Congreso Internacional: Música y Corpografías / International Conference: Music and Body Matters
Antonella Bartoloni (Università degli Studi di Firenze)
The concept of dance and gestures of the body as an element of critical discussion in Italian musical press.
The project was inspired by an essay by Mario St-Cyr, published in the May 1934 issue of the Rassegna Dorica magazine and will illustrate how the terms “body” and “dance” have been the subject of analysis in the twentieth-century music periodicals, both from the point of view of musicology and ethnomusicology. In the paper of Saint-Cyr, the author examines the dance, regarded as the aesthetic development of gesture, externalization of plastic rhythm. Dance is the spontaneous expression of any human community, because it is the closest thing to its impulsive nature and its need for rhythmic assertion, and takes collective form. Cultural contamination has created the so-called "danced word" (where the gestures are accompanied by speech) and the different forms of “danced music” (where the gesture is accompanied by music). The movements, with their apparent mechanical nature, can be coordinated by following specific patterns: we then have the fixed-rhythm dance (folksy-type) elastic and varied rhythm dance (by stylization of the popular way of dancing): in this stylized dance the importance of rhythmmdecreases as increases that of music. By shifting the focus of his analysis on contemporary history, Saint-Cyr asserts that modern dance has lost its basic syntactic features, by acquiring vagueness of rhythm, as in post-impressionist compositions by Paul Hindemith and Arthur Honegger, or exasperating the typical mechanical component of the "barbaric primitivism of african origin '(as, e.g., in jazz music by George Gershwin). To these two languages , says Saint-Cyr, he hopes to add a third, through the study of the classical sonata, a return to form and logic through the modern achievements of musical art.
