[lbo-talk] Just P-P-Pondering...

[Bill White]

In a sublime-to-ridiculous note, I was a Morris dancer for many years,
and now I am a musician for a Morris side.  The music and the dancing
are intimately connected, though it often appears that the musicians
and the dancers must be equally drunk for the dance to work.

I'm not sure other kinds of folk dancing are as closely connected to
particular tunes.  Scottish country dances are most often for
any old reel/jig/hornpipe, depending on the dance.  Contra dances
are also rarely dependent on the tune.  Western square dancers famously
can dance to a click track.  I'm told they sometimes do, as the
music confuses them while they try to remember complicated sequences.

On 2011-03-30, at 14:07 , Charles Turner wrote:


> On Mar 30, 2011, at 1:03 PM, Michael Smith wrote:
> 
>> Wow. This is robust, big-picture, grand-narrative stuff. 
>> 
>> When exactly did music's liberation from dance occur?
> 
> Hahaha!!
> 
> And what does music do? It turns right around and bites back. I think the operative terms for Rimsky, and Stravinsky even, wasn't choreographer, but ballet-master:
> 
> "I'm done with my score, now have that danced for me, please!"
> 
> Joan Peyser remarked that the richest composers of the 20th century were the ones that wrote for the ballet.
> 
> C.
> 
> 
> 
> 
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