musi-112: Listening to Music

Lecture 3 - Rhythm: Fundamentals [September 11, 2008]

Chapter 1. Advantages and Disadvantages of Musical Notation

[00:00:00]

Professor Craig Wright: Okay, ladies and gentlemen. Good morning. I think
things are going to work better today. I'm optimistic about the audio equipment
and about our slide material and things such as that. All cell phones off and we
will begin. Don't forget sections start tonight at seven o'clock and there's
another set at eight o'clock and then Friday afternoon at one thirty and Monday
morning. We've got that all online for you. And you do your work product and
you bring it to sections and hand it in to your TA in section each time. So that's
the way this works. I'll be sending you a global e-mail bringing you up to date
with some other things later on this afternoon. Okay. So today we Actually,
before I get to that, any questions from you?

Student: Yeah. Is there stuff to do

Professor Craig Wright: Is there stuff to do for section tonight? Yes, but only
the stuff that was assigned, the Listening Exercises that are assigned early on.
It's just one, nine through 11, which you've probably had done for days now so
you just bring that material and hand it in. Others will be assigned tonight. This
is shopping period. We're started sifting through things and then we'll get
rolling. Gentleman.

Today we're going to come to what I would call the nitty-gritty of the course. We
no longer have any introductory material but we're going to jump into musical
notation and we're going to be dealing with things such as half notes, quarter
notes, things like that, but before we do this I'd like to say a couple of words
about musical notation because it affects how we deal with music, how we
treat music.

Musical notation is a particularly Western phenomenon, and when you stop and
think about it only we in the West, and by West what I mean is the United
States and Canada and Western Europe and Russia, parts of South America,
only we use musical notation and we use it principally for our high art music.
That's not to say that the Chinese don't have an esoteric form of musical
notation, that the Indians do not have an esoteric form of musical notation.
They do, but it doesn't intersect quite as intensely as musical notation does in
Western cultures. Most cultures around the world, if you stop and think about it,
don't use musical notation. But we do here with our art music and that has two
advantages.
Let's talk about the advantages first. One, it allows the composer to specify
rather precisely what he or she wants, to sort of write things out in the form of
musical details, so as the result the creator in this Western art form takes on
greater importance than the creator in other cultures where the composer so to
speak is more or less anonymous and perhaps synonymous with the group as a
whole.

So again the process of notation allows the composer to loom larger. And
secondly there's another advantage of notation. It allows us to preserve the
work of art. We can kind of freeze dry this thing and store it and then bring it
back to life more or less exactly as the composer had intended. But this, if you
stop and think about it, takes the traditional balance of things and throws it out
of proportion.

In our art music, our symphonies, concertos, genres of this sort, the performer
is actually much less important. Let's think of this as architect and carpenter.
The great architect, the thinker, is the composer and the performer, the
violinist, gets this piece of gets this blueprint or black print in the case of
musical notation and is expected simply to replicate the black print. Well, that's
very different than what happens in other kinds of music.

Let's talk about pop music for a second: jazz, rock, hip-hop, blues, that kind of
thing. You go over to Toad's Place and you see the band come out and the first
thing they do is plunk this in front of them? No. That'd be ridiculous. How many
of you I was walking with a student over to my office after lecture the other
day to get some material to him. How many of you play in a rock band or have
ever played in a rock band? Okay, a number of you. Young lady out there, did
you use musical notation? No. That would be kind of silly. Right? It's Okay. So
how is it done? Well, it's all done aurally and we'll talk a little bit more about
that as we go along.

So the composer in the West is very important, more important than the
composer in other cultures. Other cultures don't use this type of prescriptive
notation.

Here's a thought for you. Musical notation was the first graph in Western
culture. "How could that be?" you'd say. How could that be? Well, if you go back
to the formation of musical notation from the ninth through the twelfth
centuries, we see that very early on these two dimensions of music, the two
axes of music that we talked about before, pitch vertically and duration
horizontally, are in place and we have these spots in this grid. So musical
notation: the first grid pattern in Western culture but it does lock us in in
interesting ways that we may you perhaps have never considered
compared to how music is made in other cultures.
Let's see how some music is made in other cultures. We're going to play here
now as our first excerpt an Adhan, and what this is is the Islamic call to worship
which is sung across the world thousands of times every day, and as we listen
to this I want you to think about the vocal production here. What's interesting
are all of the vocal nuances, so let's listen to just a bit of this please. [music
playing] Okay. Let's stop there. Fascinating. What a wonderful sound, but the
beauty of it is all between what we would call the notes. We would specify a
precise frequency here, another one up here, but what that gentleman was
singing was all the stuff in between. That made it very beautiful, and there's no
way in God's earth that we could replicate that to the Western system of
musical notation.

Let's take another example. We're going to go to the realm of Western jazz here
and I'm going to pick on Chuck Mangione. Anybody ever heard of Chuck
Mangione? Yeah. Okay. Brian, our tech guy, has. He's an older fellow. He's sort
of my age, and the reason I mention Chuck Mangione is that years ago I went
to school with him. He was a couple of classes ahead of me at the Eastman
School of Music. I was a fledgling pianist. He was a very good trumpeter.
Indeed, he was winning Grammys when he was in his twenties and has been
recording sort of esoteric jazz and sometimes more pop jazz thereafter. Now
you can go to a Mangione concert. He will sometimes play the Shubert Theater
there and they'll have two hours of spectacular jazz, but what you won't see,
again, is any sort of music in front of them. So how do these musicians
generate two hours of music with no music in front of them? Does this mean he
doesn't read music? Of course not. You can't get through these conservatories
like Eastman or Juilliard or Curtis without being introduced to an intense
regimen of musical notation, but it would get in the way of the music.

So let's listen to a track here, a sax solo, and I am going to try to keep make
some sense out of this because it gets more and more complex by
following the electric bass underneath so let's listen to an old tape. I used to go
to bars in Rochester and listen to this guy and tape his stuff. So here's Chuck
Mangione with his saxophonist and a saxophone cadenza. It's a wild riff for
saxophone. [music playing]

That's probably enough. It gives you an idea. Now how in the world would you
ever notate that? To produce this as a pre-scripted document that anybody else
could follow? It was all improvisatory. If they tried to notate it, again, it would
take all the spirit out, all the heart out of the music. Well, how do they do that?
How do these performers play such long spans of music without any notation?
Is it all memorized? Well, it's not memorized as we think of it, and you may
have had music lessons along the way and your teacher and your mother said,
"Go memorize your piece." It's not memorized like that.
There are certain basic patterns that they have. They might say for that sort of
music:, "All right. We're now going to have a thirty-two-bar solo. We'll be in the
key of E-flat. We're going to work through a one, six, four, five, one chord
progression as We'll come back to that. We'll sit on the dominant chord for
eight beats and I (Chuck) will look over and everybody else will come back in at
the end of Chris's solo." It would be that kind of thing, kind of head charts,
general plans, and within that general plan a lot of freedom of expression.

So having said that about musical notation something about a cautionary

tale about musical notation we should think about how it affects the way we
compose music in the West and how we perform music in the West. When you
go to a concert of classical music and the music is played and you start to talk,
what happens? Somebody will go, "Shh." Right? We go to these concerts and
we have to be so quiet. Why do we have to be quiet? That doesn't sound like
much fun. Why do we have to be so quiet? It's because we have these
performers up there that are reading this blueprint and everyone is listening,
basically, to see how accurately they can reproduce, revivify, this artistic
artifact. So that's sort of what's going on, but it really does affect how we
behave, even, in a concert.

Now if you go to concerts of other cultures and they are engaged in their own
classical, not just popular, but classical music, Indonesian gamelan music for
example, the audience will be there swaying back and forth, clapping,
applauding with the performance with particularly good solo, the same thing
with Indian sitar music, that classical tradition. Oddly, it's much more like going
to a jazz concert where the audience is sitting maybe around tables or
something like that and encouraging and interacting with the performers, but
again in those cultures no notation.

[In Western art music], everybody sits there sort of mummified, waiting for this
great work of art to come back to life. It's an interesting thing. And isn't it
typical of us in the West to take something, music, which is expression and
feeling and motion and movement, a response to sound, and turn it into
complex patterns, complex patterns that can be visualized and rearranged and
analyzed, and nowadays even digitalized. What we've done is take this
spontaneous response to the creation of sound, and bodily movement with
sound and replaced it. We've replaced the ear and the heart, the ear and the
body, with the eye and the mind. Ours a much more visual it's a much more
analytical type of approach to music and it has its pros and cons. We get
great Mahler symphonies yet we have everybody sitting there rock-still at these
concerts.

Chapter 2. Beats and Meters [00:14:42]

Okay. Having said that and pointing out the advantages and disadvantages of
notation, let's plunge in then to a discussion of it. I've put on the board up here
the following and we're going to review this. It's simply material found on page
fifteen of your textbook but let's review it. We say this is a beginning course so
we assume no previous knowledge. If you've read through that material, and
you should have read through it by now, you know that we have a value in
music. It's called the whole note. What the whole note is, what all these
symbols are, are simply representations of duration so we have a symbolic
language here that's going to represent the horizontal axis, the axis of
duration. And this whole note obviously can be subdivided into two half notes
and each of the half notes into two quarter notes, each of these quarter notes
into two eighth notes, and so on. So these are symbols telling us how long a
particular frequency is to endure.

Similarly, just as we have symbols for the presence of sound and its length, we
have symbols that represent the absence of sound. We call those of course,
what? Rests. Okay. So we're resting over here. We're not making any music. So
we have the notes and their values and the rests. Notice that they're all pretty
much duple in their divisions. Now here's a question for you all duple
divisions. How do we make How do we get triple arrangements in music?
How do we do that? Well, we take our basic note and what do we do to it? I bet
I'm sure some of you know this. How can we get a half note that actually
equals now three quarter notes? What do we do? Gentleman here. Add a dot.
What does that do to this value specifically in terms of ratios? It adds Okay. It
adds fifty percent or a half to that and that means instead of two quarter notes
that we now have three, and we can do the same thing to any one of these
other values here, and that's how we get our triple relationships. Okay? So
those are the basic note values normally with a duple division but we can
superimpose triple by using a dot and the absence of sound.

Now let's talk for a moment about the idea of pulse in music and the beat in
the music and rhythms in music. We all know that there is this thing in music
called "beat" and to the extent that popular music is more interesting and that
you everybody likes it and will go dance to it is because it's really
foregrounding beat and rhythm in an important way that classical music does
not. So I've put this idea of the beat up on the board here. It's really just a
pulse. It's very much like the human pulse. This is the pulse of music, and
music theorists ever since the late fifteenth century from music theory
Francinus Gafurius on we could go all the way back then have said that
the pulse in music is basically at the same tempo as the human pulse, which
comes out to be about oh, we'll say seventy-two beats if you will, pulses, per
minute.

So we have this pulse, and it's just kind of out there streaming, beat, [sings],
but we don't like undifferentiated, disorganized material in the West. Our
psyche says we've got to bring rational organization to this. Ever think about
this? Why do we have this periodicity when you take history courses? Why do
we have the Renaissance, the baroque period, the classical period, the
romantic period and so on? We have it in music. We have it in history. We have
it in the fine arts. Why do we have it? It's simply a convention established after
the fact that allows us to organize material in ways that we can grapple with it,
ways that we can understand it.

So in music what has happened is that we have organized this steady stream of
beats in ways that we can understand. We organize them. We subdivide these
into units of two, for example, groups of two like this, or we have an
undifferentiated stream like this. I am convinced even though I'm sure that
the Toyota Motor Company didn't organize it this way I am convinced that on
my automobile when I do not plug in my safety belt that there is a bell ringing,
"DING, ding, ding, DING, ding, ding." I don't think they were thinking of that in
terms of triple meter. I think they were just a succession of dings, but I'm
hearing it my mind wants to hear this organization, so there's another
organization here of units of three. As you may know, there's yet another
organization where we could group this in units of four, but for all intents and
purposes there are a few nuances to it four is simply a multiplication of
two. So in our course we are only going to have two types of meter, duple and
triple.

These organizations, taking the beat and organizing it into groups, is called
superimposing meter on the music. Then we want to indicate that meter to the
performer. It's a way to tell the performer how this music is to be executed. So
what do we do? Well, in music the most basic symbol for the beat is the quarter
note. The quarter note usually carries the beat. Okay. So here we have a series
of groups of two quarter notes. We have the convention of music of writing this
symbol indicating the beat-carrying unit of four so I'm writing a four
underneath each of these. Then I look up here and say, "Well, in this duple
pattern I have two of these quarter notes." So I'm going to write a two out
there. That (4) tells a performer that the quarter note is carrying the beat. And
the 2 says that there'll be two in each of your units. These units we call bars or
measures, and just to finish this off down here, we would have three quarter
notes, of course, in this particular arrangement.

Okay. Now ultimately what happens with this is that we begin to take this
stream and organize it into different patterns. I can go [sings], something like
this, and we would call that a rhythm, superimposing longs and shorts, different
patterns, patterns that oftentimes repeat. The dividing up of this stream into
different patterns, often repeating, of longs and short, is superimposing rhythm
over top of this basic beat which is organized in terms of these meters.
So are there questions about that? Did that seem straightforward enough? Now
as you may know some of you may have played clarinet in a high school
band or something like that, neither here nor there if you did or did not but
you may know that there are other meters out there, these things called six-
eight (and nine-eight). I was thinking this morning [sings] four, five, six, one,
two, three, four, five, six, one, two. Well, that's a beat of basically a duple
meter with a triple subdivision, but we're not getting into triple subdivisions
here. In our course the beat is always going to be a divided, to the extent
that it's divided always going to be divided into two. We have only so-called
simple meters rather than compound meters. If you want to learn about
compound meters, go take music 210 and become a music major. That's the
kind of thing that they get into but we're not doing that here. We're interested
only really in two things: One, can you differentiate between duple and triple
meter; and two, can you recognize some very basic rhythmic patterns? And
we'll be doing some of that today. Questions again?

Chapter 3. Exercises Distinguishing Duple and Triple Meters [00:23:10]

Okay. Let me play some music at the piano. This is Bulldog. Isn't this the Yale
fight song? Who wrote this? Anybody know? You've probably heard it eight
zillion times at football games. It's great What a wonderful fight song Yale
was so lucky to have this as. So yes, I think I hear somebody out there.

Student: Cole Porter.

Professor Craig Wright: Cole Porter. Who was Cole Porter, as I glance
through my music here? Oh, phooey. I've lost it. Who was Cole Porter? He was a
Yale graduate, class of 1914, and unfortunately I seem to have misplaced
Well, I can generate a little bit of it here. [plays piano] Okay. I was sort of trying
to remember the first page of the missing music there. So is this in duple meter
or triple meter? [plays piano] Huh? What do you think and how do we find out?
Tap your foot. Did we find any music? [plays piano] Ah, thank you.
Enlightenment from Lynda. [plays piano] What What's the key here? What do
you listen to? How many think it's in duple meter? Raise your hand. How many
think it's in triple meter? Okay. Almost everybody thinks it's in duple meter and
that's correct.

Now we worked through this just a little bit once before. What is it that tells us
that it's in duple meter? It's the bass [plays piano] because it's organizing itself
very strongly in duple patterns. There's one other interesting thing in here. This
would be? Well, let's think through this in one additional way, and that is
notice that in duple meter we have a strong beat, right, "strong, weak, strong,
weak, strong, weak, strong weak" in that sense or if we have triple it would be
"strong, weak, weak, strong, weak, weak." There would be two weak beats or
two unstressed beats between each strong beat. We could do this [plays piano]
and we'd have the "Waltz of the Bulldog." It'd be pretty cool [laughter] to see
actually.

So there it's I'm simply taking the Cole Porter piece and throwing in an extra
beat in each measure, an unstressed beat in each measure, and it works out
pretty well. Notice this would be Harvard would have had a field day with
this melody if he Cole Porter had not done one thing. He makes this really
rather snappy by the use of this kind of stuff. [plays piano] We'll come in on
[sings] and then it's [sings]. What's that a good example of? Syncopation, yeah.
The term is on the board, and it's a good example of syncopation, sort of
jumping in ahead of time, cutting off the beat, getting in there ahead of time
and throwing off the metrical balance for a very short period of time.

Okay. So that's a duple meter piece and what we're trying to do here is just
hear if we've got one strong and one weak beat or one strong and two weak
beats. How do we How should we do this? How are you going to do this?
Well, I think one thing that's very helpful is for you to start to move, to move
around, to sway, tap your foot. Now we can't do this during a test in here. It'd
be a little bit annoying but we really have we really do have to do this. Now
musicians, being a bit more uptight oftentimes, classical musicians, than other
more spirited folks, have developed this tradition of using conducting patterns.
Right? So for duple meter we just go down, up, down, up. It's kind of maybe
a little shape over to the right, down, up, down, up, that kind of thing, and for
triple we do down, over, up, down, over, up, down, over, up. Okay? So I'm
going to start playing here and you are going to start conducting. You're going
to listen just for a second and then you're going to move and you're going to
move using the conducting pattern. [plays piano]

Okay. Good. Now I see some of you out there from like this, not really
participating, and if I can get up here Think about this. I'm old. I'm sort of
used to thinking of myself a "White Anglo-Saxon Protestant." I have every
reason in the world to be repressed. Right? [laughter] I could [laughs] This
So if I could be up here making a fool of myself on a daily basis, you guys are
much younger than I and known for outrageous behaviors. You can certainly
get in here and move and flow and go with the beat here. So here we go.
Everybody together. [plays piano] Much better. Okay. I'm watching Good.
Virtually everyone has got the downbeat here. You're not going [sings]. You're
going[sings], so there is a sense of downbeat and we'll come back to that in
just a moment.

Let's do a triple meter one. Here we go. [plays piano] Good. Excellent. Very
good. Now I'm going to modulate, [plays piano] go to a different key. [plays
piano] Can you conduct this? Okay. There's a little confusion here so let's try to
do it together. Are you ready? [sings] Okay. Now this gentleman out here is
actually doing it different from what I am doing and what most of you are
doing, but you know what? He's doing it correctly. We're doing it incorrectly.
[sings] What's wrong here? We're off because our downbeats, our strong
pulses, always have to come on the first part of the bar, this note. The first part
of the bar is called the downbeat. It's the most important thing and our
conducting pattern always has to have the downbeat of the hand in sync with
the strongest impulse in the music, the strong. The downbeat in the music
comes with the down motion of the hand. So we were getting [sings]. Oh,
there's the downbeat, [sings] but we were putting that on two, [sings], and we
don't want that. We want [sings] at that point.

Chapter 4. Conducting Basic Meter Patterns: Exercises with REM,

Chopin, and Ravel [00:31:26]

So what do we have here? What's happening? Well, there's a little bit of music
before the downbeat. That's called a pick-up. Okay? So we have a little pick-up,
[sings]. I was thinking of a diver in the Olympics. They go out there They do
these little steps just before they spring off of the board, [sings], kind of gets
you, really landing good and hard on that downbeat, so the downbeat is very
important to us and we could conclude this by saying that although all music
has a downbeat, not all music starts with a downbeat. Sometimes when
listening to music you have to wait. Listen for a while and your body almost will
start to tell you, start to signal to you, where the downbeat is. Is it really your
body that will signal this to you? I doubt it. It's your brain up here processing all
of this information. We talked about the auditory cortex the first section and
maybe there are other parts of the brain that are factoring in here as well, but
how is it that composers send this information to, let's say, our auditory cortex
here?

How do they do that? Well, there are four principal ways that composers signal
to us the whereabouts of the down beat. Okay? So let's review let's focus on
that just for a moment. Okay. Way number one: That has to do with duration.
Notes are simply longer, held longer. That's how we have the sense of where
the down beat is. [plays piano] You have old Amazin' Grace I guess it's a
spiritual, right? Beautiful. It's beautiful. But think about that. [sings] [plays
piano] And all of those long notes are coming on the downbeat so that's how
we start to hear that as a downbeat, and that's how we know to make our hand
go down at that point so that's one way.

Now another way is through accent, and to exemplify this let's turn to some
classical music, the music of Mozart, so here we have Mozart's Fortieth
Symphony, his famous G Minor Symphony, and we're going to go ahead and
start to play it. [music playing] Okay. Good. Several of you were actually
conducting this. That's great. Okay. This happens to be in duple meter and
that's fine. That wasn't the question here but great, you're hearing that and I'm
delighted.
What Mozart has done here If we could get the score up here of Mozart's
music we would see that he has put a little arrow over top of a wedge
over top of each of the down beats [plays piano] so that the string player will
really accent those, but the string player would be accenting them anyway.
Why? Any violinists in here or anybody who ever played a string instrument?
What are you always told to do? If you are playing a downbeat with an up-bow,
are you in good shape? No, no, no, no. Your teacher would not be happy with
that. Your bowing pattern is probably backward at that point. String players are
taught, whether it's cellists going this way, downbeat, or violas and violinists
coming down this way, that the downward motion of the hand or the pull
across, the strong pull across, should come with the downbeat; that
emphasizes the downbeat. That's how we know the downbeat. So so far we've
had duration and accent. Mozart is actually writing accent into this.

The third way that we that composers signal to us, that we pick up almost
intuitively the whereabouts of downbeats, is through patterns of
accompaniment. We'll call it range.

Okay. So here's a waltz by Richard Strauss, not to be confused no, excuse

me, by Johann Strauss, not to be confused with Richard Strauss whom we
heard last time. [plays piano] And so on. What's important here is the left hand.
[plays piano] That's why we hear a triple pattern here. We're hearing two weak
beats, and the strong beat is always in the lower position here so we're getting
low, middle, middle, [plays piano] low, middle, middle, or it could be something
as we had the other day in the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto, [plays piano] low,
middle, high, low, middle, high, but each time the downbeat seems to be
coming in association with that lowest note. So range or position here in the
accompaniment can oftentimes signal this information to us.

And finally, and most important these others have been pretty
straightforward but what has not been straightforward is something that you
might listen to many, many times and not be aware of, and that is chord
changes. We have chords in music. [plays piano] They're these building blocks
that support the melody and they have to change for that melody to be
consonant all the time. But where they change oftentimes is on the downbeat.
Most frequently, chord changes come on the downbeat so composers signal to
us in a fourth way the downbeat by means of chord change.

Now we're going to play just a little bit of pop music a bit of pop music here,
and by playing this you might think that I think that I'm hip or with it. We're
going to play some rock and roll. Do I look hip or with it? Hopelessly out of
touch with popular culture and nobody knows this better than I, and to prove
this I have chosen a piece because there's a little story with it. I like this piece
because it does something and I've used it in previous years, and I put it on
and I would announce, "I'm now going to play out of the It's an album called
Document by REM [pronounces "rem"]," and put it on and REM ["rem"] and it's
fine with me. That's what it says, "REM," ["re,"]on the printout, and about two
years after I was doing this a student came up and said, "Professor Wright, it's
really not "Rem."" Oh, it's not?" Okay. So that's how distant I am from all of this,
but let's listen to a little of this.

It's in a straightforward four. Rock really comes forth not so much in twos but in
fours so we'll call this a 4/4, and you can beat a four pattern to it or you can
beat a two pattern. It doesn't really matter but notice that whenever the chords
are changing they're changing on down beat. So let's hear a little bit of this and
then we'll stop so they don't sue us for copyright infringement and then we'll
go somewhere else and take another chunk. [music playing]

Okay. So that's all they're doing there. Every time they're changing your hand is
going down, so chord changes may be the most powerful of all of these aspects
of where the down beat is.

Okay. I had intended to give you just a little bit of a rhythmic quiz but let's just
do one of these things. Here's something else we have to do in here. We have
to hear a rhythm and recognize it so we have a series of rhythms on the board
up there. Please choose a rhythm for excerpt one, you can choose rhythm A
which is [sings] or you could choose rhythm B, [sings].

So I'm about to play a piece. It's by Chopin. Which rhythm is in play here?
Which rhythm am I playing? Is it A or is it B? [plays piano] So what do you
think? How many think A? How many think B? Okay. So that's not too
challenging. We'll be doing some of that. Then [plays piano] Chopin is sitting
here and he modulates; he changes key. What about this? Is it This is
number two. Is it A or B? [plays piano] Lovely. Wasn't it lovely, a little thing by
Chopin? How long did it take old Chopin to think that up, do you suppose? Two
seconds? Three seconds of white-hot inspiration? I'm sixty-four years old and I
haven't had one second of genius in my entire life. [laughter] This is really
depressing. It's discouraging. I soldier on but it hasn't come to me. You are
younger and I'm sure that your moment of genius is out there. It's really the
difference between perseverance, in my case, and genius pure,
unadulterated genius in the case of Chopin. What a beautiful melody. In any
event, the answer is what? For two, is it A or B? [plays piano] What do you
think? A, yeah, so that's his rhythm, A there. All right.

We're going to end with one final exercise. It's a fun piece I think. It's fun to do.
It's a piece by Maurice Ravel called Bolero. It's a unique piece. Maurice Ravel
was a French composer writing in the early twentieth century. It's a unique
piece because what he does is take some very basic patterns and simply
repeats them over and over and over again for about fourteen and a half
minutes depending upon the tempo that the conductor is taking the music. So
let's listen to a little bit of this music and I want you, maybe as a group, to tap
with your foot, your hand, whatever, just the beat as you hear it. You don't
have to pay any attention to this. We'll come to this in just a moment, but just
tap and we'll all maybe eventually all together the beat. Here we go. [music
playing]

Most of you are not tapping. So everybody start tapping where you think it is.
[music playing] Okay. Good. All right. Gentleman out here in the orange shirt.
I'm going to have you be a conductor. You were doing really well and you were
conducting correctly early on. So good. Here's what we got. Most people have
[sings]. Some people are going [sings] and in this course we would know
whether you're hearing duple or triple based on some other information so
don't worry about if you're doing [sings]. That's a little bit fast for a beat. What
you're doing there is actually subdividing the beat into two, but don't worry
about that. That's fine. You're doing eighth notes and the rest of us are doing
other people are doing quarter notes. Okay. So the beat is [sings].

Now what music have we been hearing here? Santana, where are you? Okay.
Come on up here. Take a look at this. Lynda, come on over here and take a look
at this. We should have rehearsed this in advance. We did not do this. These
are two ladies that are very experienced singers. I want you to just stand right
up here, please. They have not been forewarned about this! Take a look at this.
[sings] We're going to do it together. Here we go. You're going to sing that top
melody. One, ready, go. [sings] Okay, and we're just going to keep It'll be
fine, and we're just going to keep going and once you get to the end one then
we're going to repeat. Okay? Here we go. Two, sing. [sings] Okay. So you're
going to keep going over and over and over like that. I'm going to be this thing
here. Let's just go This is the percussion. [taps rhythm] Okay? There is no
pitch to it. It is just rhythm. Up here we have melody and rhythm. Here we have
just rhythm. Underneath we have [sings]. We have basically harmony, but it
has a simple rhythm to it. It's a rhythm with a couple of different patterns. You,
students, are going to sing this. Okay? So here we go. Everybody together,
ready, sing.

[sings]

Okay. So here we're going to go The gentleman in the orange shirt I hate
to do this to you but we've got thirty seconds. Stand up. You were doing a great
job. [laughter] Stand up and you can That's fine. You can face me. We'll
coordinate it better this way, and just conduct this in three. I'll start conducting
with you and then you take over. Here we go, one, ready, go. [taps rhythm]
[singing] Okay. Great. This is actually terrific. We're going to take it to Hoboken
and Sheboygan. We're going to play across the world with this group. Okay.
Thank you very much, ladies.
The point here final point and then I'll let you go. This is a melody with
rhythm. This is pure rhythm. This is a harmony with a very simple rhythm here.
Who is playing the beat? I asked you to conduct the beat or to tap the beat.
Most people And everybody was tapping the beat just fine and dandy, but
notice up here nobody is playing the beat. There's nobody up here that's
playing the beat. The brain perceives all of this complex information and it
processes it and it extrapolates from it the beat, but again nobody in music
except the bass drum player in a marching band nobody in music ever does
anything except just play the beat. Okay. So I'll see you starting this evening in
sections.

[end of transcript]