On Feb 9, 2006, at 9:33 AM, Phil Daley wrote:
As a teacher who taught 3 or 4 hundred students how to read music, I only had rhythm playing problems with a half dozen.
You have been lucky, had better students, or are operating in a less syncopated world than I.
It just seemed to me, that they had no "internal" sense of rhythm. They could play to a metronome, but without external input, they both sped up and slowed down (seemingly randomly) when playing alone.
I have fellow faculty members who exhibit this characteristic - one who insists upon performing a transcription of a Bill Evans composition/improvisation (Turn Out the Stars) with which I am intimately familiar. His rendition is unintelligible (rhythmically) because he is so subjective about timing that he does not experience his random and incoherent rubatos. When he asks me for help, I am stymied and cannot explain that there is some objective rhythmic discipline that holds meaning in this (and a lot of other) music. It seems as if I am trying to describe color to a color blind person.
I could go on - talking about a string quartet player recently involved in performing some of my music, who said, "For us, it's all about the line", as an excuse for unsteady timing. For my music, the line loses too much of its meaning, if the rhythmic proportions are distorted. That's where I live. YMMV.
Chuck Chuck Israels 230 North Garden Terrace Bellingham, WA 98225-5836 phone (360) 671-3402 fax (360) 676-6055 www.chuckisraels.com _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
