Priorities and patience

Sometimes my students are stymied by rhythms like this:

These rhythms are really not at all difficult to play—to actually execute—for an intermediate-level student. The problem is just one of unfamiliar notation. It is usually related to the all-too-common misconception that the rhythmic pulse is always equal to a quarter note. If you approach this example with a quarter-note pulse in mind, the rhythms are indeed rather complex.

But even an intermediate student should be quite at ease playing subdivisions of a beat into twos, threes, and fours. For a student with the pulse-is-always-a-quarter-note mentality, that means this specifically:

So the key is to reframe the “difficult” rhythm so that it breaks down into subdivisions of two, three, and four. One way would be to rewrite it like this, using more familiar notation:

But often it’s enough for my students just to mark up the original to show an eighth-note rhythmic pulse:

If I walk them through marking the first few measures, they can often finish the project without much additional help. At that point, they are surprised to discover that the rhythms are really much simpler than they first appeared (and that 32nd notes are not necessarily “fast”).

For me this issue comes up most often in the Romantic-period etudes I have my students play, most especially the oboe etudes by Ferling (which my saxophonists also play) and the 32 clarinet etudes by Rose (which are mostly based on the Ferling etudes), but also some of the Milde bassoon etudes and Andersen flute etudes.

In each of these cases, by far the most common occurrence of a non-quarter pulse is the eighth note pulse, and some editions of these indicate an eighth-note based metronome marking (which should be a big hint to a student). In general, my students handle this less-familiar notation with ease once they learn to watch out for etudes or repertoire movements that have 32nd-note rhythms, and to count those with an eighth-note pulse. (The clarinetists run into this early in the Rose 32, as the first and third etudes begin with seeming quarter-note-pulse rhythms, then surprise the student with 32nd-note passages later.)

A 16th-note pulse is also not unheard of (I run across this most often in Baroque repertoire), and certainly others are possible. “Cut time” (2/2) time signatures also fall into this category, though they seem to alarm my students less because they are generally easy enough to count in 4/4; they do sound much more poised if I can convince them to use a true half-note pulse.

In summary:

• If an etude or repertoire piece has 32nd-note rhythms, try counting with an eighth-note pulse. If it has 64th notes, try a sixteenth-note pulse, and so on.
• If the composer or editor provides a metronome marking, notice what note duration is suggested (for ♩ = 50, count in quarters, but for ♪ = 100, count in eighths).
• If it helps, mark in the pulse to reveal the familar two, three, and four subdivisions.
• Don’t panic!

As my students get better at reading more complicated rhythms, often it is the “easy” notes that emerge as the ones still lacking in precision: the longer note values and the rests. It’s not uncommon for my university students to play intricate sixteenth-note rhythms with accuracy and confidence, but play whole notes that are too short by a significant fraction.

Try this: use your thumb and index finger to indicate a distance of about an inch (or, if you live in a country with saner units of measure, do a centimeter). How sure are you of your estimate? Now try one foot (or maybe 30 centimeters), then one yard (or one meter). How sure are you of those estimates? Probably less so. Look into the distance and see if you can guess at a point that is a mile (or kilometer) away. At distances this large, it starts to feel more like just guessing. But if you are reasonably confident of your smaller measurements, you can use them to derive the larger ones: measure out 12 of your guesstimated inches, and you can be more confident that you are in the ballpark of a foot.

Note values are the same way: it’s much easier to place notes that have less “distance” (time) between them. This is why subdividing is key to playing longer notes (or rests) accurately. Don’t start a whole note, wait, and end the note when you suppose enough time has passed; instead, mentally use smaller notes to measure out the longer ones. For example:

Subdivision is also particularly useful for slowing down tempos smoothly and gracefully. When the “large” beats need to get farther apart, it’s not easy to do this gradually and evenly. Smaller beat subdivisions are much easier to manipulate.

Subdivision takes some concentration at first, but can become somewhat automatic with practice. Master this technique for greater precision and control of tempo.

A young music student with some basic competencies might be comfortable with these kinds of rhythms:
But these are a little trickier to pull off well:

Divisions of the pulse into twos and threes is simple enough conceptually, but in most cases we really learn those kinds of rhythms better by ear—we just learn what eighth notes or triplet eighths sound like against a quarter note pulse. A division of the pulse into fourths, like sixteenth notes against a quarter note pulse, is something that could ostensibly be derived: you could start from a duple subdivision, then make the mental shift to hearing the subdivided pulse as the new pulse, then subdivide that. But the quadruple subdivision is common enough that I think most of us ultimately learn to play it by ear, too.

The quarter- and half-note triplets in the first two bars of the example above are a little harder to place accurately, I think, because the “extra” pulses are hard to ignore. If I can somehow mentally block out the pulses (audible or implied) on beats two and four in the first measure, then I’m playing three notes per pulse again, and that’s really no different than, say, eighth-note triplets in 4/4. Same thing for the second bar: if I can tune out the pulses on beats two, three, and four, then I’m just playing that same triple subdivision.

One approach to this problem is to simply learn the less-familiar subdivision by ear. Music notation software is the perfect tool for this; with a little skill you can usually enter rhythms as complex as you like, and hear them played back with the utmost precision against a pulse of your choice. But here are a couple of other useful tricks.

Trick #1: Subdivide long-duration triplets

To play triplets against a duple or quadruple pulse, you can derive them from triplets played against a single pulse. For example, this rhythm…

…can be derived in this way:

Trick #2: Approximate complex tuplets with duple/triple subdivisions

“Tuplets” that are prime numbers greater than three can be difficult to audiate on the fly. But in many cases (not all cases) there is some room for complex tuplets to be somewhat less than perfectly even. For example, a composer might write a scalar “run” that contains a certain collection of pitches that doesn’t divide neatly into the number of beats allotted, and use a tuplet to make them fit into the score in a legible way. In such a case, it might be appropriate for the run to accelerate or decelerate a bit. If so, the tuplet can be reimagined as a series of duple, triple, or quadruple subdivisions.

This, for instance…

…could be approached like this (with a slight acceleration effect on each tuplet)…

…or like this (with a slight deceleration effect on each triplet:

Rewriting the rhythms into duple/triple/quadruple subdivisions of the pulse makes it easier to practice these rhythms methodically and consistently with a metronome, and allows for some anchoring which ran really solidify longer runs. Even if the intention is eventually to play the tuplet with more exact evenness, practicing them this way can help to shore up technique in the early stages.