13: Rhythm

In the previous chapter we explored the foundation of all things rhythmic: The Beat.

If you skipped over that chapter (perhaps because you’re an experienced musician and feel like you know what “the beat” is), I would highly recommend going through it, including trying the exercises, before continuing with this one. Not only does it set the scene for everything we’re about to cover, we’ve found that most musicians’ rhythmic challenges actually tend to stem from an under-developed sense of The Beat—meaning it’s very easy for the average musician to under-estimate the value of spending time working specifically on their “inner metronome”, and then struggle more with Rhythm than they need to.

Once we’ve truly understood what The Beat is all about, and started to actively develop and refine our relationship with it, we are ready to start exploring the musicality of Rhythm.

Overview

In this chapter we’ll introduce a lesser-known spoken approach to thinking about, notating, understanding, and creating rhythmic patterns, which is far more aligned with developing your natural musicality than the traditional methods rooted in Western classical music and its corresponding score notation. Although this “Rhythm Syllables” approach is quite different from what you may be used to, it is not a strict alternative—in fact it can beautifully extend and complement anything you do with traditional rhythmic notation and score-reading.

We’ll also explain how the Stick Notation introduced in the previous chapter can be combined with Rhythm Syllables to let you translate spoken rhythms to and from the written page. We’ll suggest exercises you can use to practice with this approach, and show how to incorporate it into practical activities like Playing By Ear, Improvising and Songwriting.

A Musicality-Based Approach to Rhythm

We first started teaching Rhythm Syllables and Stick Notation in earnest at Musical U with our Kodály-based * See Chapter 9: Solfa for background on the Kodály approach to music education. Foundations of a Musical Mind course, which was later integrated into the Spring Season of our Living Music program. And that framing of “Foundations” is how I’d encourage you to think about what you’ll learn in this chapter.

When it comes to learning music and developing yourself as a musician, there are always a vast number of possible options available to you, and so I think it’s important to explain that the approach we’re recommending here isn’t just some arbitrary choice, or doing things differently for the sake of it.

As you’ll experience for yourself as you go through this chapter and try the suggested exercises, this approach to Rhythm is very much a foundational way of relating to, understanding, and expressing musical rhythms. Again, it’s not intended to fully replace the traditional methods, but rather it can be seen as a simpler, slightly more abstracted way of thinking about Rhythm, which our experience across tens of thousands of musicians has shown is extremely effective for developing an instinctive understanding of Rhythm.

Once you put in place this new “mental model” for understanding how Rhythm works, you may find that (like we’ve heard from so many musicians inside Musical U), it seems a bit crazy that nobody ever showed you this first. Just like with our Pitch “building blocks”, it can become a hugely versatile, powerful, and liberating asset across everything you do related to musical Rhythm.

So what is this “missing foundation” that needs to be filled in?

It can be explained most clearly by looking at where musicians most commonly struggle with Rhythm.

The traditional approach to Rhythm which I’ve been referring to is a heavily notation-based approach. Music is represented in score notation, as a series of different symbols for notes and rests, each of which corresponds to a different duration. Vertical bar lines show where each bar (or “measure”) begins and ends. Here’s an example:

Musicians are taught the durations of each symbol, and how to count through the beats of each bar and figure out where each note begins, relative to the Beat. And therein lies the problem: it is a very analytical, almost mathematical, way of understanding Rhythm, and particularly the relationship between the rhythmic patterns being played, and the underlying Beat.

To understand when to place each note relative to that underlying Beat, this “counting” method requires you to think very analytically about when each note should happen. That certainly works—but it requires a very conscious “figuring out and then executing”. It’s also easy to get lost or confused within a measure, with the later rhythms dependant on you having got the earlier ones right, or things don’t “add up”.

To put that another way: it’s all Head, with little attention paid to Hearing (the sounds) or Heart (the instinctive feel for rhythm).

When we hear or express rhythms, they exist as a continual stream of moments in time, proceeding moment-to-moment just like the underlying Beat. In other words, music flows through time, and so it’s valuable to have a way of expressing rhythmic patterns that similarly just flows, from one moment to the next. That goes double if our goal is musical freedom and creativity.

Personally, if you had asked me to improvise a rhythm before I knew about the Rhythm Syllables approach introduced below, then either:

A. My brain would have been envisioning the notation. I would have been carefully trying to think through where the notes lay in relation to the beat, and I would have struggled to do very much fast enough to be useful in improvising. Or,

B. I would have just freely made up a rhythm, and the notes would have been a bit of a jumble, not always relating well to the beat or resulting in very musically-satisfying patterns.

With Rhythm Syllables and Stick Notation, even a complete beginner can write or improvise their own creative, musically-coherent and interesting rhythms. And because “creativity is the vehicle, not the destination”, this gives us a wonderful way to develop our rhythmic skills while having creative fun.

On top of that, because it’s fully compatible with the traditional approach of counting and score notation, it makes it far easier to decipher rhythms written in that traditional way, or write them yourself.

So this is not a replacement for counting and score notation, but an elegant complement to it. Just like Solfa and Intervals aren’t strict alternatives, but each have their own strengths and best uses, counting and Rhythm Syllables do too. We’ll focus on Rhythm Syllables in this chapter both because counting is so well covered by traditional music education materials, and because this approach is so intimately tied to the musicality of Rhythm.

As we continue in this chapter, you can see this as both a useful tool in itself, and a previously-missing foundation for everything you’ve done with Rhythm up until now.