Years ago,
when I was living in Chicago, there was an elderly blues-man who often played acoustic
guitar in a coffee house in my
neighborhood—I am sorry to say that I can’t remember his name. He began and
ended every set with the song, “I’ll Fly Away.”
He wasn’t
flashy either with his singing or his guitar playing, but he was always
engaging and never failed to get his audience tapping their feet and clapping their
hands to his music. His power emanated from his rhythm, though, on the face of
it, he did not seem to do anything that was not characteristic of blues.
Other
players, myself included, used these same rhythms, yet could not elicit the
same response from our audiences—and I, for one, wondered why. I wondered what he
had, or what he did, that we didn’t. I came to the conclusion that it was not what he had, but where he had it that made all the difference. I concluded that
while I had the rhythms in my head, he had the rhythms in his body. I reasoned
that since human beings respond to rhythm with their bodies, not with their
minds, then if the rhythms came from a performer’s body, then it would be that which
would make the difference—would give their rhythms power.
What does it
mean to have the rhythm in the body?
I decided that it was the body that had to understand
the rhythm and that being able to count and
play a rhythm did not mean that the body understood it.
For decades
I have been a full-time professional musician—performer and teacher. My studio
is my laboratory. It is there that I study myself and my students in order to
make us all better musicians. One thing that has become clear to me is that for
the average student, rhythm is one of the last pieces to be fit into the matrix
of their music. Again, I am not speaking about being able to count and play the
rhythms, this ability usually develops pretty rapidly with traditional musical
work, but to get the body to really understand rhythm and convey its power
through the music takes a different kind of work—a different kind of awareness.
I think that
James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was on to
something when he said, “Rhythm is the
relationship that exists between the whole and its parts; between any part and
the whole; and between any part and any other part within the whole.”
The important
word here, the key to his definition, is the word relationship. Rhythm is relationship and for a relationship to
exist there needs to be at least two—two sounds, two people, two things. Rhythm in music can thus be understood as the
relationship that exists between a piece of music and every sound that makes up
that music; between every sound and every other sound within that music; and
also the relationship that exists between every sub-phrase and every phrase and
even every chord within the whole piece of music.
The
greatness of Joyce’s definition of rhythm is that it is not limited to the
relationships that exist between the relative duration of different sounds in
music; it can also be applied to the relationships that exist between the
pitches of those sounds, and all of the distinctions of timbre and dynamics
also. His definition applies also to painting, sculpture, dance, poetry, in
fact, everything and anything that is made up of more than one thing—and perhaps
even to all that appears to be only one thing when we consider that one can
always be in relation to nothing.
And what is the basis of all rhythm—of all relationships? It is the self. What we understand as the self, ourselves, is the beginning of every relationship we contemplate, and to neglect this truth is to render any study of rhythm and relationship a non sequitur.
Please
listen to this recording by the Dave Brubeck Quartet of Unsquare Dance in 7/4 time from his epic recording Time Further
Out ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDB4K5zCcfk ).
Dave
Brubeck, like the old bluesman, like James Joyce’s poetry and prose, had his
rhythms in his body. He, like them, and the many others not mentioned here in
this blog, communicated their rhythms in a very powerful way to others. They
all inspire me, and hopefully, my music too, and that of the student’s also
with whom I have the privilege to work.
©
copyright Michael Kovitz, 2016
No comments:
Post a Comment