This is María and this is Hester. Together we are the CONSORT COUNSELLORS!
Research has proven that every newborn has a sense of rhythm.
Babies can distinguish slight changes in rhythmical patterns. Amazing, isn't it?
Yeah! And if you think about it - that is only logical...
Because as human beings we are surrounded by rhythm all our lives:
the rhythm of day and night, the rhythm of the seasons and, even closer, the rhythm of our heartbeat.
This is very good news because: everyone has rhythm! OK, almost everyone, we have to say...
Apparently, the brains of adults are less flexible than the brains of newborns and babies,
Some of the talent we initially got might get lost along the way when not trained properly.
So, as adults we need to work harder to get our talents out!
Practice makes perfect! Today we'll show you a few ways to improve your rhythmical skills together with your ensemble.
Playing a rhythm perfectly alone is brilliant, but playing rhythmically all together with your ensemble makes it golden!
Let's look at the following pattern
and divide it among the two of us.
Hester will take the top line and I will take the bass.
We're just going to hum the rhythm with the metronome.
The metronome is set to 100 beats per minute for the ♪
This (♪) is also the time we have to take breath before we start.
Maybe you recognised this rhythmical pattern. It's the opening of the beautiful C Major sonata by Handel.
The next step we do without metronome.
We take our instruments and play the first note of the bar, short.
After that, mentally, we 'hum' as we did before
and we play the first note of the next bar.
Let's see if we are exactly together!
We check if our minds are rhythmically one...
Not one rhythmical mind here!
If it's a little bit too hard, because one bar takes quite long,
we can also add an intermediate step:
We play the first note of the bar,
the note halfway through the bar,
and the first note of the next bar.
Yeah, that's much easier...
As you can see, what we can learn from this exercise
is that humming, singing or 'hearing' the rhythm of your own part in your mind before you actually play it
is very useful to improve your sense of rhythm.
Plus: if you know what the bass part is doing, it will help you, becoming a reference in the music.
That's gonna improve your rhythm as well.
Imagining your line in your head, or singing it in the shower, will improve your musical projection as well.
Before you start actually playing a piece on the recorder, you can also turn it into a body percussion piece.
You produce the rhythms with your body in any way you like: you can clap, hit different parts of the body,
produce nice sounds... Use your imagination and follow the rhythm.
In this way you will internalise it and make it your own.
Decide on a tempo before you start.
Make up your mind how you're going to start the piece.
How much are you going to count in before?
Whatever feels best best for you!
When various body parts are involved to produce the rhythm and communicate well with each other
You, for sure, improve your groove and your multitasking talents.
Once we are so familiar with this rhythm that we feel completely comfortable with it
we can take our instruments and improvise ANY notes with complete freedom.
Just make sure we keep the rhythm, we keep the groove, the same feeling as when we were doing the body percussion.
Have fun!
Did you recognise, by the way, which rhythm pattern this is?
We are going to do a rhythmical exercise, without the metronome at first,
to improve our imagination and our internal clock.
Decide on a tempo, count in and start the exercise.
We are going to move along with the beat quite heavily.
What can we focus on? On feeling where the downbeat is.
Can you feel the whole group sharing this heavy movement?
Let's just choose one note and stick to it for the whole exercise.
Then, practice the same exercise once more, but now with metronome.
Leave out all the heavy movements. Does this feel easier?
Now that we have practiced with heavy movement and with a metronome, it's time to let it all go!
We can move just naturally, in our own personal way. We play without the metronome, together.
Are you having trouble with the rhythms in this exercise?
When we need to perform difficult passages,
it helps to mark in your score where the beat is,
with a simple vertical line.
There are two ways in which you can insert an extra step into your practice.
The first one is: if there are tied over notes
with a slur over a bar line, remove the slur and repeat the note so you get used to the length first.
When you feel secure, you can bring the slur back. For example:
Another possibility is that you subdivide any long note into the fastest value that we are playing in the exercise.
In this case: ♪
If you do this, you can place a little accent on each of the actual written notes
so that you can still hear the actual rhythm of the piece on top of the subdivision.
Really complicated rhythms can be made much easier when you add text to them.
For example, if you look at the first few bars
of this duet by Sören Sieg, the rhythm seems difficult at first.
But, if you think about it, and you repeat it several times,
you may come to the conclusion that it suits some words very nicely...
For many aspects of life it is true
that the more hours you spend doing something, the easier it becomes.
This is for sure true for rhythm. If there are special sorts of rhythms - for example, syncopations,
that you find very difficult, when you work with them, and repeat them in different ways, making them 'your own',
it will be easier to play them when they appear on a piece of music.
To practice syncopated rhythms
we go to Africa with this little exercise.
We are not playing the rhythms with any instruments,
but just with (vocal) sounds or body sounds,
to internalise this rhythm.
We are going to repeat it over and over.
Many people, like me, tend to speed up a little when playing faster note values.
A good trick to overcome this issue
is putting the metronome on the "after beat" instead of on the downbeat.
We already mentioned this in the episode about the metronome, but we repeat it because it's so useful!
Once we've practiced with the metronome on the "after beat" we can remove the metronome,
but still have a special focus on that moment of the bar,
maybe help it with a tiny little bit of length, to make sure we stay together and we are not speeding up.
In the Netherlands, Henkjan Honing is famous for his research on music cognition,
especially in the field of time and temporal structures in music.
He did research on how rhythm is perceived by adults, babies, animals - monkeys, for example -, etc.
I was lucky to have some classes with him when I studied Musicology.
I remember that, already back then, a sentence he used to repeat a lot was: "everybody is musical!"
This is also the title of one of his first books on the matter.
It's very interesting to have a look at the website of the Music Cognition Group (UvA)
where you can find the results of all this research and see what he is busy with.
This will bring you some new insights on why music is so important and necessary for a happy life.
Thank you very much for watching today! If you like our work please don't forget to subscribe.
See you next week! Bye bye!
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