Capital-M Music

Musicianship

Vol. 1: Rhythm Guide

by Richard Bruner

Welcome to a series of guides about musicianship! I strongly feel that every musician needs to have strong musicianship skills if they want to succeed in the world of professional or semi-professional music, regardless of which aspect of music they want to focus on. Musicianship cuts across all other aspects of music, and is crucial for performers, composers, improvisers, and even plays a role in getting better at analysis. When I first went to college at Berklee College of Music, I was told by an alum that the single class he used the most in his everyday life as a musician was Ear Training, the closest class we had to what some other colleges or universities call Musicianship. As a working professional musician, I fully agree with that assessment.

I consider musicianship to have several elements: rhythm, intonation (or pitch recognition more broadly), music notation reading ability, the ability to learn by ear (so ear-training), which ultimately leads to dictation or transcription (the ability to listen to music and write down in notation what you hear as precisely as possible). Also, I think mapping your instrument(s) to music physically plays a role in musicianship, so that you know exactly where you are within the instrument at all times, and you can execute the common patterns of your music. In many kinds of Western music, the basic version of this would be scales, arpeggios, and common chord progressions, including inversions of common chord types. This then also connects to music theory and harmony, form, etc. Those subjects are treated separately from musicianship but nonetheless are an essential component of becoming a well-rounded musician who can play, write, or improvise music to a high level.

I have chosen to start this series of guides with a guide to rhythm, because rhythm is the foundational aspect of music. Without the element of change over time, it can be argued that music doesn’t really exist at all. When it comes to playing music, sloppy rhythm will be far more objectionable than less than ideal intonation, tone, or other aspects of music making. These are all important too, and you can’t really be professional if any of them are lacking, but missing a note or two here or there when it comes to intonation will not ruin the evening unless you are in an audition or competition setting. But just try to get through a regular full gig with poor rhythm and see how that goes!

This guide will be organized into several sections. We’ll start with some foundational ideas about what music is, and then work through the basics of pulse and meter, followed by ideas of groove and tempo, before arriving at some more complex topics such as syncopation, swing, cross rhythm and metric modulation. I will include music notation, audio, and videos of actual musical examples where appropriate. I have prepared a quick guide to music notation as it relates to rhythm here if you need a refresher. It may not be the best place to start if you’ve never read standard notation before - I am assuming at least some musical background on the part of my reader.

What should you know before you read this guide? I am assuming that you are already some kind of musician (if you’re not, it’s never too late to start!). I assume that you’ve at least held your instrument and made some sound with it (or sung some notes if you are a singer) and hopefully begun learning to read music as well. I will try to make as much use of audio and video as I can in this guide, as that’s a key tip of mine (music is sound), but for transmitting many of these ideas, music notation will be crucial as well. I do firmly believe that you should learn to both see and hear every element of music, not just see them, and that that is a critical part of any musicianship system, whether in a college class or anywhere else. I don’t necessarily assume you are a college student in music, but this guide will be based at least in part on what you will be working on in a college musicianship setting if you don’t already have these skills when you get to college. I will start at a low level in this guide from a philosophical perspective, but some of these ideas will make more sense if you already have some knowledge of music like you should ideally get through high school music (or its equivalent in genres not taught in schools).

There may also be some basic music theory in this guide, and musicianship and music theory should go together in a college setting, but you don’t need to be an expert in theory to use this guide. When it comes to teaching music, we tend to separate the skills into many distinct areas and even distinct fields in some cases, but when you actually make music they all happen at once, or at least the composer does several things that happen simultaneously - form (which includes aspects of rhythm), harmony, melody and counterpoint, orchestration, etc. which are experienced as a unified whole despite being taught in different classes, and then the performer brings together all their rhythm skills and listening for pitch and tone and balance, so that the composed piece is realized as a coherent whole. If the same person is both the composer and performer, that can be all the better as they will know what they intended at any given point. The improviser will do both of those things simultaneously, composing on the fly as a performance, so their skills need to be top notch across the board. That being said, you can have a lot of fun with improvising well before you’ve developed professional aptitude at every skill, but if you get good at performing improvisation, it will be because you’ve developed all of those skills to a high level. All this is to say that I will not shy away from exploring other aspects of the pieces I will analyze as part of this guide when I think they are interesting or relevant to other musical goals that we’ll have. Musicianship should be about developing the whole musician, and ultimately all of these things will come together in the end.

I will note that many of my examples come from the standard orchestral repertoire, and I will usually provide an orchestral score in some form or other for those examples. If you are not an orchestral musician, or you are just beginning to develop your score reading abilities, just know that in most cases you should be able to pretty clearly see what I am talking about anyway, as I’m not for the most part diving deep into orchestration here. Since we’re looking at rhythm first and foremost in this guide, the point that I’m making should be clear without advanced score reading required. I may address other aspects of the pieces as well, but you can come back to those when your score reading or music theory abilities are a little stronger if what I’m saying doesn’t seem to make sense yet. I will always provide audio for any of my orchestral score examples (usually in the form of a youtube video along with all the other “real-world” examples), so you will be able to hear what I’m talking about as well whether you can follow the score or not.

This guide is instrument and mostly genre agnostic - it doesn’t matter whether you are classically trained, a folk player, a rock or jazz musician or any other genre, or whether you are primarily a performer or a composer (or both!), musicianship and rhythm cut across all of that and are relevant to everyone. The examples I choose to illustrate my points will more or less by necessity be skewed towards the genres I have studied the most, so they will tend to come from the classical world (particularly orchestral, solo string, and solo piano repertoire), the folk world and in particular Celtic folk music, and a smattering of jazz, latin, and pop perhaps, and maybe even a film score cue or two! I will further assume that you are playing music in the Western music traditions of Europe, the Americas, and maybe Africa (particularly as it has intersected with European music in America) - I don’t have enough experience with Eastern music of various sorts to be able to make connections across those genres, only enough to know that not everything I’m going to say here is as relevant in that part of the world of Music.

I. Foundations of Music