Rhythm and counting
The music that we as keyboard players work with on a daily basis involves time as well as pitch, timbre, and other qualities of sound. We are so used to this that it seems like something that does not need to be said. It is very close to the core of the way that we think about music. In fact, I have sometimes heard people define music as something like “sound with defined pitch organized according to regular time intervals” or words to that effect. This is, if not necessarily a valid definition of anything that could possibly be considered music, certainly a good start at defining one of the important components of the type of music that we typically hear and play. Of course, due to the nature of time and perception, whenever a sound succeeds some other sound, it has to do so on some kind of schedule, and indeed once in a while that schedule is irregular or subject to the whim (or judgment) of a player. But most of the time sounds in pieces of music follow one another at regular intervals. This phenomenon of pulse or rhythm or beat is as important as the notes (pitches) themselves, or close to it, in most musical situations.
And of course our system of notation includes indications for rhythm—that is, lengths of notes in relation to one another. It is actually hard to call to mind any standard way of notating pitch in post-medieval music that does not also notate something about rhythm. When a composer wants to suggest that, in some way, notes are not being presented as having a pre-determined set of rhythmic relationships, the composer has to borrow rhythmic notation and then somehow indicate that the usual rhythmic meaning of the notes is suspended. That is the case, for example, with the unmeasured preludes of Louis Couperin and some other seventeenth-century composers, and with passages marked “free” or “unmeasured” or “molto rubato” or something to that effect.
However, organ teachers are rarely in the position of teaching students how to read rhythmic notation from scratch, or how to read notation at all. We usually take on students who have already learned “the basics” by studying piano—this includes notation along with at least some ideas about fingering, and of course a certain amount of actual keyboard dexterity. (Of course, many of us do teach these basics in settings other than organ instruction, and occasionally we are lucky enough to find a student who wants to study organ from the very beginning!) On the other hand, there are many students whose sense of rhythm—even at the level of their comfort with reading the rhythmic dimension of the notation—is shaky. There are students who feel that they “can’t count” or who are at least not always confident about their reading of note values, and who are often right not to be confident. As with any other problems in studying or in playing, this usually stems from something’s having been taught inadequately or (and this might actually be more common) having been taught in a way that makes the matter seem more complicated than it has to be.
What follow here are ways to help students with some aspects of reading and producing correct rhythms. This is separate from, though in the end of course related to, the business of playing with a convincing sense of rhythm and pulse. Paradoxically or not, the convincing sense of pulse often comes from departing slightly from the scientifically (i.e., metronomically) correct reading of the rhythm. I am not talking about that here—rubato, timing, using accent to create pulse: all very important, but mostly for another time. One important aspect of the relationship is this: that all of the possible subtleties in the realm of rhythm are extremely difficult to execute for anyone whose playing is burdened by a fear that the basic rhythm is shaky—whether it actually is shaky or not.
1) If it does fall to me to teach the basic meaning of the different “note values”—that is, the way that we indicate rhythm in written music—I try to do so in as simple and colloquial way as I possibly can. None of the jargon or the ways that we habitually put these things to ourselves in our heads once we know them really well is self-evident, and some of it is unnecessary. Take, for example, the phrase “note value” or the concept of the “value” of a note. It becomes second nature that this word refers to the aspect of the note that is the length of time that it occupies, but someone who has actually not studied the notation at all will not know this. I have actually seen someone more or less flummoxed by the statement that a dot “adds half the value of the note to the note.” And why not: unless you almost already know what that statement means, it is not particularly obvious what it means. I would rather say something like: “if you put a dot immediately to the right of a note, it makes that note one-and-a-half times as long as it would otherwise have been.” There are then two ways to concoct examples of this: first, if, say, a quarter-note takes as much time as two eighth-notes, then a quarter-note with a dot next to it takes as much time as three eighth-notes; and second, if a quarter-note is going to last a day, say, then a dotted quarter-note is going to last thirty-six hours.
2) The notation is all about ratios, and my last example above is meant as a reminder that a ratio is a ratio, regardless of the absolute times involved. A student learning the rhythmic notation from scratch needs to embrace the idea that the notation is all about ratios and not about absolute time—or for that matter about beats, pulses, measures, or time signatures. It is about the notion that some notes last twice as long—or three or four times as long—as others. That’s all. A whole-note lasts twice as long as a half-note; a half-note lasts twice as long as a quarter-note, and so on. Thus, if a quarter-note is going to last a second, then a half-note is going to last two seconds, and a whole-note, in turn, four seconds. If a sixteenth-note is going to last four years, then a thirty-second note is going to last two years, plus or minus an adjustment for the stray February 29. Once the student is comfortable with the idea of ratios, then learning which symbol is which note and what the ratios are is rather easy: there aren’t that many of them. Of course, the teacher must include in the discussion not just all of the “regular” notes, but also the concept of dotted notes, the meaning of ties, and the meaning of triplet signs. These are still all about ratios, and still do not amount to very many different things to learn.
3) By the way, as far as rhythm and counting are concerned, it is probably true to say that nothing would change if all of the time signatures and all of the bar lines were magically erased from all of (at least) western classical music. The note lengths and the rhythms that arise from them are fully described by the note-heads, stems and flags. The bar lines do not change anything about that, and a time signature is—for basic rhythms—either redundant or incorrect. Sometimes a time signature suggests something about what pulses or groupings will arise out of the basic rhythm. But even with respect to that, if the groupings or pulses would not be there or would not be convincing without the time signature, then they are probably not really there with it either. I mention this partly to reinforce the idea that no one learning how to read rhythm in our common notation should be thinking about time signatures or bars or measures. This is just a distraction. Also, when a player who is past the stage of learning notation—who is presumably comfortable with the rhythm side of music reading—nonetheless has a problem reading the rhythm of a passage or with feeling secure about that reading, it is almost always a distraction to be thinking about the time signature or the phenomenon of “measures”. I have seen many students effectively prevent themselves from reading a fairly straightforward rhythm because they were not sure right off the bat how to relate that rhythm to something about the time signature or meter or the placement of bars. This leads me to the next point, an especially important one.
4) If the systematic counting of a passage is going to be useful in creating an accurate rhythm, then of course the counting must happen at a steady pace. It does not, however, need to use numbers that relate it to the measures. Often using the ordinary “one and two and three and . . . ” system for counting a passage is enough of a distraction that it hinders rather than helps. Also, sometimes a student puts so much stock in the fact that the numbers are present and in the correct order that he or she forgets to keep them absolutely steady. So we hear something like this: “one and two . . . and three . . . andfourand.” The student believes that the passage is being practiced correctly because, again, those numbers are there, and they are the right numbers in the right order. So rather than counting a passage as in Example 1, I would suggest something like that shown in Example 2.
This starts with deciding to use the eighth-note as the steady beat. (The correct choice for the steady counting beat at the beginning of the process of drilling a rhythm is the smallest fairly common note value, unless the passage needs to be kept slow enough that that note value is too slow to follow easily: see 7) below.) Then it expresses the length of each note in the number of eighth-notes that that note value actually includes. Of course, it is still necessary to be sure that the numbers come at an even pace. But the second example zeros in on what the player needs to understand and to work on. Of course, as the passage becomes better learned and can go faster, the next step with this type of counting looks like Example 3.
5) The kind of counting described in 4) is also one of the best exercises for teaching the basics of rhythm notation, once the simple rhythmic meaning of the different note shapes has been learned. Taking a large number of fairly straightforward but not trivial rhythms—say of about the level of my example—and counting them out this way serves to drill the meaning of the different note values quite efficiently. For this purpose it is not necessary to play anything, just to count, dropping back to “1” at the beginning of each new note. At the same time, this type of counting really does work well to straighten out a tricky or recalcitrant rhythm. It is not just for beginners: I use it myself when I encounter a rhythm that I want to count out.
6) Sometimes the idea arises of practicing the rhythm of a passage completely separately from the actual notes. This usually takes the form of tapping the rhythm on a table or clapping it. This can be a good idea. It is based on the clearly sound notion that a tricky rhythm should be practiced some—initially or whenever it becomes a problem—without the distraction of worrying about fingering and hand position. It is a form of isolating and simplifying something difficult, philosophically similar to practicing hands or feet separately. I would suggest, as a modification of this, that a student can in effect practice a rhythm in isolation by playing it with random easy notes, perhaps just five adjacent notes played up and down by the five fingers: no choices to make about notes or fingering, but a sonority to hear. This seems to me to be more “true to life” and probably just more interesting for many players. It also gets around a problem that clapping and tapping both have: that they are usually carried out as “repeated note” gestures, and that fast “notes” are therefore harder than they need to be. If a student is in fact going to tap a rhythm on the table, then he or she should use two hands alternating, or two or more fingers alternating in what amounts to keyboard-playing gestures.
7) Another way to practice the rhythm of a passage with difficult notes is to slow the passage down enough that the notes become easy. This is, of course, always the pillar of good practicing, as far as I am concerned, whatever the particular circumstances. Sometimes, however, in order to make the notes of a passage easy enough that the student can afford to think about the rhythm, the tempo has to become so slow that the rhythm begins to seem even more non-intuitive or not really there: almost as if the sixteenth-notes were indeed lasting years. The way to deal with this is not to be afraid of subdivision. If the line that I used for my examples above were hard enough that it had to be practiced at eight quarter-notes per minute, for example, then the correct choice for the counting beat would probably be the thirty-second note, at sixty-four per minute. This would indeed mean that the opening whole-note would be counted (steadily!) from one to thirty-two. This might seem—or indeed be—annoying. However, there is no shortcut to practicing slowly enough, and attempting to time a note that lasts half a minute by counting only “one and two and three and four and” is not going to succeed. The numbers and the “ands” are too far apart to be meaningfully related to one another in counting them out.
8) There is sometimes a fear of subdivision or of building rhythms up by counting out the smallest components. The fear is, I believe, that too much of this will make a performance seem choppy, make it not convincingly reflect the underlying pulse. My own experience is that this is just not a problem. Having the player’s conception of what the rhythm actually is—what the note lengths and their relationships are—be both correct and really solid is the absolute requirement for achieving a convincing pulse. Counting small beats—subdivided beats—accurately is the most sure-fire way to be certain that the rhythm being drilled is accurate. As a passage becomes solid and as the tempo is able to approach performance tempo, the player’s focus on the smaller beats will naturally melt away. The ease with which both the correct notes and the correct rhythm can be executed will free the player up to listen for the beat groupings and the underlying pulse along with any and all other artistic or rhetorical aspects of the music. Also, any rhythm that needs to be slowed down a lot and treated to a really extreme subdivision will be the exception: an especially hard passage. Every player will have the experience of playing many passages that have been learned from the beginning counting only the time-signature beats. If it is indeed easier to get a convincing overall pulse and shape in these passages—which I rather doubt—then the player can consciously transfer the feeling of playing and hearing those passages to others that have had to be taken apart more finely.
