Category: Dance & Music

Waltzing is fundamentally like any other musical dance: it’s a way of listening to the music by using your whole body. Listen to this description of a waltz. It’s my thinking, but Richard Powers started me thinking this way.

A good waltz tune has three parts to it: (1) a flirt, (2) a swell, and (3) a resolution.

The flirt is often a single instrumental introduction to the tune, as if the musicians are saying, “Here’s what we’re offering for you to dance to.”

The Swell, is the gradual introduction of more instrumentation, lifting the tune’s complexity up with each new instrumental interpretation (which are often show-cased individually with the other instruments playing back-up). During this part, because the dancers have learned the tune in the Flirt and gained some understand of their partner’s skills, they will be aroused into all sorts of dance interpretations to the music.

The resolution is offered in two ways. Lively tunes often end suddenly, as if the driver just slammed on the brakes. It usually makes the dancers laugh. Softer tunes have an easing off period, not as long as the flirt, but it softens, slows down, and ends peacefully. Both endings, though, are telegraphed. Before the sudden ending in the best lively tunes, the musicians make you think it’s ending, then they kick it one more time before they stop. The softer tunes’ endings imply that the tune, like the dancers, are tiring out, satiated and peaceful.

In Praise of Dance by Saint Augustine

I praise the dance, for it frees people from the heaviness of matter
and binds the isolated to community.
I praise the dance, which demands everything:
health and a clear spirit and a buoyant soul.
Dance is a transformation of space, of time, of people
who are in constant danger of becoming all brain, will or feeling.
Dancing demands a whole person,
one who is firmly anchored in the center of one’s life.
Dancing demands a free person,
one who vibrates with the equipoise of all one’s powers.
I praise the dance.
O, people, learn to dance,
or else the angels in heaven will not know what to do with you.

A Child’s Review

Distributing my first CD (“Howjado? Songs and Stories for the Very Young”) has been a fascinating experience. First, I’ve been surprised at how different it is than hearing comments on my books. With books most people say what they think. With music and stories, most people tell me what they feel or experience. Almost every day someone tells me they’ve been enjoying a particular song or story. Just an hour ago a mother, walking alongside her young son, exclaimed, “He was just singing your song ‘Wimoweh’!”

Last week I spoke with a child whose father tells me has been listening to my cd “a lot.” She was grinning ear to ear as we played with a couple of those tunes, particularly adding verses to “Pick It Up.” One child, each time she sees me says, “Awongalama”—the name of the tree in one of the stories on the cd. I love it!

The other day I called my wife and meekly said, “Jim (my boss) just yelled at me.” She replied, “Are you okay?” I said, “He called me, and as soon as I answered he yelled, ‘This cd you gave me is great!’” He’s bought extras to give to his grandchildren.

For about five years I virtually gave up doing music and stories with children. I wanted to do more complicated adult music. Then at a song circle I sang “Little Red Caboose” and the “Car, Car Song.” The group—all grown-ups—lit up. It reminded me that I may just be a musician for children and the child-within. I just am not going to be a great guitarist or dulcimer player, but I sure can have fun with songs and stories for children. Interesting that that revelation happened in a song circle, for now I’m returning full circle. I started out with children’s music, with a children’s television show (“The Rickety Bridge”), with school and library concerts of songs and storytelling, and I’ve come back to it.