On 9 Feb 2006 at 12:33, Phil Daley wrote: > 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 always felt that people who learn rhythm "additively" do very poorly with tempo and sight-reading, but people who learn rhythm at a "gut level" do better. What I mean by that is very similar to what I said about sight singing with intervals as opposed to movable Do solfege (i.e., with reference to the tonal framework). If you're reading intervals, you're dependent on each individual step being correct or you'll end up in the wrong place. Singing in tonal context, however, you can get intermediate notes wrong and still land on the right notes later on. Similarly, with rhythm, if you think a measure is constructed from adding together the component rhythmic values, you will have no sense of the overall meter. However, if you emphasize the meter and read particular rhythmic patterns as different ways of subdividing beats, you're able to muck up one beat, and still get back on with the next beat. Rhythm is something that never gave me the slightest difficult (unlike pitch), and so I'm not as good at teaching it as I am at teaching pitch-related skills. But I do make a point of teaching rhythm starting with meter and working down from there, rather than emphasizing subdivision built up into metrical structures. But, again, there is a bias built into this approach that makes it somewhat harder to to grasp odd-numbered subdivisions, and variable- length beats (e.g., 7/8, which has 3 "beats" of 2+2+3 or 2+3+2 or 3+2+2 eighth notes). So my approach to rhythm, just like my approach to pitch, works better with older music than with newer. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
