Pacific Dances

I love the marriage of music and dance. Always have. As well, as a composer who has worked primarily in film for several decades, I am pretty hard-wired into thinking of music and imagery together. For this work, I wanted to write a piece inspired by dances that could be associated with our west coast. Problem: as wonderful as Pacific Serenades is, they don’t usually carry a troupe of dancers and a choreographer. Solution: I’ll imagine the dances and then write the music to them. No problem. All I can really describe for you about my imagined dance is that the dancers wore really colorful costumes and they were very funky.

The first movement is an old fashioned boogaloo… stood on it’s head. I had fun with the rhythms and harmonies of this dance. I used to be a horn player in a funk band, and we would use bends in tempo for effect. Here I use a slowed down vibrato in tempo in the strings to try and do the same thing.

The second movement, Nightclub, is a kind of slow dance. We’ve all slow danced. ‘Nuff said.

The third movement is called West Coast Swing. This is a kind of box step that is usually not danced to swing music at all, but rather funk and blues. This movement, marked Allegro é Funky, plays with rhythm and syncopation and hopefully will make you (want to ) pat your foot.

My goal in writing this piece was to inspire a few smiles, provoke some imagination, and maybe even some ‘moving to the beat.’ Let us all wish our stellar world-class refined performers the ability to ‘get their groove on’. And please… feel free to imagine your own set of dances.

Many thanks to Pacific Serenades for this opportunity, and to you for supporting them. They are fighting the good fight.

Peace,

Joel McNeely

• Excerpt: Mvt. 1 (1)
• Excerpt: Mvt. 1 (2)
• Excerpt: Mvt. 2 (1)
• Excerpt: Mvt. 2 (2)
• Excerpt: Mvt. 3 (1)
• Excerpt: Mvt. 3 (2)