Music Concepts Online: Rhythm Lecture

Rhythm: The Long and the Short of It

Introduction

I once had a good friend who was a fiddler. When folks would hear him play, it was hard for them to sit still, because his fiddling had something in it which made you want to get up and dance. "It's in the bowin'," he would say and grin, when asked how he managed to make folks want to dance. And I used to watch his bow. I soon noticed that when he bowed his fiddle, there was a wonderful combination of long and short movements, back and forth, across the strings. When he wanted to make you dance a hoedown, the movements were fast. When he wanted to make you dance a waltz, they were slow. These movements of the bow, long and short, fast and slow, were the magic of his fiddling.

Rhythm

Musical sounds, too, can be long or short and fast or slow. Long, short, fast, and slow are terms which are related to time, and music takes place in time. That part of music, the part that concerns time, is called rhythm.

Notes

Our music notation system uses notes. Notes are symbols which indicate the pitch and rhythm of sounds. Since we're concerned here with rhythm, we'll begin with a description of the rhythmic aspects of notes.

Note Parts

A note may be a simple "egg-shaped" thing like this:

Example 1: Whole Note:

Or, a note might be something with a stem and flags, like this:

Example 2: Sixteenth Note:

The parts of a sixteenth note are the (note) head, the stem, and the flag(s):

Example 3: The Note Parts:

Flagged notes in groups use beams instead:

Example 4: Sixteenth Notes wth Beams:

Note Values

The most commonly used notes, and the ones we'll learn about in this course, are the whole note, the half note, the quarter note, the eighth note, and the sixteenth note:

Example 5: Note Values:

Each note is equal to two of the smaller ones:

Example 6: Note Relationships:

Those same notes, placed along a staff might look like this:

Example 7: The Notes of Example 6 Placed on a Staff:

Example 7 Audio:

Once we assign a value to one of the notes, we can figure out the value of the other notes. One whole note equals two half notes. One half note equals two quarter notes. One whole note equals four quarter notes. Well, you get the idea.

For example, if we assign the value of one beat to a quarter note (a very common occurence), we can then figure out that a half note will be equal to two beats, since it is twice as large as a quarter note.

Once we know the value of a note, we can perform it, since we know when to play or sing it and how long to hold it.

Ties

Sometimes two notes are joined by a curved line, which is called a "tie." When two notes are joined by a tie, they become one note which is equal to the sum of both of the notes.

Example 8: a Tie: