If you ask ten people to answer the question: “What is musicality?”, you’ll likely get twelve different answers – and on the off chance your respondents agree, their answer will likely be
“I know it when I see it”
which, though often true, isn’t the least bit helpful in developing your own or helping your students build theirs.
A quick google search will tell you that “dance musicality is how dancers hear, interpret, and dance to music”, or that “musicality in dance is how a dancer hears the music they are dancing to, and how they interpret it into the moves they make” – which, again, while technically correct, is about the same amount of useful as the above.
In this article, I’ll try to define what musicality is (and isn’t), in a way that uncovers specific avenues for you to work on if you want to improve your musicality, or help others do the same.
Dancers vs Musicians
First, a bit of context: while similar, musicality won’t mean the exact same thing for a musician and for a dancer.
Musicians, as well as dancers, are considered “interpretive artists”, in that they interpret the work of another person. the composer, who would be considered the “creative artist” in this situation. The line, obviously, isn’t so clear-cut. First of all, the composer and the interpreter/performer can be the same person; second, many musicians perform fully or in part improvised pieces; third and most important, even even if a musician strictly only performs the work of another, their creativity and artistry are essential in bringing said work to life.
The same applies to dancers who interpret and perform choreography: while the choreo may or may not be your own, and you may or may not improvise part whole of the dance, your creativity is essential in bringing the piece to life either way.
What makes the difference between musicians and dancers – and what makes this distinction between creation and interpreting relevant for us – is the fact that a musician interprets something that doesn’t exist in the moment. The sheet music, the folk tune the musician is about to play, the theme they’re going to improvise on, does not exist in the same time and space as the audience before the musician starts to play. They need to create the music, through their bodies, voice and instruments, in the moment.
A dancer, however, has a twofold interpreting task: on top of interpreting the pre-written choreography (if you’re dancing choreography, of course), which also doesn’t exist in the same time and space as your audience does before you start to dance, you also interpret the music, which is already present.
You need to hear, connect, feel, and recreate the music in your body, so that your audience can also connect to it.
Musicality, then, is a creative ability for musicians: it’s the skillset they use to create music from nothing.
It is, however, an interpretive ability for dancers: it’s a skillset we use to connect to, render visible, and express ourselves through an already existing base that we’re building on – the music.
Dispelling myths
or what musicality is not
“It’s an innate talent one either has or doesn’t have”
Look, I’m not going to pretend some people don’t have it easier than others. Some dancers seem to absorb anything music-related like a sponge, while others struggle not to rush their performances after years and years of training.
Musicality is a skillset. How good your get in developing those skills is, llike many other things, is a mix of good luck and hard work.
Genetics probably plays a role.
The culture you come from, notably how common everyday music-making and dancing is in your culture, plays a role.
Your family culture plays a role. To quote Zoltán Kodály, the Hungarian composer, ethnomusicologist and music pedagogue, who created a method that revolutionised music education, “a child’s musical education starts nine months before their mother is born”. Apart from the sexism that insist on all child-rearing work belonging to mothers, he’s spot on: how much you’re encouraged to make music or dance as a child, and how much your parents were encouraged to do so in their early life, makes an enormous difference in how easily you “get” music.
This also shows that much of the “talent” we perceive in others isn’t innate at all, but is a result of exposure, encouragement and education they received as children.
And while it’s definitely easier to learn when you’re a small kid and learn by playing, you can absolutely go through the same learning process later in life.
We all have what it takes to develop a strong musical foundation. In fact, “the human brain and nervous system are hard-wired to distinguish music from noise and to respond to rhythm and repetition, tones, and tunes”1.
Musicality can be built and improved at any age.
“A creative / technically skilled / expressive dancer by default has good musicality”
I once saw a fusion belly dancer perform to a Scottish Highland folk music in a kilt. She paid little regard to the music, or indeed to any rules or customs of style or choreography, but it remains, to this day, one of the most creative pieces I’ve ever seen.
I regularly see dancers with impeccable belly dance / raq sharqi technique who, while they dance beautifully in rehearsals, will inevitably speed up when they go on stage. Others can’t follow a combination or choreography that isn’t timed to have on movement per beat to save their lives.
We’ve all seen beginner dancers who have little technical knowledge and struggle to keep on the music, radiate joy at their end-of-year hafla (and captivating their audience more than many of their technically better but less expressive peers).
Musicality has a certain overlap with creativity, dance skills and expression, but building your musicality remains a different process from learning dance technique, honing your creativity, or becoming more expressive.
“Musicality means staying on the beat”
Staying on the beat is a foundational element in musicality, that’s true.
However, if you think that’s all there is to musical understanding, connection and expression, you’re missing out on a whole world of artistry.
Don’t be content with a single drop when you could have the ocean – and don’t let your students miss out on it either.
“Having musicality means marking each and every sound of a song”
You cannot, and should not squeeze in a movement on every single sound. Apart from it being physically impossible in most cases, all it would do is confuse and overwhelm your audience.
Part of musicality is being able to choose when to move and when to pause, which parts of the music to render visible in order to support the feeling, emotion, message or story you want to transmit to your audience.
“I can learn all I need about music in my weekly dance class”
As mentioned above, learning dance technique is a very different process from building your musicality. Weekly classes are justifiably focussed on technique and moves, and, at a beginner-intermediate level, on providing a space to de-stress after work, have fun, and move.
You’ll certainly learn some things about music, but the teacher has to keep up the energy and dynamism of the class, so there often isn’t much time – or willingness – to go deeper than the very basics, or to accommodate students who struggle with the musicality side of things.
Besides, contrary to popular opinion, not all professional dancers or dance teachers are experts on music, or know how to transmit the musicality they “instinctively” have. Unless you’re lucky enough to learn with teachers from the source cultures, your dance teacher likely learnt dance in a classroom setting, with limited time and resources dedicated to musical knowledge, and a teacher who probably had limited knowledge about music and teaching music to begin with.
Elements of musicality
Now that we’ve seen what musicality is not and how it isn’t acquired, let’s dive in into what it is:
Musicality is the dancer’s ability to understand, emotionally connect to, render visible and express emotions through the music in a way that supports the dancer’s (and/or choreographer’s) artistic intent.
Understanding
While music is an abstract art and its emotional and artistic impact incredibly subjective, certain aspects of music have, quite literally, a mathematical precision. This doesn’t mean that making music has to be precise: it means that musical sound can be described mathematically (using acoustics) and exhibits “a remarkable array of number properties”2.
The fact that sheet music exists and can be used both to describe music, for example when you note down a tune you heard somewhere, or to prescribe it, as composers do, shows how exact music can be when it comes to the actual sounds – tones, intervals, tempo, rhythm, form and more.
While as a dancer you don’t have to read sheet music, you do need to have an understanding of the music itself.
“But music theory is booooring” I can almost hear you say, “and I’m absolutely sure that [insert your favourite Egyptian dancer here] never took music classes, and look at her beautiful musicality!”
To which I answer:
First of all, don’t yuck others’ yum – personally, I find music theory fascinating, even if you don’t.
Second, I’m also sure that [insert your favourite Egyptian dancer here] didn’t learn Arabic with Duolingo either, yet I can see you trying to keep your owl alive every day.
Third, I hope you realise that knowing that the maqsoum is a rhythm that goes “dum-dum-es-tak-dum-es-tak-es” and is counted in 4 while the chiftetelli is counted in 8, or knowing what a taqseem is, or what the typical parts of a baladi progression are, all count as music theory.
Fourth and most important, I never said that classroom-style formal learning is the only way to acquire a functional knowledge of dance or music. To be fair, certain types of musical and dance knowledge are hard to come by otherwise. Western classical music theory and technique are among these, as are classical dance styles such as ballet or Bharatanatyam.
But when it comes to traditional music and dance, such as baladi, in which belly dance / raqs sharqi is rooted, formal training is not only not necessary, but in fact an inferior form of learning, compared to community learning within the family and home environment.
To illustrate the point, I’ll quote Maya Youssef3 as she recounts her experience of performing in Aleppo:
“Nervously, I performed a taqsim, and to my relief, the audience responded with an ‘Allah’. Later, a gardener approached me, praised my performance, and identified every maqam switch I made—despite being illiterate and having no formal music education.”
Note that the gardener in the story had a great amount of musical understanding,but that he acquired it elsewhere than the classroom.
Unfortunately, most of us can’t go back in time and grow up again in an Egyptian or Middle Eastern family to soak up the knowledge at home (and even if it were possible, it would pose another set of questions), so we have to resort to other ways of learning, usually in some sort of class or course. That said, as I mentioned above, your regular dance class is rarely an ideal environment to learn anything but the very basics, so if you want to dive deeper, you’ll need to find other sources4.
Understanding the music to being able to feel and transmit it is like dance technique is to expression. You can have the latter without the former, you can gain both in a variety of ways, but having more of the former will always help. We’ve all seen beginner dancers who are super expressive – and we encourage them to improve their technique, so that they have a larger toolbox for their expression.
The same way I’d like to encourage you to be curious about music and learn as much as you can: it can only help you improve your innate musical sensitivity and talent
– and it can help you avoid becoming the teacher who has a beautiful musicality, but due to her lack of musical knowledge will struggle to transmit it, saying things like “I’m not on the music here” or “just follow the melody”, to the frustration of your students.
A sense of rhythm
As mentioned, following the beat is a very small part of musicality – but it’s the foundation of it.
While musicality as a whole can be quite subjective, “[r]hythm, in contrast is more objective. It is less abstract. I don’t believe you can have musicality if you don’t have rhythm, because you must be able to hear the music before you can respond to it, and rhythm is the foundation of response to music.”5
Part of having rhythm goes back to understanding concepts like beat, meter and phrasing, or even syncopation or countertime, but you need to go beyond understanding and embody these concepts, so you can transform them into movement, into dance.
This means
- finding and staying on the beat, or
- being on time, if your moves fall in between the beat
- being able to find and mark the first (or second, third etc) beat of a measure
- being able to hear each part (instrument or voice) in the music, and
- being able to follow only one or another, or layer them intentionally
- being able to recognise and follow motifs and phrases in the music
- being able to predict (within reason) when phrases will begin and end, and when the music is likely to change
- being able to catch “The Drops” (big changes, accents or silences) and the ending
You already have some, maybe all of these abilities, and you can certainly train the ones you’re weakest at. This is where we all start: if you can’t hit and stay on the beat, the downbeat or countertime, if you can’t reliably follow the notes played by a specific instrument (percussive or otherwise), if you can’t hear and understand where a motif or a phrase begins and ends, you won’t know where to start and end your movement, or your breath.
Which is why deep rhythmic awareness is the first step: you need to embody the rhythm to be secure in the timing of your moves. The next step is quality.
Quality of sound, quality of movement
Sound has many different qualities that are entirely separate from timing / rhythm.
Quality of sound can be described by
- how high or low it is (this is called pitch: a series of pitches is a melody),
- how loud or quiet it is (the variation of which is called dynamics),
- and how sharp or smooth it is (known as articulation).
These remain, much as rhythm is, objective, describable qualities of sound, and part of musicality is being able to recognise them and render them visible through movement.
While in terms of rhythm, your choice of timing your moves goes in one dimension (timing), you have a much wider choice when expressing highs and lows of a melody, the loudness/quietness or sharpness/softness of a sound.
Tense or relaxed. Small or large. Accented or fluid; with a hard stop or reverbing. Oriented upward or outward vs dawn or inward. Isolated or full-body. In place or travelling. And that’s without taking layers into consideration.
As an example, you can render the highs and lows of a melody visible by alternating upper and lower body movements; you can also do it by expressing the highs with larger, looser, less isolated and more outward-oriented moves and the lows with contrasting smaller, tenser, more isolated, more inward-oriented ones. In fact, you can express said highs and lows by accordingly changing the quality of same move, say a hip lift or a circle.
The quintessential quality of sound is called timbre, and this is a lot less easy to describe in objective terms. Timbre is what makes instruments and human voices recognisable – even if they play or sing the same tune at the same volume, an oud will sound different from a nay or a singer, and one soprano different to another. The choice of instruments and voices pre-determines a significant part of the timbre, though singers and instrumentalists can change it by using different techniques.
Accordingly, rendering the timbre visible is often more subjective than any of the other qualities. There are obvious choices, like shimmying on the qanoun or letting your breath lead during a nay solo, and it’s an important practice to do so; but these remain as simple – and let’s be honest, cliché – as insisting on only using upper body moves for melody highs.
Movement choice
In terms of musicality, movement choice is mostly unimportant. It will be affected , to some degree by
- the melody – we tend to associate upward, upper body or open moves with higher or increasing pitch;
- articulation: the sharper a sound is articulated, the sharper usually the movement gets, while tremolo or vibrating sounds often call for shimmies;
- dynamics: louder notes often invoke more up-or outward movement, or travelling steps; or
- storytelling intent: gestures or moves used to mime objects, actions or to depict the lyrics;
but none of these are hard rules. You can shimmy on a long, soft note of nay, and it can absolutely work; you can decide not to shimmy on a single-note tremolo, percussive or otherwise, but say, turn instead, or catch the ever-so-slight beat or accents in it, if they exist.
Movement choice is up to preference. Within physical limits, of course – can you do it slow or fast enough to follow whatever rhythm you wanted to embody? Can you add enough range to make it visible?
Even the divide of “sharp” and “smooth” movements is a simplification, as all movements exist on a scale. Do mayas fast enough, and you’ll end up with Soheir Zaki accents, then with a shimmy – and shimmies can be either sharp, soft or strong, depending. You can make a “smooth” undulation sharp if you start it with an accent; you can make an accent sharp or soft; you can let an accent with reverb into a sinuous move.
Pretty much any movement can work on any music, if you’re connected it.
Expression
You could argue that expression is a separate topic from musicality, and you’d be right, at least in part: expressing yourself applies to all situations in life, on and off stage, with or without music.
(Being an expressive person “in real life” can certainly help with expressing yourself on stage, while if you’re used to repessing certain feelings and remain stoic, it might take some inner work to reach your full potential.)
Expression in the context of musicality means
- being open to the style and/or piece of music in question,
- letting it impact you emotionally,
- knowing enough of the piece to discern if your reaction to it is what most people would have / what the piece is intended for, and
- translating into movement in a way that others can relate to.
How music impacts you is of course by nature subjective, and depends on a variety of factors: the talent of the musician, the quality of the concert or the recording, your general disposition towards the style of music, the moment in their life in which you listen to the piece, as well as your general emotional tendencies.
If you hate heavy metal or find African pop music boring, you’re unlikely to let it provoke any meaningful emotion in you besides irritation or boredom; and you should probably choose something else to perform to.
As a performer, you’ll also need a certain amount of cultural knowledge: a song may provoke certain feelings in you, but if you’re performing on it, you’ll need to make sure that your interpretation is at the very least not jarringly disconnected from your audience’s take on the same piece.
Songs to induce trance that are used in certain cultures, are a good example: to my European ears, many of them sound like high-energy, fun party songs, but in their source cultures, they’re often sung to heal illness or even grief over the passing of a loved one.
Expression in any situation is so quintessentially human that its absence is quite disturbing. You will always express yourself naturally. Even if I had you strictly march on a metronome beat, you’d express something – though, to come back to the previous example, it might be irritation with the music (or the metronome beat), boredom with the pop song in question, frustration with your choreographer’s choices, or the fact that you’re concentrated on following the sequence that you might not even register any emotional content in the music (the phrase “concentration face” exists for a reason).
You may have a rich internal tapestry of sensations, feelings and emotions and even stories you’ve constructed on the basis of your music; the trick lies in expressing them in movements that others can perceive correctly and relate to.
There are several methods you can use to achieve this.
You can use moves and gestures to mime and tell a story, indicating specific objects, actions and emotions; this method is less used in raqs sharqi, though it works to some degree in duets and groups, or in dances depicting a linear story. You can also use gestures depicting the lyrics; again, the general consensus is that you should do it sparingly in belly dance (and make sure that the gestures work well with the source language as well!).
A method I learnt from Mercedes Nieto, closer to personal expression, goes like this: let yourself feel “it”, whatever it is; let your body react to the feeling; notice your natural body movement and incorporate it into your dancing.
This may lead you to express feelings differently than what’s considered typical: personally, I look to the sky when I’m sad or grieving, which is very different from the hunching and turning inwards many people experience, even though I also hug myself while doing so. You may similarly find that your natural expression differs, often significantly, from the stereotype.
Another method (one that I learnt from my piano teacher as a child) is using the power of association: do you associate a temperature, colour, texture or speed to your music or your feeling? Is it from the slow rural South, the hectic modern capital or from the court of the Empire? What sort of stance or movement (or costume, or lighting) goes with that? This, of course, is the most abstract of all, and it takes a while to truly get the knack of it, but learning this method opens up possibilities you’ve never seen before.
Cultural awareness
This should go without saying, but you need to know the cultural context and significance of your music.
What is the piece’s “intended purpose”? Is it a party song or is it music for a healing trance? Is it religious or political?
Does it have lyrics and if so, what do they mean?
What is the wider cultural context or impact of it? Has it’s meaning change over time? Some working songs become closely associated with workers’ movements, thereby becoming political; sometimes, a reinterpretation or remix changes the vibe of a song; love songs can become religious and vice versa.
If you practice a dance style and use music you’re culturally connected to, it’s easy; if you’re a guest in the culture (like so many belly dancers, including myself), you’ll need to acquire this knowledge.
There are also aesthetic preferences in each culture that we need to respect, both in respect of the music and dance style, and of the audience present.
If you’re dancing raqs sharqi / belly dance to a sad Egyptian song, a Western theatrical setting might call for an intense in-the-moment expression of sorrow, while a Middle-Eastern audience may prefer something more removed, as if you were telling a sad story of the past (while being, if not happy, somewhat nostalgic in the present). Both of these will differ from a filmed fusion dance to a version of the same song.
As another example: my Bike Song6 has a line that says “don’t talk about cars to me”, to which I mime using a steering wheel – and then I make a (euphemised) rude gesture. If I ever danced the song in front of an all-Arabic audience, I might actually make the gesture in full, since I can trust them to understand the lyrics; but never in my life would I do that when dancing for a non-Arabic-speaking crowd, even though it fits the song perfectly.
It’s all about artistic intent
Let me repeat the definition I gave you before dissecting the whole concept of musicality:
Musicality is the dancer’s ability to understand, emotionally connect to, render visible and express emotions through the music in a way that supports the dancer’s (and/or choreographer’s) artistic intent.
Acquiring musical knowledge, honing your sense of rhythm, understanding sound and movement quality in detail are mere tools; your cultural awareness and knowledge, your expressivness are mere tools – for you as a dancer and/or choreographer to support your artistic intent.
Your talent, learning and experience serve you to be able to make artistic choices intentionally; to make artistic choices that please your audience and fill you with pride in your work as a dancer or choreographer.
While “[c]ertain choreographers in the second half of the 20th century worked either without music or in such a way that music and dance remained wholly independent of each other”7, in raqs sharqi (and many other styles), “dance is music made visible” and in the source cultures, musicality and expression are prized above all.
As any artistic pursuit, building your musicality is a lifelong adventure of learning, exploration and creation. It’s a journey where with every step you can make new discoveries and deepen your connection to the music.
With every mistake, every challenge overcome and every bit of progress, you’ll improve your skills and polish your unique artistic voice; every step on the way brings you closer to mastering your craft.
If you want to work on your musicality,
hone your sense of rhythm and be in the running for some amazing prizes,
join the Inside the Rhythm Challenge today!
The Inside the Rhythm Challenge is a 5-day Instagram challenge running from 16th to the 20th of October. It’s designed to help you better understand and embody rhythmic patterns, develop the musicality you need to become the dancer you’ve always dreamt of being!
When you sing up, you get immediate access to two other musicality resources (The Dancer’s Guide to Music Analysis and A Rough Guide to Musical Layers, made by yours truly) and if you complete the challenge, your name will be entered the prize draw as well.
Notes
1 Source: https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/music-and-health
2 Wikipedia, quoting Reginald Smith Brindle, The New Music, Oxford University Press, 1987, pp. 42–43
4 Maqamworld is a great resource, for example, though you need to have some notions of music theory to make full use of it
5 George Pytlik, Is musicality the same thing as rhythm?, https://delta.dance/2020/08/is-there-a-difference-between-rhythm-and-musicality/
6 Watch it here: https://youtu.be/8-LkdVT5c64?feature=shared&t=60