Klarinet Archive - Posting 000238.txt from 2005/06
From: "Lelia Loban" <lelialoban@-----.net> Subj: [kl] Bounced babies Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 10:15:44 -0400
Tony Pay wrote,
>I wonder whether anyone has tried to teach
>this inner pulse directly to someone lacking it
>-- and if so, I wonder how they went about it?
I've tried to teach it to my husband, Kevin. He's an advanced amateur
violin player, but his sense of rhythm isn't strong and he has an awful
time with syncopated passages. In days of yore, his best teacher, Mischa
Mischakoff, used to whap him with a fly swatter to keep him on the beat.
Though I'm not nearly the musician he is, I do have a good sense of rhythm.
I'm unwilling to hit my husband with a fly swatter, but off and on over the
years, I've tried to help him develop an inner pulse by developing an outer
one first, with mixed results. I hoped that he could translate kinesthetic
movement into something more subtle, instead of learning a bad habit of
distracting davening (bobbing) and foot-stomping. I think dancing is a
great way to learn to feel rhythm (just watch Bulgarian folk dancers, each
with an agile pair of feet stomping along briskly in 2 or 4 while the
threesome of 2 arms and 1 head keeps time in 3!), but Kevin absolutely
refuses to try to dance.
What helped the most (though it didn't fix the problem) was to teach him to
feel an off-beat by tapping his foot while reversing the idea of a
downbeat. I asked him to imagine that his toes strike something solid as
he raises them. In 4/4, then, the beat goes,
1 (up lightly)
2 (down hard)
3 (up lightly)
4 (down hard)
Reversing the motion of the usual first-note downbeat simply calls
attention to the syncopation, to keep one's mind on *not* emphasizing the
downbeat. My mom (a former musician and music teacher) taught me to feel
off-beats this way when I was very young, and then taught me to stop
tapping and just *imagine* tapping, or to tap my big toe inside my shoe
where nobody can hear it or see it. The imaginary toe-tap works well for
me even with complex rhythms, since I can think the right toe in three and
the left toe in two, for instance. Recently, as one of Kevin's quartets
started working on late Beethoven, I've noticed him doing syncopated
foot-tapping when we listen to CDs or the radio. This is not a stunning
success story, but he does seem to feel an off-beat better now than he did
when we met, 37 years ago, for what it's worth....
Lelia Loban
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