Musicianship
Rhythm - I. Foundations of Music
1. What is Music?
Let’s start with a foundational aspect of music. There are quite a few “definitions” of music, and all of them get at important ideas and usually leave something out. But my favorite basic definition is “Music is sound organized in time”. I think this is sufficiently broad to incorporate most of what most people would call music, while also getting at the most important aspects: sound, organization, and time. The sounds of a city are not really musical because they aren’t organized, they are fairly random. To really be music and not just ambient noise, some entity (usually a human artist of some sort so far) has to decide how to group sounds, and then have that unfold in time
2. Music as a Time-Based Artform
This gets at another point raised by my composition / music analysis professor at CSUN, Dr. Liviu Marinescu, which is that music is a time-based art form. He points out in our graduate analysis class that events in music exist in time, and therefore reading a score is not really a musical act, because you can look ahead and look back, but the music itself exists only now (see also Life Tips General Musicianship Tip No. 2). You have to remember what happened before, and you don’t know what will happen next until it happens. Of course, you can listen to a piece over and over again, and then you know what happens next before it happens, and composers can set up foreshadowing you only notice on your second listening just like authors of short stories or novels can. This is also covered in an interesting paper I read in Musicology / Research Techniques my first semester at CSUN: “Three Ways to Read a Detective Story - or a Brahms Intermezzo” by Edward T. Cone. Alan Belkin covers this topic as well in several of his essays and his textbook.
3. Music as Language?
People often make an analogy in music comparing it to spoken or written language. There are some parallels, which we spent some time exploring in our Graduate Music Analysis class at CSUN. Dr. Marinescu pointed out that music exists not in the notes so much as in the connections between the notes - the intervals and chord progressions, for example. He compared this to grammar and syntax in language. What you spend most of your time learning in undergraduate music theory classes is “vocabulary” - scale degrees, what minor and major triads are, etc. You do take a class in form in a standard music theory course in an undergraduate music program, but you usually only get one semester of that vs. two - four semesters of harmony and some of the other classes. The form class focuses primarily on the standard classical forms up to sonata form. This graduate class did a deeper dive into the basic building blocks of motivic cells (not to be confused with rhythm cells that we’ll get to later in this guide, though there is some overlap there), motives, phrases and then larger sections. We looked at relationships in rhythm and in pitch based analysis.
But Dr. Marinescu warns that there is one key difference between spoken or written language and music - music doesn’t “mean” anything. In liguistics, the term is “semantics”. We have vocabulary, grammar, and syntax in music, but we don’t have semantics. He demonstrated how difficult it would be to write a piece to tell someone “I’ll meet you at the street corner at 2:00 PM”. Note that we’re talking specifically about instrumental music here - it’s easy to communicate that concept in vocal music that has lyrics, but that’s literally language, not music. The music minus the lyrics doesn’t mean anything specific like that.
Grey Larsen has a couple of chapters in his book “The Essential Guide to Irish Flute and Tin Whistle” about the “Language Analogy”. He notes many of the same things that Dr. Marinescu did, for example, “Words refer to directly to things in the external world. Music refers to nothing outside itself. We often associate things of the outside world with instrumental music, for example by connecting a tune with its title. We may become inspired by the outside world to create music. But these external connections are not directly communicated by the music itself.” (Larsen, 43).
4. Music Communicates Emotion
So if music doesn’t mean anything directly, then what does instrumental music communicate? It certainly seems to communicate something. I think it communicates emotion. When we are young, our teachers often help us make up stories to go with the songs we learn so that we can play them in a certain way. Our brains work on a more concrete level at that age, and abstraction is more difficult to grasp. But at this point in my musical practice, I don’t really make stories with characters and events so much anymore. I do have some extra-musical idea I’m generally trying to communicate in my playing and writing, and it’s raw emotion. I don’t care so much whether someone else pictures a man riding a horse and going on a quest, but I do hope that they experience a similar feeling to what I had in mind. I want music to sound happy, or sad, or super dark and murky, or angry, or like the most exciting day of your life (whatever that means to you). I tend to respond better when my conductors put things in those terms more than when they try to tell me a story that the music evokes, though if it is known that the composer had a “program” in mind when they wrote a piece, then knowing that is very useful.
The least helpful way a conductor can talk to me today is in technical instrumental terms. That is helpful and even necessary when you are still in the primary learning stage on your instrument (school orchestra through middle school and even parts of high school perhaps), but once you have the basic mechanics down, the conductors or music directors should stop telling you about vibrato and bowings and such (that’s the section leader or concertmaster’s job if anyone else needs to tell you something technical). They should instead tell you about the spirit of the music (or maybe its history or program notes, etc.). At least that’s what I find most useful today.
So now that we have some ideas to consider about what music “is”, let’s get into the more technical side of how music works with rhythm!