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-- From where I sit, music begins with dance (Bach's gigues, gavottes, etc., Mozart's minuets, etc.) and dies a slow but sure death the greater its distance from dance. This is a cyclic thing and applies to rock and jazz as well as to classical music.
^^^^ CB: Yes, I usually make this point of the unity and disunity of music and dance when this thread comes around. Perhaps the larger whole is music, dance and partying, cabaret, festival, mardi gras. Eat, drink and be merry !
Blues and jazz start in speakeasies and juke joints, which are sort of permanent and daily party houses.
Also, your fellow Oaklander , Angela Davis, has a lecture on African American music as the Blues tradition. She notes that in Africa, music is part of much of daily life, used to accompany work as well as leisure and ritual. In the old South, enslaved Africans were known for "field hollers" and singing while working.
Obama says in _Dreams from my Father_ that his father took some of their brief time together to teach him how to dance. In American culture, dance is predominantly feminized. Me, I'm a world historic party dancer anyway. Ask anybody in Detroit (smile)
^^^^ I spend a fair amount of time listening to classical music, both recorded and live, and it is a sad thing to see how much life has been taken out of it by being made a precious object of reflection rather than a shared activity. Given the dreck they applaud, I would guess a lot of the modern audience is there more for the status than for the pleasure. Same for theater.
Joanna
^^^^^ CB: Bravo !
...sitting there passive, stiff and still, unable to respond bodily to the music except to clap at the end... what a repressive limitation to "theory" over "practice"...
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