Hi, dear readers! What’s music made out of? Take a moment to answer that for yourself before you read on. …….
Ready? One way to answer to that question (not the only way, of course!): music is made of melody, harmony & rhythm. Okay, fine. What are these made out of? Melody and harmony are both made out of pitch—and doesn’t pitch just suck all the air out of the room sometimes? Notes, notes, notes! It’s all notes, all the time! Learn the notes! Play the right notes! A, B, C, D, E, F, G! All cows eat grass! You missed a note! Don’t you get sick of that?
Don’t get me wrong: I like notes. I like to play the right notes, as often as I can. And I adore the things that are made out of them: life without melody in it would hardly be worth living, and what pianist in their right mind isn’t in love with harmony? I don’t mean to denigrate these pitch-dependent constructions in any way. Only to point out that so often we focus on all things pitch, to the detriment of that great force that lies even closer to the heart of things: rhythm. Rhythm is a different animal altogether. Rhythm underlies everything we play, and for that matter, life itself. (Our heartbeat! Our breath, our walking pace… day and night, seasons, movements of the stars…) Maybe it’s precisely because it is SO elemental, so fundamental, so natural for us that we ignore it.
Ignore it?? “But I don’t ignore the rhythm,” you say! If that’s true, I am genuinely happy for you—and I’ll venture to guess that you’re happy too, because rhythm brings happiness! But we’d better make sure it’s true. When we say “notes” (as opposed to, for example, “note values”), we generally mean pitches. A great many of us have been trained carefully from childhood (mnemonics! flash cards! Stop right there: what note is that?) to prioritize NOTES over RHYTHM in a way that leads to…. unhappiness. Or should I say, that leads to the stilted, halting playing of all those separate, disconnected, isolated pitches. Those lonely As and Bs and Gs who don’t even know that what they’re longing for—what would really give their brief lives meaning—is to align themselves with the rhythm that they don’t yet know is there.
Two things about that little packet of vibratory energy that we call a note. Picture a vertical axis and a horizontal one. The vertical axis represents frequency, or how many cycles-per-second in this vibration. There it is: pitch. Low frequency = low pitch and vice versa. String players, wind players & singers must concern themselves most carefully with where they place their notes along this vertical axis, lest they sound “out of tune” (poor intonation—you’re sharp! Now you’re flat!—being capable of shooting down in cold blood even the most exquisite phrasing or otherwise-brilliant execution). We pianists leave it to the technicians to keep us reasonably in tune, and just crudely push buttons. But we still need to push the right buttons! Play the right notes! Put each sound in its correct position on the vertical axis of pitch.
That’s important. Yes, of course, sure, I agree! AND there is that other axis, which represents TIME. Our horizontal axis is all about where we place out notes in time: all things rhythm.
Do we stop to think that if we put our notes in the wrong spot on the horizontal axis, in the wrong spot in time, it is every bit as much of a “wrong note” as when our notes fall in the wrong place on the vertical axis of pitch? So that “Stop right there! What is that note?” is, in one way of looking at it, a completely self-defeating directive, because in stopping to check or fix the pitch, we fully ensure that we will destroy the rhythm. It’s almost as if we tell ourselves rhythm is an afterthought, or that we can’t attend to it until we “know the notes.” That’s okay, I’ll breathe later! Really? “The notes” are not just the pitches! Remember: two things about these little packets of energy we call notes….
As our subscribers know, most of our Featured Practice Tools at Pride & Practicing are fleshed out in considerable detail. And this isn’t a Practice Tool post! Check the Archives for those. But here’s a quick practice tool that I cannot resist throwing in, because it’s important… and also because we’re all closet drummers, right? Don’t we all secretly just want to bang on pots and pans? Take a piece you’re working on or would like to start, and JUST PLAY THE RHYTHM. Not on the piano! Play it on your pots and pans, the most resonant ones you can find—why not? You can do it while no one’s home! Put all the wooden spoons away when you’re through, and let it be your little secret that you spent the afternoon on the kitchen floor with your music propped up on a mixing bowl. NEVER MIND PITCH! Pitch schmitch. Place each note (and yes, they’re notes! Just notes-intentionally-without-pitch, as opposed to those notes-UNintentionally-without-rhythm that we so often and so dangerously indulge in) in its correct position on the horizontal axis of time. And here is the thing: make it beautiful and expressive! When we realize that we CAN do that, no pitch required, then we are really on your way. And then we know it’s true: rhythm brings happiness.
More (and much more detailed) practice tools on working with rhythm to come! Stick with Pride & Practicing (or, fair warning, run away now). But keeping things a little more general here: do we understand enough about how rhythm works? Starting with this: can we explain both numbers of the time signature without tying ourselves in knots? Quick, why it is that we could theoretically have the time signature of 17 over 512, or 5,347 over 2048, but not 2 over 3?
And here’s another one: what’s the difference between beat, meter and rhythm? Here I mean rhythm in its more specific, technical sense, as opposed to rhythm as the broad umbrella that encompasses everything having to do with sounds in time. Can we give a simple definition for each of those? I’m not going to, not right now…. you do it!
And another thing: how do you know if you’re doing the rhythm correctly? Without your teacher breathing down your neck, that is (or through the Zoom screen at you)? Will the metronome tell you if it’s right? It’s true, the fancy ones with all the bells and whistles might give you some information—but if you rely on them to subdivide for you, instead of learning how to do it yourself, allow me to suggest that you are selling your soul to the devil. I like driving my own car, but I think I could let that go and be okay with it. But give up counting my own triplets? Never! (When all the tuplets are gone, what will we have left?) And the old-fashioned metronomes, the more principled ones that just tick, won’t pester you with judgements about your playing as long as it’s steady. They are perfectly happy to tick 5 times in a 4/4 bar if you want them to, and can help you play incorrect rhythms with utmost precision if that is your choice. They hold you to a tempo but otherwise let you mind your own business.
Also: does your metronome ever speed up or slow down? Hmmmm….
So, of course there is lots more to explore—and explore we will. But also, here’s another way to look at it: there’s a single syllable that could’ve stood in for this entire post! Do you know what it is?
Have fun with those pots and pans, and thanks for reading Pride & Practicing! If you enjoy it, please share it with your friends.