Rhythm

 

The house of music has three doors, melody, harmony, and rhythm. Depending on the musical period and style, these three elements can present themselves in different ways and in different relationships to each other. In most music, all three doors lead to the same place, like spokes on a wheel, and all three doors work with each other to fully express themselves and the music.

Melody manifests itself in time and hence creates melodic rhythm, and melody can imply harmonies. Conversely, harmonies can suggest a roadmap for melody to follow. The progression of harmony through time creates its own rhythm—harmonic rhythm.

Rhythm requires sound to be heard or felt, hence rhythm in not independent of sound—sound in the form of pitch and duration.

It has been my experience that apart from the study of percussion, the study of rhythm is often given a backseat in the study of music. Teachers of classical, jazz, and popular music all too often assume that if the student can count out music notation correctly and play notes and chords in time, then their work with rhythm is either complete and that the student can then automatically find the right feeling of the rhythm on their own. This is especially true in the instruction of folk, pop, blues, and jazz. Emphasis is placed on the chords and chords progressions, while the rhythm of the strums and picking patterns is given short shrift.

Many years ago, when I was performing on the folk circuit in Chicago, Illinois, my path often crossed with that of a folk blues artist called Blind Jim Brewer. Jim would begin and end every set with the same song, I’ll Fly Away. It’s a simple song and Jim’s guitar playing emphasized the bass notes of the chords on beats one and three of the measure which he followed with a strong downstroke of the strings on beats two and four. Both the chords and the strum, often called the Carter Family Strum, are something that even an advanced beginner can easily handle. But what could not be duplicated was the effect that Jim’s playing had on his audiences.

Without exception, on every occasion that I observed, whether in coffee houses or college campuses, within moments of him beginning to play this song people began to smile, tap their feet, and clap along to the music. Little children would even begin to dance.

What was it about Jim’s playing that caused this to happen? I believe the answer lies in the power and meaning of living rhythm. Living rhythm is something far beyond playing music in time, it comes within and finds expression through the body.

I recall that James Joyce in his, A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, said, “Rhythm in art is the relationship that exists between the whole and its parts, the relationship that exists between any part and another part within the whole, and the relationship that exists between any part and the whole.” This definition applies equally to all the arts, music, poetry, sculpture, painting, and dance, as well as to life in general, creation, the movement of the stars and planets, and the proportions of the human body and even the makeup of the mind.

Kahlil Gibran spoke about Jesus through the character of Mary Magdeline, “When I saw him in the garden, He moved like none other—he moved as if his every part loved every part of Himself.” – (paraphrase).

Relationship and love, they seem to go together, but how does that make us better musicians and specifically better at rhythm? As a teacher and a musician, it just doesn’t seem appropriate to leave it at that. There must be some practical way to study and practice rhythm. Metronomes and counting will only lead us so far. The “play it like this” approach used by many teachers perhaps takes one a bit further, but I wonder if the most practical approach may turn out to be the one that at first appears to be the least practical and the most impossible to teach or learn, and that is love—love for the music, love for others, and love for oneself?

Above the entrance to Meher Baba’s tomb in India is written, “Mastery in Servitude,” and somewhere in the scriptures it is said, “There was a time when the kingdom of Heaven could be taken by force, but those days are gone. Now the way to the Kingdom of Heaven is through love.”

As a fortunate teacher and performer of classical guitar, I have had the opportunity to attend many guitar concerts. I have seen the best the genre has to offer, and I have observed something very unique about the concerts of Andre Segovia. I saw it manifested in the audience during intermissions and at the end of his concerts.

Contrary to other artist’s concerts, during intermissions and after the concert when leaving the hall and the building, the audiences were generally quite talkative, commenting and discussing the performer, the performance, and the music, but the audiences attending the Segovia concerts were different. They tended to be much quieter, smiled more, talked less, and seemed to be more serene.

I observed this on many occasions, and I wondered why. I have concluded that the difference was due to how Segovia came to become a master musician. I believe he mastered the music by serving it, rather than by force of ego will, in other words, Mastery in Servitude through love.

Of course, love cannot be taught, but I have observed that it can be communicated. As Meher Baba said, love can be caught from those who have it. That love can manifest itself across all genres of music, it is not limited to the works of Bach or musicians like Horwitz and Segovia. It can also be found in the simple folk blues of Blind Jim Brewer and even the simple pop songs and singers of the 1950’s and 60’s.

So, it is love that brings the music to life, love that makes melody, harmony, and rhythm live. Love manifests through the hands and the voice of the musician, through the body of the musician.

Love and service are connected. By continuing to serve the needs of the music, by continuing to sacrifice for the needs of the music, one may gradually learn to love the music, and when love for the music is supported by successful work connected to learning the music, living with the music, and playing the music, the end result is that the musician is raised beyond himself, effaced, as it were, and the music soars to the highest levels of human endeavor.

Studs Terkel once asked Andre Segovia why, after becoming a true master of the music, he still continued to practice scales and other exercises daily. To this question Segovia replied, “Studs, I know I don’t have to remind you of the story of Jacob’s Ladder. Even though the angels had wings to fly, they still ascended and descended the ladder step by step.”

                                                                                                           (c) copyright, Michael Kovitz, 2023

 

 

 

The Alchemy of Transfiguration in Music

“A blueprint is a guide for making something — it's a design or pattern that can be followed.” —Vocabulary.com

After listening to John Fahey’s vintage album, The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death, I began thinking about transfiguration. My first step was to look up the word.  Transfiguration is type of transformation.

Transformation has many nuances of meaning. It could be something as mundane as simple change or something as profound as metamorphosis, or something even more than that— like transfiguration.  Change implies making different and different does not, in and of itself, imply either better or worse, while metamorphosis implies a change to another level, a higher level of consciousness or structure, like when a caterpillar becomes a butterfly.

Transfiguration is something even beyond metamorphosis; like metamorphosis it is a change to another level of consciousness or structure, but additionally, that new level seems to imply aspects or qualities associated with divinity, perfection, ultimate reality, infinite beauty, infinite, bliss, and infinite consciousness—in other words, the highest strivings of creation. In music, transfiguration is when a musician raises his or her expression of the music to a level that inspires the mind and heart of the listener to contemplate the infinite and the eternal.

For there to be transfiguration, a kind of alchemy is required between the composer and his music, the musician who plays that music, and the occasion, or performance, of that music.

Andre Segovia was once asked by Studs Terkel about this alchemy and Segovia answered him by saying, “Lazarus was dead and in his grave and Jesus walked up to him and said, ‘Lazarus arise!’ and Lazarus arose and was alive. At that moment, Lazarus belonged as much to Jesus as he did to his own mother and father.”

The Scriptural context that Segovia was paraphrasing is found in Acts 20:7-12 “And when he thus had spoken, he cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth. And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with grave clothes: and his face was bound about with a napkin. Jesus said to them, ‘Loose him, and let him go.’”

So, the musician brings the music to life by playing it and, in that moment that piece of music belongs as much to the musician as it does to the composer. That is what Segovia was saying. But what I wonder is if all the music I hear is truly alive? Can the singular act of translating a blueprint into sound be enough to bring a piece of music to life? After all, the notation of a piece of music is only a blueprint that enables the thoughtful musician to arrive at an expression of the music that is acceptable to the composer, the musician, and the audience.

On another occasion Segovia told a young woman that she was disrespecting the music. She gasped and then fell silent. Segovia said that he would try to explain and went on to say that both the good musician and the bad musician disrespect the music. He said that difference was in how they disrespect it.

My understanding of his statement was that when Segovia said “the music,” he meant the notation of the music—the blueprint. I think he was saying that the lesser musician does not extrapolate all of the information from the blueprint and makes mistakes with it and therefore, what comes out, does not respect the music and the composer’s wishes. A good musician, on the other hand, goes beyond the limitations of the literal blueprint, understands beyond the explicit information of the literal blueprint, and creates an expression of the music that disrespects the literal blueprint by transforming it into something more.

As a musician and as a listener I begin to lose interest if a musician is merely translating a musical blueprint, even if the expression is superficially different than other expressions I have heard. I get more interested if the expression of a piece of music reveals something new to me about the music, something that I was not formerly aware of—something about its harmonies, or melodies, or rhythms, or structure. I am interested, yes, but still wishing, still yearning, for something more—something that can take me to a higher level of consciousness, a higher experience that touches the highest expectations of what art is and can be and inspires the deepest of longings for a real fulfillment of myself and the meaning of my world.  

When music realizes its potential to take us into places that cannot be described in words, places where one sees a glimpse, or hears a whisper, or senses an awareness of that which is real, that which is infinite, and eternal, then that music is not merely inspired, it is transfigured and it is the nature of that which is transfigured to transfigure all and everything that it touches.

© copyright, 2016, Michael Kovitz