What the heck is rhythm
Lately I've been looking into African rhythm (Western or generally Sub-Saharan). Because after understanding the basics of how melody and harmony works, I want to get a better feeling for rhythm.
Japanese flute music is very comfy for me because the rhythm is free and intuitive and nature-sound-like, but at some point I want to be able to do things like playing modern music at a nice pace or just accompanying wadaiko in festivals. and my problem with that is that I hate metronomes. Really fucking hate metronomes. Can't stand the damn things. (I wonder how European Common Practice musicians trained rhythm before the invention of metronomes.)
It's not the clacking that bothers me, it's the deadness of fitting into a grid. This schoolroom feeling of it, this dictatorshipness (but I repeat myself). Even though rhythm is fitting into a grid? But it feels so different when it's someone playing the drums. I considered using the library's Volca Bass, or borrowing their Stylophone Drums, to have something more interesting than a clack, but in the end a drum backing track on youtube is much better for me, though still I feel like I'm missing something. I'm not sure I can explain it well.
If you want to understand harmony you go to European common theory, if you want to understand modality you go to Middle-Eastern or Indian music. I don't think there's any continent in the world that has developed rhythm to the degree that African traditions have. Almost every music genre I can think of that does interesting things with rhythm traces down immediately to sub-Saharan African music. Samba, maracatu, macumba drums, umbigada, the large majority of Latin rhythms, all from Africa. Metal and punk and hardcore all from rock, from blues, from Africa. Taiko ensembles, from jazz drums, from Africa. Hip-hop. Sometimes the rhythm comes from Arabic and North African cultures instead (flamenco, much of Brazilian Northeast). The long tabla cycles of Indian/Carnatic are something I want to understand better, and definitely also the interlocking patterns of gamelan of course, with that satisfying buildup to the big gong. But what attracts me to African rhythms isn't just the famous polyrhytms, but especially the basic element of it: the timelines. The timelines are almost like a metronome, but there's something else. I don't know what's the something else but it allures me.
At the outset people focus a lot on the patterns of the timeline bells, but that's not what intrigues me, I mean the patterns are cool but nothing that you couldn't do with a drum machine. I'm interested between the difference in playing to a drum machine vs. to an agogô.
There is some hints: the timelines, the gamelan interlocks and the long tabla patterns all feel cyclical—music not as a development towards a conclusion, but as a loop, generously endless for you to join in. They're all communal forms of playing; like harmony, rhythm as a thing that helps you do music together, to transcend individuality without losing it. There's this feeling that musicians are not “hitting” or “missing” the beat as if you were playing dance dance fucking revolution, but rather that they are playing with—alongside, against, weaving in-between, laying out contrasting patterns atop—the structure provided by the reference instrument. In a simple word, there's a feeling that they're dancing.
In the African timelines this is the clearest because, for example, the Bantu bell player (who's the reference point, the “drum beat”) will be watching and interacting with the feet of the dancers (I'm told). I'm thinking of the ubiquity of tapping the foot to understand rhythm, even in the most stoic European Common Practice musician figuring out sheet music, sitting alone by the piano dreading their grades in the next lesson. But to recognise this as what it is, a dance, and then make the rhythm reference not dictate the dance, but play with the dancers! There's an echo of that in the rave DJ, I think, the way they will do drops and chillouts and crescendos while watching the crowd, almost as if the crowd were their instrument. I have to imagine a good DJ will pick their tempos based on on what the crowd is telling them back.
So here's my first few vague notions of rhythm:
- Rhythm is an embodied thing. Even if nothing in the body is visibly moving, my tentative definition of “being in rhythm” is: to be dancing, internally if not externally. What bass players call “being in the groove” is some state that happens in your body.
- There's a deadness to the metronome that bothers me; a kind of mercilessness.
- The living, pulsating rhythm that interests me is human;
- Communal;
- And interactive.
- From that I come back to the Japanese free rhythm. it's not really “free” in the sense that you just do anything. It's dancing with something, too, only it's something less obvious than another musician or a steady loop. To a first approximation: with your breath, but it's not just your breath. I want to say “with your internal fluctuations” or “everything around you” or “the cosmos”, but if I try to separate any of those things I feel like it doesn't make sense, it's all the same stuff. It's hard to put in words; but it's also not learned by putting it into words, so that's ok.
One element I spot often in Amazonian music is a leg rattle, tied to ankles or shins or knees, used in stomp-dancing to keep rhythm. While in full effect when a group uses it, it also pops up in vocal or instrumental solos. I don't know what rhythm is, but this is certainly rhythm:
If my understanding of rhythm is correct this should be something that would help me—level up the foot tapping by making it into an instrument. A bit of a challenge to play the flute while moving and not lose the notes, but exactly the challenge I need right now anyway (getting a stable, reliable air column that can withstand stuff like this). I'm already able to play Cosmo Canyon, but it sounds so lonely without drums (consider this shinobue cover). This sounds like a good way to improve my sense of rhythm: improvise an ankle maracá of some kind, then stomp throughout this song I know.