One major concept in rhythm is the idea of Groove, which is a basic template of subdivisions of a beat that repeat - basically what you will “feel” as you are playing a piece of music. All of the musical “events” you will play (notes) will fall somewhere on this grid of time. I’ve learned this the best through learning my various fiddle traditions along with some of the other instruments that go with them (guitar, piano, bodhran, even whistle, dulcimer and harp work into this). In Irish and Scottish fiddle music, many of the tunes we play were written for dancing, or at least in that tradition. There are a variety of dance forms, such as the reel, jig, and hornpipe (and others) in Irish music, and also the march and strathspey in Scottish fiddle, and each one has a characteristic groove, which includes the meter that they fall in, the accent pattern employed in each (based on meter but not always played quite the same way), and the tempo - how fast the pulses happen. In order for people to be able to dance to the tunes, you need to play them rhythmically very precisely, and with enough physical accent that the dancers can feel the meter and know where to place the dance steps, so playing for dancers is one of the best ways to develop solid rhythm. Playing the tunes with no dancers is useful too, but be careful because it’s possible to be sloppier and get away with it if there are no dancers present. As with any style of music, listening to great players either live or on recordings is essential to really get the feel down, as there are subtle differences in the way people play these tunes that cannot really be notated precisely (see Multi-Genreism in the main paper for more on that).

This is a concept from the Baroque era of classical music. Motor rhythm is a continuous stream of notes at the same subdivision that is present either all the time or almost all the time. 16th notes are commonly used, but it doesn’t have to be 16th notes. Hocketing is a concept that goes with this - any given voice or instrument may not be playing continuously in the motor rhythm, and in fact the piece is much more interesting if not every instrument is playing the same continuous rhythm the entire time. But between all the voices, the motor rhythm will be present, and this is what gives that characteristic drive to so much Baroque music when it is played well (or makes it so boring when it isn’t), and if you are playing music like this, you need to be aware of what the motor rhythm is and how your part fits into it. The rhythm should sound constant and consistent, and you don’t want to break the groove when you enter (or when you fail to enter correctly). My high school orchestra conductor, Peter Rosheger, used the analogy of a moving train - to get on or off a moving train, you need to find a way to match its speed before you get on it (or after you get off), otherwise you will be in for a nasty surprise!

Here’s an example from J.S. Bach, one of the great High Baroque composers. He wrote a set of keyboard pieces called the 15 2-part Inventions, and I really could have picked any of them, but I’ve chosen No. 4 in D Minor. I’ve included a video below, along with the sheet music for the first part. Click here to download the full sheet music from IMSLP. This is a video of a harpsichord performance - these pieces were written for a variety of keyboard instruments of the time, and while today they are most often played on the piano, J.S. Bach would have written them for the harpsichord, clavichord, or maybe even the organ. These pieces were prabably most often played on harpsichord or clavichord, and they sound quite different than they do on the piano today. You can see how the 16th note rhythm is pretty much constant from the beginning. It appears constantly in at least one of the two voices alternating, or sometimes together, demonstrating hocketing as well. The only place in this snippet of the sheet music that doesn’t have it is the cadence at the end of this first big phrase, where the music comes to rest for a second.

Here’s another example of motor rhythm in the first movement of Spring from Antonio Vivaldi’s Violin concerto “The Four Seasons”. This one doesn’t really use hocketing, but you can feel the chugging of the orchestra in a consistent rhythm. This one demonstrates another way to lighten the texture without hocketing - you can have the bass instruments play longer note values than the upper instruments, and even the upper instruments don’t play constant 16th notes. Here the motor rhythm feels more like 8th notes, with some 16th notes to spice things up now and then. I’ve provided a recording below, along with sheet music (full score) for the first “ritornello”, or orchestral section. This sheet music ends at the first point where the soloist starts a solo.

If you are writing a piece, the idea of hocketing is a useful one, as it will let you take a single line and make it more interesting for the players, and it’s especially useful for background figures as well as for the melody. It will also allow you to give relief to the audience from constantly hearing everyone play, while still making use of (up to) everyone for a given passage. It is also necessary for wind players to sustain a long passage without noticeable breathing places - having the players trade off on repeating passages so that one can breath while the other plays. Overlap them by a note if you do this, and it can feel like a continuous stream without killing your players (generally not the desired outcome!).

See the opening of Smetana’s Romantic era tone poem “Die Moldau” for an example of this in the flutes (and other winds eventually as well). Once the main theme comes in (1:03 in this video), the strings take over both the main theme and a hocketed background line - in both the case of the flutes and the strings, the hocketing is supposed to create a swirling sound that represents the flowing of the River Moldau of the title of the piece (known as Vltava in the original Czech). This is from a larger piece by Smetana called Ma Vlast (My Fatherland). Video and score below for the first part until the strings take over the theme. Flutes only for the first line - strings omitted until page 2. Click Here for the full score from IMSLP.

One more interesting example of hocketing, also from the romantic orchestra world. This one is a favorite of orchestration professors: The opening of the last movement of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 in B Minor called “Symphonie Pathetique” (meaning pathos, or sad, not “pathetic” or bad. Listen to the example below, then look at the score and try to find where the very clear melody is coming from in the first four measures.

The two violin lines are passing the notes of the melody back and forth alternately for the first four measures, and you’ll notice it even starts in the 2nd violins. I think this is evidence that Tchaikovsky expected the violins to be sitting opposite each other (the 2nd violins sitting where we usually put the cellos today, on the audience right side across from the 1st violins on the audience left side). This was a seating format that was used back then, and I can’t think of another reason why he would score this way.

If this was a piece today, I might wonder if the composer was just “trolling” the theory students looking at the score :-), but back then composers didn’t do things that didn’t have an audible impact. If you do this with our modern seating method, which is how I’ve usually heard it, all that might happen is a discontinuity in the sound between the two sections either for timing or for volume, but there isn’t really any upside in this instance that might benefit from this effect. Sometimes this is effective if the single line would be difficult for one instrument or section to play properly alone (see the Smetana example just above for an example of that in the winds), but there is no reason here why the 1st violins (or for that matter, the 2nd violins) couldn’t play this line alone. But if you did do the opposite seating, then you’d get a stereo panning effect with the melody, and that would be reason to write it like this.

So this is another point for hocketing - in addition to being useful for making a texture thinner, or allowing your wind players to breath, also think about using it as a way to vary where a sound comes from in 3d space or other dimensions that you can adjust. I know of at least a couple of synthesizers that allow you to set something up so that every time you play a note a different timbre results, which can be a wild way to play with hocketing!

A lot of popular music styles make use of a constant groove (which may not be precisely metronomic, but is nonetheless constant). Classical music treats groove with more flexibility than most of those styles. You still want to have a groove in a lot of classical music - even in slow pieces you should still have a noticeable groove when things change (they need to change at the right point in time and not arbitrarily). But the tempo will often push and pull somewhat (that is get faster and slower), either within a measure or across several measures. Subtle (or even not so subtle) fluctuations within a measure are called “rubato” (Italian for robbed), and means that you move faster in certain places, and then slow down in others (or vice versa), so that on average the tempo doesn’t change much. You “rob” time from one part (where you speed up) and give it to another part (where you slow down). This is most common in soloistic contexts like unaccompanied solo playing (solo piano uses it a lot), and in concertos with a soloist and an orchestra. But even orchestral or chamber pieces with no soloist will usually not be played completely in a steady time as we’ll see in some other examples elsewhere in the guide as well, and players who are primarily classically trained may have a harder time with pop and jazz and other styles where the tempo tends to be less flexible. This leads to classical players often being accused by rhythm players of having sloppy rhythm, but it’s really a different conception of what rhythm is (of course you can just be sloppy too!). I think playing both fiddle dance music and classical music has given me an advantage in this regard, so I can play with either technique, but it is something to be aware of on both fronts. Classical music is also more likely to have sudden substantial tempo changes, but that shows up in some pop contexts from time to time. A lot of popular music styles mostly keep a steady tempo though.

Here’s an example of a Celtic tune where the players use rubato in this style. This is a traditional Scottish air called Ca’ the Ewes. Slow airs are much more likely to use rubato and be somewhat free than dance tunes. You’ll notice that if you try to put a metronome on this example they are not playing in strict time, but it probably doesn’t bother you because they are taking time at important parts of the phrase and not either arbitrarily or sloppily. It’s also fairly subtle, and you might not even notice it if you weren’t listening for it as it feels natural in a tunes like this. This is from Alasdair Fraser’s CD Legacy of the Scottish Fiddle Vol. 2: Tunes from the Life and Land of Robert Burns and Natalie Haas is playing the opening cello line:

Here’s the sheet music for this tune (in treble clef for fiddle) as it would be written in time. Note that they repeat it 4 times on this recording, and vary the rhythm a little bit each time:

Here’s an example from the classical solo piano world. This is a Chopin Mazurka, which are noted for rubato. Chopin appears to have more or less invented this dance type for his music - it’s based on preexisting polish dances, but there wasn’t one quite like the Chopin Mazurka until he started writing them. The characteristic dance pattern in this type of tune is an emphasis on beat two or three instead of one. The first beat often feels like a pickup into beat two. I’ve chosen Op. 68 No. 4 in F Minor as it’s one of my personal favorites with the really snakey (or sneaky?), dark, chromatic melody. In this video, you can hear pianist Josh Wright really using a lot of rubato in this performance. I’ve included the first section of the sheet music below the video, click here to download the full sheet music from IMSLP.

Another way to see tempo fluctuation in classical music is to look at tempo change over the course of a piece. This can go either way, but in this next example, the tempo gets faster as we near the end of the piece, which is very common, especially in overtures and symphonies. I could pick any number of overtures I know for this example, but we’re currently working on Verdi’s Overture to “La Forza Del Destino” (The Force of Destiny) at one of my orchestras where I play viola as I write this, so I’ll pick that one. I’ll start this score video in the middle but nearer to the end, where the tempo starts at what passes for moderate in this piece, and then builds so that by the end, it is blazing fast. Since this is a score video, feel free to go back and watch the whole thing - it’s a fun one!

Here’s an interesting study. In classical music, the tempo is not usually set by the composer, at least not in common practice music (roughly music from the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe). Or rather, there is more than one tempo that could be considered “right”. Even when composers (or at least the scores) provide metronome marks, you will hear a wide range of tempos from different professional conductors and orchestras, not to mention student and amateur groups! To demonstrate this, I’m going to pick three recordings of the same piece by three different highly respected ensembles and conductors. I happen to like one of these tempos and not quite as much the other two, but we can talk about it a bit after I show them.

This is Franz von Suppe’s Light Cavalry Overture, one of my favorite pieces of all time for very personal reasons - this was the first piece I ever specifically asked my dad to get me a recording of after hearing my friend Sarah Wilfong who I’ll mention again in Chapter 6 play it in the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra when I was somewhere around 8 or 9 years old. I loved it that day, I still love it today, and I’ve now gotten to play it three times myself!

For this demonstration, I’ve picked a recording from the Berlin Philharmonic with Herbert von Karajan as the conductor, and then another recording from the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields with Sir Neville Marriner as the conductor. I was hoping to find one with Sir Georg Solti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (my hometown symphony!), which is my other favorite orchestra along with these other two, but it doesn’t look like Solti recorded this piece with them, so I’ve pulled one with Solti and the Vienna Philharmonic, another great orchestra, which will certainly demonstrate the point I’m trying to make here. Take a listen to at least the opening of each of them, and then I’ll talk about it below:

Herbert von Karajan and the Belin Philharmonic

That may have been an eye-opening experience for you if you haven’t done this kind of back-to-back comparison of multiple versions of the same piece before, especially if you come primarily from the school that says “we must do exactly what’s on the page and nothing else”. For reference, the score says q=80 for this opening, and Marriner is close to that - about 76 to 78. Herbert von Karajan is more like 65, and Solti is somewhere around 90, though they are all using a bit of rubato so it’s hard to clock it exactly. As we get further into the piece, von Karajan raises the tempo to roughly match Marriner in the faster parts (starting around the wind steady 8th notes at about 2:15 in von Karajan’s recording). He sticks with the faster tempo until the big string unison (4:38 in his recording), where he slows down substantially again compared to Marriner, before once again roughly matching Marriner in the last fast part. Solti takes the tempo faster than Marriner throughout the entire piece.

As you can hear and see, von Karajan takes the piece significantly slower than Marriner does in the slower sections of the piece, so much so that it almost sounds like two different pieces to me. I’ve seen this phenomenon with some other pieces too, and sometimes it almost feels to me like von Karajan’s tempos are so slow that the melody gets lost a little bit. Solti’s tempos, on the other hand, are about as fast as I think one could reasonably get away with in this piece, and are maybe a little too fast for my taste. I tend in general to like Marriner’s tempos on most pieces, as well as other aspects of the Academy’s performances, to the point that nowadays if I’m looking for a recording of a new piece I’m working on or just want to listen to, I default to the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields if I can find a recording from them. I like a lot of von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic’s output too - the recordings are always technically brilliant, the playing is always great, but I just don’t always like his tempos. Out of all of the “recent” conductors of the Chicago Symphony (back to Fritz Reiner, at least), I tend to like Solti’s recordings the best, between the raw sound and playing quality and the tempos he picks. I even met a few of the players over the years I lived in the area - several of them lived in my high school district and I knew some of their children growing up, which is one reason I like the group so much (that and they are one of the top orchestras in the world!), and why I was hoping to find a recording of them for this study. But as a general rule, if Solti takes a different tempo than I like, he tends to go faster than I like, and this recording with the Vienna Philharmonic certainly demonstrates that aspect of his conducting.

I’ve been working on rhythm exercises with some of my tutoring students at CSUN, and given the complexity of some of the rhythms, we’ve been trying them slowly. But I’ve found that some of my students want to go so slowly that the rhythms devolve into individual notes and lose any sense of groove. There is a place for super-slow practice if you recognize that you are basically getting rid of rhythm and you know why you are doing it, but in this case since these are unpitched rhythm exercises, I don’t think there’s much point in taking things quite that slowly. I want to be sure that we can still sense the overall groove of the piece as a groove, even if we slow it down from performance tempo for practice. von Karajan isn’t that slow in this recording, but I think he might be pushing the bounds of acceptable tempo for this particular piece. Marriner’s tempos feel right to me in this case (I’ve phrased it before as “he’s taking the tempo I would want to take if I was conducting it”).

Sir Georg Solti and the Vienna Philharmonic