Holding steady

Hello, stalwart solfeggists!

It's been a crazy week in my world, and the weekend has left me with very little room to breathe.  So, this week's installment will be short, but (hopefully) pithy.

In your Ottman book, chapter 18 is all about forbidding-looking rhythms, specifically, those that use very small divisions of the beat.  Recently, I've been teaching some rhythmically challenging pieces in choral contexts, and it's once again come to my attention that many folks use a repetitive physical gesture (foot or hand-tapping, usually) when they encounter any sort of rhythmic difficulty, and they usually try to tap to a pretty small rhythmic value.  I understand the inclination to do this, but I'm quite opposed to it.  Why?

-We tend to be taught as children that our western rhythmic system is based on mathematical operations, and that's not really true (I mean, it's factual in a way to say that rhythm is mathematical, but math is not nearly as influential on our experience of rhythm as we think it is).  Our rhythmic system is extremely influenced by hierarchy, and it is hierarchy that makes a rhythmic pattern feel how it feels to us.  Therefore, if we don't reflect hierarchy in any aid we use to read a rhythm, we're sabotaging ourselves.

-Tapping a small rhythmic value as your "beat" the same way over and over (without any kind of hierarchy) is a recipe for getting lost.  Your brain barely has a fighting chance of keeping track of all that repetitive motion, despite what your sense of security might be trying to tell you.  We tend to feel like we're being more accurate because we're doing something, but the something we're doing in this case is likely to just distract us from inaccuracies.

-Rhythmic patterns aren't made difficult by speed, they're made difficult by unpredictability or unfamiliarity.  So, slowing something far past the point of its intended tempo is probably less useful than we think -- the composer heard it inside her/his head as a pattern that made sense at a given tempo, and if we get too far away from that tempo, the pattern doesn't feel the same way anymore.

-Our brains aren't wired to perceive quick notes as isolated incidents, but rather as elements of a pattern that has a specific interplay within an established hierarchy.

Now, these rules start to fall apart if you start working with some types of early music or 20th/21st-century serialized rhythms or rhythms chosen through chance operations, etc., but the Ottman examples we're dealing with here definitely play by these rules.  So, I'm going to insist on a few things:

1. Conduct.  This doesn't necessarily have to be a traditional hand/arm pattern, but you have to do something with your body that shows the beats of the measure in distinct places AND gives a sense of which beats are strong in the hierarchy of the meter and which are not.  For example, if you were to use your foot in a 2/4 meter, you could decide that your heel touching the ground would be beat 1 and your toe touching the ground would be beat 2.

2. Don't stray too far from the notated tempo.  A conservative tempo is one thing, but if you're thinking in 32nd notes, the rhythm you think you're performing has nothing to do with the actual piece of music the composer wrote (unless it's in 3/32 or some such craziness).

3. If you're struggling with notes and rhythms together, isolate the rhythm.

4. Think in groupings and phrases, not in isolated note values.  Start to see that the last sixteenth note of a beat will feel like a pickup to (or a decoration of) the beat that follows, etc.  Just like in the world of pitches, the magic of rhythmic patterns has everything to do with the relationships being expressed.

5. Trust your body.  Before you begin reading each example, take the time to really ground yourself in the the meter by moving (see item 1).  Once you've started reading, if something seems wrong, see if you can figure out a reason -- it might just be a mistake, or it might be a misplaced metric accent, or an unusual phrase length, etc.  Trust that your body knows how a good, solid 4/4 ought to feel, even if it's slow, and if something happens to upset your expectations, be a good detective and figure out why.

Rising Level 2's

Try your hands/feet/voices at these...ignore any grace notes:

18.1 & 18.2
18.12 & 18.13
18.16
18.17 (make sure you look carefully at the key)
18.22
18.29

Rising Level 3's


Give these your best shot:

18.18
18.19
18.21
18.23
18.25 (don't let the sixteenth rests freak you out)
18.26

Rising Level 4's


Your examples are longer and more complex, so you can spread them out over multiple days as you see fit:


18.30
18.31
18.32
18.34

So, hold steady and don't let the little notes scare you -- they're just a decorative part of the whole, and if you approach them calmly, they'll fall into place.

PS: It looks like I lied about this post being short...sometimes that happens when we get going, I guess...my apologies!