Chuck Israels wrote:
On Feb 9, 2006, at 6:05 AM, Christopher Smith wrote:
Counting and subdivision only take one so far; eventually one just
has to recognise the rhythms as something one has seen before and
knows how it sounds.
I tell my students this almost daily. They don't get it. They read
rhythms the way our daughter read out loud at the breakfast table at a
tender age, "Hoe - moe - gen (hard G) - i - zed." I couldn't come up
with a better description of the way many student musicians
misunderstand the process of reading and absorbing musical meaning from
written symbols and fail to integrate the information. Written music
is seen by those people as a set of automated behavioral instructions
rather than as a language. I don't think I'd enjoy hearing them read
French either.
I keep reminding my students that a piece of music they are playing is
not a sequence of 300 true-false questions that they need to get right,
even to the point of going back and repeating if they realize they
goofed, but rather a living, breathing work of art which needs to shared.
I also point out that for most of them, within any one beat there are
about 12 common rhythms they are going to run into on a consistent
basis, and they have memorized and internalized much longer vocabulary
lists in English class, so they just simply need to internalize one more
list, and then see how those rhythmic vocabulary words are put together
in new sequences in each piece of music they play.
--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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