the other hand. At a time when listeners demanded that their expectations be
fulfilled musically, it was difficult for composers to write much in the way of
indirect melodies. Direct melodic choices are always the ones that get stuck
in your head. Indirect melodic choices demand your attention and are inter-
esting, but often are soon gone from memory — or rather, they are remem-
bered indirectly. You remember the senseof them without remembering the
exact notes.Now that you have some sense of what the effort shapes mean, let’s connect
them more directly to composing music.Composing Using Effort Shapes ................................................................
Basically, as we have tried to establish, effort shapes are natural human
styles of movement, and they convey moods and emotions. They are body
language. Any musical phrase or passage can also be broken down into
Laban’s four components and resolved into his eight effort shapes.The eight effort shapes have been given names, and here we attempt to
describe each shape musically. For the most part, the names of the effort
shapes speak for themselves. It is also easy to see how you can use these
names as a guide for composing music that conveys certain moods.Dab .......................................................................................................
Dabis light, direct, staccato, and free-flowing.Imagine you’re dabbing something with a paintbrush, or the tip of a wash-
cloth. When you dab, you’re not striking it hard, and you’re not squishing it
flat. You’re gently and quickly poking it.When you want to capture the feeling of dabbing in your music, you’re going
to play it lightly and quickly — like you’re softly and quickly poking the exact
center of a piano key. You have a musical idea you want to quickly get across
to your listeners, and you’re not going to dance around things to get it
across. But you’re not trying to hit your listeners over the head with it, either.Mozart wrote a lot of dab music, as do contemporary composers like Toog,
Momus, Henry Purcell, Mr. Wright, and Belle & Sebastian.130 Part III: Harmony and Structure
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