After reading this post several times my mind started to generate pictures about african work situations and I noticed that for me the evolutin of music and dance starts there, at work! ... and I found me quite near Oliver Sacks who says that music starts "at the beat".
If you need to do repetitive work for a long time you need to find ways to strengthen the works rythm and one way is to start make sounds to reinforce the work pattern. The need to organize the movements is even more urgent when a group of people needs to work together.
This is a Finnish midsummer competion and the way to organize the power of teams by voices is easy to understand. Here we are very far from the music, very far from the dance!
But at another beach they have refined the methods! They sing and use instruments to organize the working pattern. Movements have also got some level of abstraction so I could call it for dance.
I usually learn only about things which are important for me and for same reason I think the repetitive work made people pay attention to rhythms and the effects of rhythms.
Work_rhythm could be the first connection between movement and music and as such a primitive form of dance.
Movement_beat is the abstraction of the pair of words above and that gives us all the variations of dance_music of today.
So I see the repetitive work as the base for dance and music!
Work movements => voice => song => instrument
Work movements => abstract movements
What do you think about this?
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1 comment:
Leading Lady: Music can be internal (human brain) or external (musical instruments). Any sort of repetition leads the human mind to make to associate it with music. So what starts as just repetition in movement is just that. Once it becomes music, then it becomes dance. However, I never considered work as being the starting place. Possible. Interesting idea. However, I think the most likely primal source was out of joy or as courtship behaviors.
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