June 17, 2022Emma RiggleWhat is Stylized Dance?Sometimes music makes us want to tap our toes and move our feet – especially if that music is a dance! In classical music, the word dance can mean the steps that dancers make while dancing, but it can also mean music written to go along with dance steps. Classical music is full of dances that people used in history for actual dancing. Those kinds of dances are called social dance. But that’s not the only kind of dance in classical music! Composers throughout history loved the sound and feel of dance so much that they also wrote stylized dances, which are musical pieces based on the idea of dance, but which weren’t meant for people to literally dance along. You can think of it this way:Social dance is dance for moving, and stylized dance is dance for listening!Or try this:Social dance is dance for your body, and stylized dance is dance for your ears!Here’s another way to think of it:In stylized dance, a composer puts their own unique style...
