Hypermetric Expectations and Structural Feeling

This chapter reveals that skilled dancers acquire and value hypermetric expectations beyond the measure of one clave iteration to multiples of eight-beat groupings within larger formal structures. Dancers construct frameworks of phrasing and projection based on structural feeling, much as accomplished musicians do, but simultaneously listen, predict, and draw attention to musical features through particular movements of their bodies, thus taking advantage of their corporeal knowledge of musical structures to heighten the experience of social dancing.

•  Expanding on Felix Salzer’s (1952) concept of structural hearing as knowledge of large-scale form, structural feeling is the knowledge of large-scale form as sensed from relative durations of timespace (see chapter 2).

 

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