing
something
different. Now you will know how important it is to isolate the beat
you want
to dance.
From a club newsletter, March 2014,
and
reprinted
in the Dixie Round Dance Council (DRDC)
Newsletter, November 2016.
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