Rhythm Distillation
For years now in my lessons I have used a Rhythm Sheet handout I designed based on some ideas presented by Neil Swapp at the 2015 New Mexico Music Ed Conference. The method starts students off with sixteenth notes, forcing them to subdivide from the beginning. I have found it to be very successful and effective with most of my students. Most.
In the past couple of years I have had a few students who have issues with the rhythms. They will get the rhythms on the sheet fine, but then go to a set of other exercises or literature for their instrument that use the same rhythms and act like they’ve never seen them before. We’ll work out the rhythm for that exercise and move on to another one, which contains the exact same rhythm, and it will again flummox them. In trying to find a way to help explain things to them better I stumbled up on an idea that breaks rhythm down and simplifies it in a way that can help students understand the fundamentals of how both rhythm and meter work. I call it Rhythm Distillation.
The rhythm sheet I use contains full 4/4 measures, which tends to be helpful in that context because it gives them multiple beats to work a specific rhythmic pattern, but it can cause some confusion between which notes represent what rhythms and how they fit into the multiple beats. So if we abandon the concept of a measure and distill it to a simpler form we are left with one beat. When working with simple meters each beat can be subdivided into four parts. The four parts of the beat can be identified by four syllables, which are traditionally: 1 e & a (one, ee, and, uh). Given that a large portion of music is written in time signatures where a quarter note is a beat we can fill in the four syllables with the four sixteenth notes. This gives us the first of the twelve Base Rhythms. Four use sixteenth notes and rests:
Four use combinations of eighth and sixteenth notes and rests:
Two use dotted eighth notes:
And two use a quarter note and quarter rest:
Each of the twelve Base Rhythms fills a single beat in a time signature with simple meter. Every other possible way to fill a beat is just a Variation of one of the twelve (except for Base Rhythms 1, 5, 11, and 12, which have no variation). The easiest way to illustrate a Variation is to start with Base Rhythm 2, where we simply move the location of the sixteenth rest within the beat. Doing so gives us three Variations of that Base Rhythm.
In addition to the various configurations we get from writing out these variations, we can also simplify the rests in a few of the base rhythms to make them more accurate to the way they are seen in repertoire.
As should be clear, not all of the Base Rhythms will have the same number of Variations. The Variations for the remaining Base Rhythms follow.
The Base Rhythms and their Variations show us all the ways to fill a single beat. To fill more than one beat we can then Augment the Base Rhythms and their Variations. So the augmentations of Base Rhythm 1 would be as follows.
Further levels of Augmentation are theoretically possible, but are uncommon in practice, so won’t be discussed further here. Three levels of Augmentation will be more than enough to cover the most common rhythms in Western Literature. For more examples let’s Augment Base Rhythms 3 and 7 and their Variations
Now that we are expanding beyond the scope of a single beat we can create measures in a three different ways. We can combine Base Rhythms and Variations for as many beats as we need, we can Augment them until they are the size we need, or we can do a combination of those. To create a 2/4 measure for example, we can either combine two Base Rhythms/Variations or do one 1st Augmentation. To get a ¾ measure we would add one more Base/Variation (as the Augmentations double each time we wouldn’t have a single Augmentation that would equal three beats). A 4/4 measure could be four Base/Variation rhythms, two 1st Augmentations, some combination of those two, or one 2nd Augmentation.
In examining those combinations it should also become clear that many rhythmic patterns can be classified in multiple ways. A simple measure of 4 quarter notes could be called a combination of four repetitions of Base Rhythm 11, a combination of two 1st Augmentations of Base Rhythm 5, or a 2nd Augmentation of Base Rhythm 1. This is similar to how a single pitch can be given multiple names when using enharmonics.
By breaking down the rhythms used in simple meters in this way we essentially give ourselves and our students an alphabet they can use to help understand an infinite number of rhythms they can encounter. By showing that everything extends from the twelve Base Rhythms we can not only simplify the world of rhythm and meter, but give them more ways to recognize the connections between different patterns.