The Musical Breath of Life – Rhythm and Timing

Like my old music teacher used to tell me after I had just played my heart out on a piece I had been practicing for a week, “you’re playing black notes on white paper.” At the tender age of 13 years I had no idea what he meant. Now, older and wiser I can see painfully clearly that music without “soul” was just that – black notes on soul-less white paper.

However, by adding phrasing, correct timing and rhythm, we can create beautiful pieces of living music. Here’s how that is accomplished:

In Part 1 of our Music Theory series we learned how notes are recorded on staffs to identify them by name. While this tells you the pitch of the note that needs to be played or sung, it does not tell you WHEN the note should be played or HOW LONG it should be sustained (or held). For this you must be able to interpret the value of each note.

Hearing the “Beat” or “Count”

If you listen to any snippet of music you will hear a pulsing or rhythmic effect. If you now clap with the music, you are almost certain to find yourself naturally carried along by a persistent beat. The most common type of beat you can hear is music with four quarter notes. Try clapping along to your favorite song and repeat the numbers one to four. In doing so, you will usually find that music naturally emphasizes the first beat (or count). This natural grouping of beats is known as a bar or measure.

Music is basically all mathematics. Some notes you hold for one beat, others for 2 beats, others 3 and 4 and so on. Where it really gets interesting (and faster) is when you play successions of notes with the values of one-half a beat, one-quarter of a beat or even less. And when we add a dot beside a note, we add half the value of that note back to itself. What all this means is the amount of time the note is sustained. This brings variety and beauty to groups of notes which become songs, concertos, symphonies, and more.

So, let us review our note values in standard Common Time, otherwise known as Four-Four:

Whole Note: 4 beats
Dotted Half Note: 3 beats
Half Note: 2 beats
Quarter Note: 1 beat
Eighth Note: ½ beat
Sixteenth Note: ¼ beat

Now, if we were to mix and match varieties of valued notes, the results are almost limitless. Ever wonder how new songs can be written? Where’d they get those notes? You’d figure the composers would run out of ideas and variations of the SAME OLD NOTES. But they don’t. Same notes – just different sequences of them.

Recognizing Rests in Music

While it may seem strange at first, an essential element of any type of music is silence. After all, one wise musician once said “It’s not the notes that make the difference between one musician and another, but the silences between them that does.”

Without silence all music would merely be a continuous sound but by adding Rests, we have periods of silence to add diversification and distinction. Notes have their equivalent rests (in Common Time):

Whole-note rest: 4 beats of silence
Half-note rest: 2 beats of silence
Quarter-note rest: 1 beat of silence
Eighth-note rest: ½ beat of silence
Sixteenth-note rest: ¼ beat of silence

Sometimes we can even Tie notes together. This curved line connecting different notes creates one note in effect, combining the values of both without playing or singing them twice. So if you were playing the Note C with the value of a quarter note and tied it to a half note, you would sustain it for 3 full counts.