Chords for How and why classical musicians feel rhythm differently

[G] The way that classical [Fm] musicians feel rhythm can [Em] be very different from the way that rhythm is felt
by musicians [D] who play jazz, rock, or pop music, [G] or really any [D] music from the past hundred years
that has its origins in West African rhythms.
Professional classical [Em] musicians are known for
their tone color [E] and their control and their dynamic range, but very often rhythmic facilities
in classical musicians can be left a little bit wanting.
For example, check out this actual
instructional video [G] from this double bass professor who teaches at [D] the University of Washington,
[Gbm] who talks about the importance of being [G] able to accurately perform quarter note triplets,
and then he doesn't quite accurately perform them.
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_ _ _ Okay, so what's going on here?
This guy has been teaching at the [Ab] University of Washington for 24
years and can't perform this very simple rhythm.
What gives?
Three [Bbm] years ago, I walked into _ a
master's recital of Wim Laysen, a Belgian composer and [E] pianist.
Wim got [Gb] together an ensemble of a [A] classical
string [Bb] quartet in a jazz [Db] 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 [Gb] 2 plus 1, [Cm] so it was sort of like 4.4,
but with an added eighth note.
[C] So we sight-read through the music pretty decently, but we in the
rhythm section [Db] train wrecked when we got [C] to a measure that was accidentally notated like this.
[Abm] In this particular measure, it looks [Bb] like the unit pulse is actually a [Ab] group of [Gm] three eighth [A] notes,
or a dotted [Bb] 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 in odd time signatures,
it's extremely important to get the [Db] beaming of the eighth notes right, [Bbm] because it shows the unit pulse
of what you're supposed [Dbm] to be feeling.
Now, we in [Gb] the rhythm section train wrecked when we first
came across [Fm] this, but the classical [Bb] string musicians kind [Dbm] of just sight-read through it
with no problem whatsoever.
So my initial reaction to this, like [Abm] most people's reactions are when
they're confronted with the virtuosity of a well-trained classical musician, is that these
musicians were simply [Ab] superhumanly good sight-readers of a caliber of musicianship far,
far higher than mine as a lowly [A] jazz musician.
This artifice was shattered quite spectacularly
a couple months later when we actually went [G] to record the music as part of our album,
Inside Outside.
We used the same classical [D] string quartet, and they performed most of the album
quite brilliantly, but they had a lot of problem with this particular rhythm.
This 16th note
syncopation, they could never really [Gbm] quite play cleanly, and [Ab] so we actually [D] had to fix it in post
production.
This confused me, because I saw these same classical musicians perform these very
technical feats of musicianship, [G] and yet this simple rhythm that I and the rest of the rhythm
section [D] had no problem with, they could [G] 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 [Am] react [B] to the pulse, and jazz, rock, pop, etc.
[C] musicians feel the pulse.
Classical musicians
very often perform [G] in 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 [D] to
the ictus of a conductor's baton or a conductor's breathing, and [Ebm] then they'll count rhythms based
upon the pulse that [D] they are seeing.
This might give some insight [Ebm] into why Wim's string quartet
could sight-read that music that was [C] contrary to the pulse of the rhythm section.
[D] For the rhythm
section to accurately play these rhythms, we needed to graph the subdivisions onto the actual pulse,
and it was very difficult [Ebm] to do that when visually the pulses did not [Bb] 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 [N] iPad.
They're both clicking away at 120 beats per minute,
and yet they're not [Ab] phase locked, but downbeats do not align with one another.
[C] A big part of
locking into [Dbm] a groove is not only keeping the same tempo, [C] but also phase locking with the other
musicians in a [Dbm] particular ensemble.
Watch this video of Leonard [C] Bernstein conducting Mahler's
Fifth Symphony.
[D] [Bb] No, the video and audio are not out of sync in this [B] one.
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_ _ _ _ [E] _ _ _ _
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[D] This is an extreme example
of where the orchestra and the [Ebm] conductor are not phase locked, but it is a common sort of occurrence
in classical [E] ensembles where not everybody is playing perfectly in sync.
This [G] actually is not
a huge pressing problem for orchestral [Bm] music, and the reason for this is that the initial attack
[C] transients of [A] strings and woodwinds generally are [B] fairly soft.
[N] If the initial attacks of each one of
the notes are not 100% 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 [Em] a
drum is very sharp and very short, so if any other instruments or any other drums are out of [Bm] 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.
[E] This rhythmic dissonance is what makes things [A] sound
not locked in or not [D] grooving or not together, and it's not [Ebm] as huge a deal with orchestral music
[Abm] because of the softer [D] initial attack transients.
Check out these two [E] examples.
They both use the
[Gb] exact same MIDI data, which is not 100 [D]% phase locked, but in the first example you [Gb] have softer
attacks and slower [B] attacks, and in the [D] second example you have much sharper and shorter attacks.
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[Bbm] _ _ [B] _ [Gm] _ _ [D] _ _ _
_ _ [B] _ _ [Bb] _ _ _ _
_ [Fm] _ _ So [E] classical musicians might not [Ab] apply the same rigor to the study of phase locking as other
musicians do.
That [N] 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 [F] major.
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_ [Bb] _ [C] _ _ [F] _ _ [Bb] _ _
_ [C] _ _ _ [Ab] _ _ [Db] _ _
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_ [Gm] _ _ Is the pulse [E] metronomic?
No, of course not.
If everything was completely even, it would sound very stilted and unmusical.
So the music [G] itself requires this very different understanding of rhythm [Gb] as a whole,
and so the musicians [Ab] themselves are more apt to apply that understanding.
So it's a little unfair
to bemoan [Gb] classical musicians' [Ab] 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 [D] Quartet.
This
has been Adam Neely.
[Ebm] If you've enjoyed this lesson, please comment, please [D] like, please subscribe,
do all of those things.
I have a new lesson [Ebm] coming out every Monday, so stay tuned.
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