Direction and Alignment, Part 2, Alignment – by Chris Bruce
DW. Bkg LOD. Fcg DC ag LOD. Has the cat been walking across my keyboard again?
No, not on this occasion. Using a combination of ‘dance jargon’ and abbreviations I’ve been documenting a ballroom routine, and these hieroglyphics record the direction and alignment of each step…
Direction and Alignment, Part 1, Direction – by Chris Bruce
Chris and his wife Monika at a Dancesport competition. Direction and Alignment, Part 1, Direction DW. Bkg LOD. Fcg DC ag LOD. Has the cat been walking across my keyboard […]
Aspects of Standard Ballroom Music, Part 6, Tempo (revisited) – by Chris Bruce
Chris and his wife Monika at a Dancesport competition. We have already said that Tempo defines the speed at which the music is played. We looked closely at one way […]
Aspects of Standard Ballroom Music, Part 5, Time Signature – by Chris Bruce
In the previous article in this series we looked at how music is divided into groups of beats called bars or measures. But how do we know how many beats are in each bar. To determine this, we need to look at the Time Signature. The Time Signature describes the number of beats in each bar (or measure) of a piece of music, and the type of beat.
Aspects of Standard Ballroom Music, Part 4, Bars or Measures – by Chris Bruce
DK Ballroom Instructor Chris Bruce
In this series to date we’ve looked at Beat (the rhythmical pulse in music) and Tempo (the speed at which music is played, focusing on measuring Tempo in Beats per minute). We listened to some soundbites in the last post which demonstrated the range of Tempos used in Standard ballroom, but those soundbites consisted of a monotonous series of drumbeats. We could march to this. Possibly we could dance to it.
Aspects of Standard Ballroom Music, Part 3, Tempo – by Chris Bruce
DK Ballroom Instructor Chris Bruce
Tempo defines the speed at which the music is played. In Ballroom Dancing Tempo is typically measured in bars (or measures) per minute. Musicians, on the other hand, will often refer to Tempo in beats per minute. Both are commonly abbreviated to bpm (though bars per minute may also be abbreviated to mpm for measures per minute).
Aspects of Standard Ballroom Music, Part 2, Beat – by Chris Bruce
DK Ballroom Instructor Chris Bruce
We can define Beat as the steady pulse in a piece of music. It’s that pulse that you’d naturally clap along to or tap your foot to. A Beat is a pulse of time. A ticking clock is a good example. Every minute, the second hand ticks 60 times, and each one of those ticks is a beat.
Aspects of Standard Ballroom Music, Part 1, Introduction – by Chris Bruce
Let me start with a quote from George Balanchine, Artistic Director of the New York Ballet for more than 35 years:
I don’t want people who want to dance, I want people who have to dance.
I love this quote. I have it on an old T-shirt that I can’t bear to throw away, even though it’s way past its use-by date.