Posted by: clariniano on: February 12, 2012
Recently, I have been seeing on music discussion boards about teachers who have students who have significant rhythm problems. While some of them are the typical young students who are learning to keep a steady beat and generally play note values accurately, at least two of the stories posted were those with teens who could not play from written notation.
I can certainly relate to the teens who could not reliably play from written notation. While I was a very good pitch reader, I did not really learn how to count written musical rhythms until the middle of my Grade 11 year, when I was 16 years old. And it happened quite by accident. However, I was really good at copying rhythms I had heard, especially during my Grade 8 and Grade 9 years, but to some extent my Grade 10 year as well.
Early in my Grade 11 year, I had successfully earned a placement as principal third clarinet in a high level all-city band that played music generally played by music students studying it in university. In the second semester of my Grade 11 year, I started taking a piano keyboard class offered through the high school I attended. In that keyboard class, there was also a music composition assignment. The last was the trigger that finally got me to find the beat, as I composed my first successful piece with a metronome, although I had composed pieces before then without one. But this piece composed with a metronome, a duet for French horn and clarinet, was a success in multiple ways, the main one finally knowing how the notes fit within the beat.
What is strange however, that since the middle of my Grade 8 year, I had earned among the highest marks in music, and received all the highest mark in music awards in the courses that I took since Grade 9, both prior and after discovering the beat.
Besides the solutions of increased musical involvement to help students find the beat, in my case learning the piano and coordinating two hands playing different rhythms, composition, and joining other ensembles, other ideas would be to have students associate the sound of a rhythm to its written notation, the playing of percussion ensembles, taking private lessons on the instrument the student is learning in school (or to start them if the school instrumental music program hasn’t started yet, especially if the program starts later than Grade 5 or 6), and to learn to write the rhythms of music in popular styles. Having students dance to different types of rhythms, tempos, and meters (in 2, 3, 4 or 6 for example) will help.
True arrythmia (the lack of an understanding of musical rhythm or pulse) is extremely rare. These ideas, or rather, a combination of these ideas will probably help all but perhaps the very toughest cases. But while some teachers have said that they cannot be helped and even should be dropped or encouraged to quit lessons, it’s possible to go from almost complete lack of rhythmic understanding to being extremely secure in all but extremely difficult rhythms within music, like much Stravinsky and Alban Berg for example.
I’m glad I did not give up on myself to understand rhythm, and other people trying to help me didn’t give up either. Because I went from not knowing where basic note values fit to performing Alban Berg’s Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano twice in my 20s successfully so far in my professional career at two different concerts–which is EXTREMELY difficult in its rhythms.
