How and why classical musicians feel rhythm differently

the way that classical musicians will rhythm can be very different from the way that rhythm is felt by musicians who play jazz rock or pop music or really any music from the past hundred years that has its origins in West African rhythms professional classical musicians are known for their tone color and their control and their dynamic range but very often rhythmic facilities and classical musicians can be left a little bit wanting for example check out this actual instructional video from this double bass professor who teaches at the University of Washington who talks about the importance of being able to accurately perform quarter note triplets and then he doesn't quite accurately perform them there are a lot of places here where you have to play three against two so you have to do this God duh duh duh duh duh so okay so what's going on here this guy's been teaching at the University of Washington for 24 years and can't perform this very simple rhythm what gives three years ago I walked into a rehearsal studio to rehearse music for the Masters recital of whim Laysan a Belgian composer and pianist women got together an ensemble of a classical string quartet in a jazz rhythm section and so we sat down to sight-read a piece of music in 9 8 the basic pulse of this piece of music was 2 plus 2 plus 2 plus 2 plus 1 so it was sort of like 4/4 but with an added eighth note so we set read through the music pretty decently but we in the rhythm section train-wrecked when we got to a measure that was accidentally notated like this in this particular measure it looks like the unit pulse is actually a group of three eighth notes or a dotted quarter note instead of the unit pulse that we were supposed to be feeling which was a quarter note this is why when you're writing music an odd time signatures is extremely important to get the beaming of the eighth notes right because it shows the unit pulse of what you're supposed to be feeling now we in the rhythm section trainwreck when we first came across this but the classical string musicians kind of just sight read through it with no problem whatsoever so my initial reaction to this like most people's reactions are when they're confronted with the virtuosity of a well-trained classical musician is that these musicians were simply superhumanly good sight readers of a caliber of musicianship par far higher than mine as a lowly jazz musician this artifice was shattered quite spectacularly a couple months later when we actually went to record the music as part of our album inside outside we use the same classical string quartet and they perform most of the album quite brilliantly but they had a lot of problem with this particular rhythm this sixteenth note syncopation they could never really quite play cleanly and so we actually had to fix it in post production this confused me because I saw these same classical musicians perform these very technical feats of musicianship and yet the simple rhythm that I and the rest of the rhythm section had no problem with they could not really play very cleanly why might that be one framework to understand this and this is generalizing a little bit here is that classical musicians react to the pulse and jazz rock pop etc musicians feel the pulse classical musicians were very often perform an Ensemble under the direction of a conductor and the conductor's job is to keep everybody in sync not unlike a drummer does orchestral musicians will react to the ictus of a conductors baton or conductors breathing and then they'll count rhythms based upon the pulse that they are seeing this might give some insight into why winds string quartet could sight-read that music that was contrary to the pulse of the rhythm section for the rhythm section accurately play these rhythms we needed to graph the subdivisions on to the actual pulse it was very difficult to do that when visually the pulses did not align so the result of all this is classical musicians might have a good sense of rhythm but not have a good sense of what's called phase locking check out these two metronomes one on my phone and one on my ipad they're both clicking away at 120 beats per minute and yet they're not phase lock but down beats do not align with one another a big part of locking into a groove is not only keeping the same tempo but also phase locking with the other musicians in a particular ensemble watch this video of Leonard Bernstein conducting Mahler's fifth symphony know the video and audio are not out of sync in this one this is an extreme example of where the orchestra and the conductor are not phase-lock but it is a common sort of occurrence in classical ensembles where not everybody is playing perfectly in sync this actually is not a huge pressing problem for our Kestrel music and the reason for this is that the initial attack transients of strings and woodwinds generally are fairly soft if the initial attacks of each one of the notes are not a hundred percent phase-locked it actually doesn't sound particularly bad this is very much not the case for any style of music that relies upon drums the initial attack transient of a drum is very sharp and very short so if any other instruments or any other drums are out of phase with that initial attack transient of the drums it sounds kind of bad it's a rhythmic dissonance known as a flam and it can be particularly vexing this rhythmic dissonance is what makes things sound not locked in or are not grooving or not together and it's not as huge a deal with orchestral music because of the softer initial attack transients check out these two examples they both use the exact same MIDI data which is not a hundred percent phase-locked but in the first example you have softer attacks and slower attacks and in the second example you have much sharper and shorter attacks so classical musicians might not apply the same rigor to the study of phase-locking as other musicians do but that doesn't mean that they have poor rhythm it just means that rhythm is sort of applied in a slightly different way in string quartet music for example the rhythm sort of ebbs and flows it's a lot more fluid and goes with the melodic line let's check out Maurice Ravel's first string quartet he actually only wrote one string quartet in F major is the pulse metronomic no of course not if everything was completely even would sound very stilted and unmusical so the music itself requires this very different understanding of rhythm as a whole and so the musicians themselves are more apt to apply that understanding so it's a little unfair to bemoan classical musicians lack of phase-locking because the music itself requires a completely different understanding of rhythm in general if you want to check out a great string quartet that has a great jazz rhythmic sensibility check out the Turtle Island string quartet this has been Adam mealy if you've enjoyed this lesson please comment please like please subscribe do all of those things I have a new lesson coming out every Monday so stay tuned

Channel: Adam Neely

Views: 1,479,348

Keywords: classical rhythm, music lesson, music vlog, adam neely, phase locking, internalize rhythm, lesson rhythm, rhythm lesson

Id: rEbUNDW9bDA

Length: 6min 46sec (406 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 25 2016