When I was a postgraduate student at the Manhattan School of Music in New York back in the 1980s, I decided to make up some credits for my master’s degree by taking courses in Dalcroze Eurythmics. Fortunately for me the teacher of these courses, Dr. Robert Abramson, was one of the world’s leading exponents on the subject and I learned an enormous amount about how rhythm works.
Rhythm does not exist in the head, but in the body – we have to feel it physically. Playing a musical instrument rhythmically is a totally separate thing from playing by merely spelling out the counts. If music is dead in time, it is just that – dead! I once had an advanced student with a fundamental rhythmic flaw. Barely a bar would go by without some glaring rhythmic inaccuracy, and yet when I got her to count it out, it was clear she had a complete intellectual understanding of the mathematics of the meter. What was missing was the physical aspect, how the rhythm actually felt.
The solution? No amount of metronome practice over the years had helped her one iota to play rhythmically. One term in a Dalcroze Eurythmics class did wonders to complete the circuitry and this made a huge difference to her playing. The whole body interprets musical rhythm enabling the large movements to become internalised. This rhythmic sense can then be executed by smaller parts of the body (namely our playing mechanism).
“Muscles were made for movement, and rhythm is movement. It is impossible to conceive a rhythm without thinking of a body in motion.” Emile Jacques-Dalcroze
Perhaps we can compare counting out with reading a recipe from a book and rhythm with actually tasting the dish (the full sensory experience)? Rhythm (the placement of sounds in time) embraces the concept of timing, playing sounds either earlier or later than their literal, mathematically assigned moment. Playing metronomically is contrary to an alive, vibrant rhythm where beats are rarely absolutely evenly spaced apart. Music is almost never inflexibly mathematical.
Try this experiment: find two or three recordings and figure out the metronome speed. Put the metronome on with the recording and see how long the performance keeps to this strict beat. I will wager not more than a bar or two! The beat of the vast majority of music (except perhaps for toccata-like music or music that is intentionally meant to sound mechanical) is not carved in stone, but is flexible. You might compare the musical beat to the heartbeat – it can vary subtly and imperceptibly from moment to moment depending on our emotions and state of mind. We need to remember that in creative music making there is a balance between meter, which represents thought, and rhythm, which represents feeling.
This past week, I was sent details of a summer school in Dalcroze Eurythmics in Canterbury, organised and run by The Dalcroze Society. Looking at the events calendar it seems that the society offers other courses and workshops that are bound to be of interest to performers and teachers looking to connect up their head with their body.
A few thoughts on rhythm :-
In moments of panic people are advised to breathe deeply, or maybe to count to ten or walk ten paces very slowly. The aim is to slow down your breathing and pumping heart. Because when you panic everything speeds up – your heart pounds and you hyperventilate and adrenalin surges through your body. So you need to slow down and recover the body’s calming rhythms. Something similar happens at the piano – the more nervous the pianist, the more likely he is to speed up and rush at everything. In the scramble wrong notes abound, but, more importantly, all sense of musicality and expression is lost. How often does your music teacher point out that the wrong notes don’t matter that much but the sense of the music does? Sadly, both tend to go together; the wrong notes throw you and your sense of the shape of the music falls apart. The trick, then, is finding how to let the rhythm rule the music. This is easier said than done. Some people have a stronger sense of rhythm than others but we all have a sense of rhythm; it is related to your heartbeat and the sense of pulse within you. But you cannot control it any more than you can dictate how fast your heart should beat. But most people want to be in control of what they are doing, adults more than small children. There is a feeling that one needs to control one’s playing, else all that would come out would be a chaotic mish-mash of wrong notes. So you control what you are doing, lose the rhythm and panic – yet you cannot allow yourself let go of the urge to stay in control. Definitions of rhythm all lay great emphasis upon how patterns of sound are constructed to bring about an underlying rhythm. But impose rigid control upon those patterns and the rhythm itself may be lost or conversely become over heavy. The thing to come back to is the sense of movement and impetus. There needs to be an innate sense of swing somewhere deep down even when it is not obvious. We talk of falling into a rhythm and that is what we need to do – relax into it, give ourselves up to it, go with it, let it rule us rather than we try to rule it. And the funny thing is, go with the rhythm and the nerves ease off. Get into the rhythm and it is hard to remain in a state of panic. Do I imagine it, or do I hear the sounds I am making differently (and more intensely)? Often it helps to let your body sway ever so slightly with the rhythm as you play.
I just wish I were better at it!
Thank you for these excellent points, Elizabeth. I like what you say about rhythm not always being in our control. Any sort of nervousness is likely to impede the body’s equilibrium and coordination, and breathing certainly helps. A great piece of advice I had from a teacher (a very well-known concert artist) is to clench the buttock muscles tightly together while playing if you start to sense tension. It absolutely works, try it! Riding a rhythm, or allowing the body to move very subtly while playing is a great way to summon the inner conductor, provided this does not degenerate into mannerisms and excessive movements which it can. The most coordinated of pianists tend to sit very still indeed, the difference here is that the rhythm has been internalised, not that it is missing. It has been refined and reduced so we don’t see it.