It's About Time!

 

You've heard me talk a great deal about rhythm in these posts. I find it to be the aspect of music that students have the most trouble with. (See my earlier posts titled Rhythm, parts I and II, for the reasons for this.)

French composer Claude Debussy wrote that "the music is not in the notes, but in the spaces between them." Rhythm is essentially the space between the notes.

I believe that rhythm should be the first priority when learning new music. I have encountered so many people who, in lessons with previous teachers and/or learning on their own, pretty much ignored the rhythm in order to concentrate on the "notes." Some are aware they are doing that but don't know how to do it differently, but some are not even aware that their rhythm is all off. They have ceased to be able to "hear" rhythm in their own playing.

If you think about it, you can see that music is really all about "time." If you look at a painting, you see everything in the painting all at once. You see the foreground, the background, and you can see what the painting is trying to portray. (I am not saying that you wouldn't see even more if you study the painting, but you get the basic idea even at the first look.)

With music, however, it unfolds and develops over time. When you hear a note, a phrase, or a section of the piece of music, you hear it in relation to the notes, phrases and sections that preceeded it. If you didn't, it would just be "one thing after another" and would make no sense. If it made no sense it probably wouldn't be very enjoyable to listen to. The more familiar you are with the piece you are hearing, and the more familiar you are with that genre of music, the more you will hear the relationship of the parts to the whole. Unfortunately, most teachers don't really know how to teach this listening skill. When you learn about musical forms (such as sonata form, etc.) you are really learning about how the parts relate to each other and to the whole. But it isn't just about intellectually understanding these forms; it's about being able to hear them as they are happening in the music. But I digress....

The music unfolds over time, but not randomly, of course. The time is "divided," if you will, into specific patterns. These patterns are what we would call the rhythm. People have a hard time defining rhythm. When I ask them to define it, they might say it's the beat, or the tempo. It is neither of these. The beat or the tempo are aspects of rhythm, at least as far as music is concerned. (You could say the steady beat of your pulse is its rhythm, but in music it is clearly more complex than that.)

Not only does the music unfold over time, but the time element is one of the key elements, if not the key element. Think of the theme of a famous piece such as Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. The iconic opening of the first movement, the "da-da-da-dum," is the element upon which the whole movement is based. This rhythmic "idea" ties it all together. The rhythmic theme appears throughout on different notes, but you, the listener, recognize it as the theme because of the rhythm.

If you think you can ignore the rhythm when you are learning your pieces and somehow add it in later, you are sorely mistaken. Again, if you do that routinely, you may actually lose your ability to really hear rhythm.

If you ignore rhythm you are effectively ignoring the very core of what music is about. If you were learning to dance, no one would say "let's just do the steps but without the rhythm." If you have been ignoring rhythm, or even making it a low priority, you need to change the whole way you think about music.