Further thoughts about rhythm, part 4
After writing my last column and in the course of searching for further ideas about rhythm, I came across this quote, which was new to me and I quite like. It is from a review of Rhythm and Tempo by Curt Sachs published in 1953 in Journal of Research in Music Education, written by Theodore F. Newmann:
The essence of all musical expression is that of creating a feeling of organic movement. And that factor, above all else, which contributes to a work’s organic unity, its total feeling, is rhythm. Rhythm is not a matter of divisions of time and accent but rather a relation of tensions—the preparation of new expectations by the resolution of former ones. It is rooted deeply in the framework of all living organisms. It permeates the very body of music—its tempo, melody, harmony, and form. Rhythm is, in fact, the most vital element in music.
I might quibble about the absolute terms in which some of this is expressed. Rather than “the essence” I might say “an essence” or “one essential part.” Despite my focus on rhythm right now, I would not say that it is “the most vital” element in music—certainly one of the most vital, and one that, defined broadly enough, must be present.
What I really like is the part about expectations. This is a powerful way of framing the theoretical background for my second mode (as per last month) of determining rhythm in music. The ebb and flow of tension, the creation of expectations—and then the fulfilling or the subverting of those expectations—is the source of the rhythm of my second sort. And this operates at every level, from a whole piece to the motion from one short note to the next. Newmann’s quote is a beautiful expression of the notion that rhythm can be derived from and described as something other than counting beats. For me, this description also establishes that the expectation-based sense of unfolding rhythm is primary. It is not just a system of departing from the rhythm created by the beat structure. If anything it is the deeper, more essential source of rhythm.
How is it possible to reconcile the simultaneous existence of these two radically different ways of defining, projecting, and perceiving rhythm in one piece of music? I do not know if I have a thorough or systematic answer to that. Both forces being discussed here are real, and therefore they do coexist pretty much regardless of whether we know why. Not having an answer to how or why that works may reflect something about how flexible it is in actual practice. It may also relate to the phenomenon of people responding differently as listeners to the choices made by performers. After all, expectation is a listener’s experience. And if a piece or passage of music creates and then fulfills or subverts expectations, then the actual flow of that experience is very likely determined in large part by the listener’s experience, training, philosophical stance, temperament, and so on. Different listeners will hear what is being performed in a way that is literally different.
If a piece of music is ostensibly measured and structured in a regular meter, then any overt conflict between the two approaches to rhythm would take this form. The intuitive, listening-based approach might well lead to something other than playing the rhythm as written, and playing the rhythm as written might lead to ignoring the ebb and flow of tension and expectation. One axis along which a solution to this conflict might exist is that the sense of pulse is remarkably strong and resilient.
My experiment with Helmut Walcha’s recording of Sweelinck, as described in my December 2021 column, page 11, is a manifestation of this resilience. As I wrote then, my reason for testing out the literal metronome steadiness of the recording in the first place was that the performance came across to me as remarkably and inexorably steady. So it was interesting and telling that the metronome reading varied so much across the piece. I have conducted similar tests on other recorded performances. For example, about eighteen different recordings of the beginning of the first movement of Charles-Marie Widor’s Sixth Symphony yielded similar results. Some of my odd driving-based experiments about time have this same import.
A Chopin anecdote
There is an anecdote about Chopin that I have come across in writing twice over the years, though I cannot remember where exactly. One version framed the story around his mazurkas, the other around his waltzes. It works equally well for either, as they are in ¾ time. The point is that a friend of Chopin’s said to the composer that when he played one of his own waltzes there were four quarter notes in each measure, not the notated three. Chopin denied this. The friend made him sit down and play and kept strict track of the timing, and Chopin was indeed taking four quarter notes worth of time between bar lines. This story implies three things: that Chopin was playing very freely, holding some supposed quarter notes for as much as twice as long as they “should be” held; that there was nonetheless something that could be identified as “the quarter note;” and that Chopin himself intuitively accepted what he was doing as being a manifestation of three quarter notes per measure.
It seems also possible that if the intuitive, expectation-based approach to rhythm is applied thoughtfully in a way that is really derived from careful, involved listening, then it might enhance the sense of regular pulse while being less regular than a purely beat-based rhythm would be. If the sense of momentum that is associated with the concept of regular accent-based meter is as robust and as difficult to destroy as I suspect, and if an expectation-based shaping of rhythm can make the ebb and flow of intensity the most compelling that it can be, then it could make sense that the latter approach would make the accentuation patterns that define regular meter more rather than less convincing.
The actual results of the two approaches do not always have to be very different from one another. For some performers and listeners experiencing repertoire, the listening-based intuitive approach might well yield results that are quite regular in their actual rhythms.
In musing a bit about how to introduce this idea to students, I start by quoting something that I wrote in my column from April 2015, page 17:
I often suggest to students the following practice tool. Once they have identified a spot where they want to make a rhythmic gesture (usually of the sort that might be described as “rubato”) they practice that gesture, in the privacy of the studio, in as exaggerated a manner as possible: take the risk of executing a gesture that is utterly tasteless, mannered, “schmaltzy.” This is to counter the fact that we usually only visit the gestures that we think we want to make “from below” (so to speak), that is, only compared to and judged in comparison to not making such a gesture, or to a modest version of the gesture. This stems from and then reinforces a philosophy that teaches a kind of reluctance about such gestures. If you hear a rhythmic inflection from both sides, you get a different sense of exactly how it might be effective.
When I wrote the above, I invoked the word “rubato.” Now I would be inclined to avoid that, since it is a term that relates the flow of rhythm to the underlying regular meter. The relationship is real, but I would want to encourage the student to move away from considering that relationship to be primary or of overriding importance. In applying this practice suggestion with many students over many years I have observed that almost everyone finds it easy to identify spots where they intuitively want to create rhythmic gestures that are not identical to what a strict reading of the metric notation would suggest. While these gestures fluctuate in number from piece to piece, it is more common for the student to believe that their interpretation of some of them are wrong.
Experimenting with notable works
As an experiment, try giving a rhythmic inflection different degrees of magnitude—including the highly exaggerated, but not limited to that—and try to experience and analyze what is happening with each different shape. For example, consider the very beginning of J. S. Bach’s Toccata in D Minor, BWV 565. Play the opening mordent and then listen for when you think that the following scale passage “wants” to come in. Try taking longer next time. What has changed? Have you lost the moment when the impact would have been greatest, or does the added suspense increase the impact? Does it sound like you caught a sort of wave of expectation when you initiated the scale passage, or did you miss it? If you missed it, could there be another one coming up, different yet also fulfilling?
Questions like these are easy to highlight with a moment in an intrinsically free passage like this, but they are potentially present all the time. Returning to the pieces that I invoked at the beginning of this series of columns, I would say that the first barline in the opening of the first movement of Widor’s Sixth Symphony is also a place where the dynamic of this sort of rhythm is clear. A student can play it metronomically and then try various timings, listening as closely and open-mindedly as possible. What is gained or lost by various different timing possibilities? What does the timing at that barline imply or suggest or even necessitate about playing the second measure itself? Would the answers be different if this were not the opening of the piece? Is the answer to that question different if we stipulate either that it was a recapitulation or, on the other hand, that it was a new idea introduced in mid-piece? Does the use of this motif later in the movement as written affect choices here at the beginning?
It is interesting to listen for intuition-based timing of quick notes within a texture. In Example 1, in this Mozart Piano Sonata in A Major, K. 331, how can we determine exactly where to play the sixteenth notes?
My own approach to figuring this out would be to leave those notes out at first, making the rhythm of the first half of each of the first two measures the same as the rhythm of the second half. I would play this a few times, just like that, as if it were the piece. Then I would play it a few times hearing the sixteenth notes in my head, but not playing them and then add those notes back. I often do not know and cannot seem to determine as a matter of counting and calculation where I want to place short notes after dotted notes. To use a piece I have played a lot, I have no idea exactly what ratio I give to the pervasive dotted rhythms in Bach’s Prelude in E-flat Major, BWV 552i. I can only hear whether they do or do not seem to do the right sort of job in creating momentum from one long note to the next.
When one asks a student to listen carefully to every moment in a passage and to discern as much as they can about rhythm through that listening, interesting things happen. Some of these are advantages while others are pitfalls. One great advantage is that this tends to keep the student from rushing. Not everyone has a tendency to rush, but most of us do at least some of the time. One reason for rushing is that we pay the most attention to the things that we must do physically—and for organ and harpsichord that means initiating the notes and releasing them. As soon as one note is safely played, there is some pull toward either the moment of release or the moment of initiating the next note. The sort of listening that I am describing here focuses the attention as much on the middle of a note as on the beginning and end.
Listening this way tends to lead to slower playing. That has been true for me, to a fault some of the time, though it is a perfectly natural outcome of this approach. The way to counter this tendency is through awareness and honesty. This listening approach is both a practice technique and something to bear in mind while actually performing. As with any other sort of practice, it is important and good to utilize it at a slow tempo, but as with any slow practice, it should be ramped up to the desired tempo in a systematic way.
It is natural to prepare for the moment when you believe the next note should occur and then play that note. This makes that moment in the music late by definition and leads to slow playing. It is probably acceptable for this to happen early in practicing a passage, as long as you are aware of it and work on evening it out as you get to know the music better. I have also been guilty of this in performance, not recognizing it clearly enough in practicing, and therefore not working to smooth out the process.
This is analogous to something that can happen when using a metronome, when one listens for the metronome beat and then plays the note. Something like this can also happen with releases. If you hear the instant at which you want to release a note and then release it, the release is late. A release that is executed by pushing off—down, then up—will also be late if the downstroke is timed to the desired moment of release. There is a sort of leap of faith when executing something, whether the timing of the beginning of a note, as we are discussing here, or of the end, without waiting to confirm that the looked-for time has arrived.
A few miscellaneous points
What is the meaning of any given note value? We know the answer: a quarter note is equal to two eighth notes or to half a half note; a whole note is four quarter notes, etc. But here’s another definition: a quarter note (or whatever note value) is whatever a listener will hear or accept as a quarter note. This relates directly to the Chopin story above.
Watching a TV game show recently, I heard the host say to a contestant, “Time is ticking away!” Why? Why is time defined as made up of discrete entities, ticks of a clock? Is it just because old clock technologies produced audible ticking? Or is there really something more fundamental about time that requires us to think that way? This vignette from a fraught moment in a game reminds us that thinking of time as ticking tends to create a sense of impatience or even panic.
The beating of the heart is sometimes evoked as a possible source for the notion of beats in music. This makes sense because the heart does beat fairly regularly in the absence of a medical issue. That beating is audible to the one whose heart it is, though not usually in a way that rises to the level of conscious awareness. If you quiet the outside world, you will easily hear your heart beating. But no heart beats as absolutely steadily as the beat we hear from a metronome. If the heart is a model for musical beats, maybe it should confer some flexibility onto those beats. If the heart is the model for a beat-derived sense of musical rhythm, breathing should be the model for a sense of rhythm based on expectation and fulfillment.
