#20: Surprises in the Details
May 04, 2020Have you ever built anything?
Have you ever built a house? Or even gutted and refinished a basement suite? The details are a surprise sometimes. You start off with this grand picture in your head and then when you boil it down to the details, sometimes there are some unexpected surprises.
For example, years ago my husband and I designed a legal basement suite for a very small space (550 square feet). I did all the dirty work of cross referencing common measurements for all the appliances, doors, showers, toilets, etc. and my husband drew it all up on the computer. It looked amazing when it was done! Everything was in there and it fit! When we actually built it, we discovered one of those unexpected surprises.
The stacking laundry unit was a standard 29" wide and would fit just fine in it's spot and through all the doorways, HOWEVER, we didn't budget how far a toilet sticks out and so, to this very day, every time we have to change that laundry unit, we have to remove the toilet first, swap the laundry units, and then reinstall the toilet. CRAZY right?! We never saw it coming until we had the laundry unit ready to install.
What Does this have to do with ballet and music?
Recently, I was working through the duple meter section of the Complete Music Training Course for ballet teachers (Part 1) that I am creating, I was struck by some finer details that I had never really thought about before. The musician's galop (for fuoettes and pique turns, etc) is the same tempo and has the same left hand structure (classic oom-pa) as the cut time (2/2) march, and yet they're totally different styles of music! What?! Crazy, right?
These unexpected details took me on a surprise rabbit trail as I sought to better understand the actual music structure differences between the 2/2 march and the galop.
What are the actual differences between the galop and the cut time march?
First, I dove into the left hand, they're basically the same, a bass note and then a chord, and then a bass note, and then a chord.. over and over again.
So, I thought, the mystery must be in the right hand.
This is where the true magic of each of these pieces of music became crystal clear!
The galop has longer notes (longer than a dancer count at times), design to pull you through longer movement phrases. These long phrases are why the galops are so brilliant for big jumps from the corner. A big jump from the corner is generally phrased longer than 1 or 2 dancer counts, often at least 4 or 8 counts.
In comparison, the cut time march melody rarely uses notes worth even half of one whole dancer count. With all those short notes, the cut time march is not set up to lead anyone into any long phrases.
To break that down more dancer count'ly, the cut time march has weight/accent on every dancer count while the galop has larger gaps between it's accented dancer counts. The galop typically only has weight/accent on counts 1, 3, 5 and 7.
Interesting, right?
In Conclusion..
So, all that to say, if you have created an exercise that has an accent on every dancer count but it feels too fast for the slower standard march that you usually use, you might want to consider the cut time march as an alternative, since it's the speed of a galop, but the weight of a march.
As one accompanist worded it in an online discussion we had, the cut time march.. marches, the galop.. flies. Now we understand why.
*If you enjoy learning and want to hear from me when the Complete Music Training Course for Ballet Teachers (Part 1) is complete, please sign up here.
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