I (ain't) Got Rhythm!

I (ain’t)  Got Rhythm!

I still remember the “Smith – Yoder – Bachman” lesson book I got with my brand new, shiny Martin Alto Saxophone in the 5^th grade!  In it, we learned fingerings for the first few tones we were to produce, and then…… a page of whole notes and whole rests!! We were instructed that “a whole note “gets” four beats and a whole rest also “gets” four beats.  Subsequently, we were instructed that a half note (and half rest) “gets” two beats and that two of them is equal to one whole note…  etc. etc. 

Set aside the mind-numbing boredom of this approach to learning rhythm, I am convinced after three decades of teaching music and even more of playing music, that people learn to perform with rhythmic accuracy (if they do at all), only in spite of this approach rather than because of it!

I was a student at the University of Wisconsin – Platteville, when a “new” approach to rhythmic learning emerged.  It was based on the work of Professor Edwin Gordon and was being developed by James Froseth who was then at the UW-Madison.  It dared to suggest that maybe we have this “backwards” and that the missing factor in this whole “mathematical” approach to rhythm was the actual concept of a “beat” or “pulse”  It dared to suggest that until a student has the actual physical experience of a steady pulse, (the “heartbeat” of music) and then builds further concepts by combining these pulses to create longer tones or dividing these pulses to create shorter tones, that any actual rhythmic learning is impossible (or, as I have suggested, accomplished by “accident”)!  It went on to suggest that until a student is able to experience this “pulse” through large muscle movements, as practiced by something as simple as marching around the room to a selection of music, he/she will be unable to successfully “refine” this experience to the smaller muscle movement of fingers and tongue.  This “organic” approach to rhythmic learning was not really new; but it was the first time that it had been systematically applied to learning instrumental music.

Thus, the initial pilot version of Froseth’s  “The Individualized Instructor – Sing, Drum and Play” was developed.  Thomas Dvorak, another UW-Platteville graduate, was teaching at the time at McFarland, Wisconsin and was involved in testing the early versions of this “method”.  Professor Dvorak went on to a nationally recognized career from which he has since retired, as the Director of Bands at UW-Milwaukee.  Richard Grunow, still another UW-Platteville graduate who went on to establish and lead a program of music education at the famous Eastman School of Music in Rochester NY, was also involved in implementing the Gordon-Froseth approach in its early days.

Neither of these distinguished music educators were “ivory tower theorists” but had witnessed the practicality and success of this approach in actual application through years of teaching in public schools.

This method used terminology that was “new” to publications of this kind.  The concept of pulse was known as “tempo beats” and those divisions of the pulse as “duple and triple meter beats”.  For example, rather than the traditional cerebral approach to learning “eighth notes”, students experienced  the concept through such activities as clapping or tapping steady pulses (tempo beats) while singing  familiar (at least then) songs like “Yankee Doodle” for duple meter beats, or “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” for triple meter beats.  Rhythmic learning then grows organically from these basic concepts. 

We all “learned” at some time that 6/8 meter “meant” that there were six beats in a measure (a “measure”?) and that an eighth note “gets” one beat.  This new approach established a tempo beat, represented in this case by a dotted quarter note, and had the student experience the division of the pulse into three equal parts (“Merrily, Merrily, Merrily, Merrily”) and learned the equally common pattern of quarter-eighth in the same way (“life is but a dream”).  So the eventual (and much more realistic) concept is that 6/8 usually  means that there are 2 beats in a measure and the dotted quarter note represents the “tempo beat”.  Teaching of “cut time” also becomes so much easier: the student “transfers” the concept of duple meter-beats (“Yankee Doodle”) into a version in which the tempo beat is represented by a half-note and the duple meter beats by quarter notes – it sounds the same – it just looks different!   Other terms adopted in later incarnations of this approach substitute the terms “macro beats” and “micro beats”.  Whatever the terms, the approach remains the same:  physical experience of a steady pulse forms the basis of all rhythmic learning.

The original Froseth series also involved included similar “organic” approaches to the melodic aspects of music learning by recognition of tonal patterns in major and minor tonalities, based on another term coined by Gordon; “audiation”.  A series of supplementary books included page after page of actual songs employing the basic concepts introduced in the method.

So, why after over 40 years hasn’t this innovative and practical approach to music pedagogy been more widely used?   That’s a difficult question to answer, but probably begins with music educators’ reluctance to “re-learn” something in a manner different from which it was originally “learned”.   Another factor, in my opinion, has to do with the non-musical factor of marketing.  The “big-box” music publishers have over the years come out with slick publications that included lots of “bells and whistles” and became the “leading” (that is; best selling) pedagogical publications, not so much by virtue of their substance but of their style and familiarity.  A much better and more practical approach is possible. Music educators just have to look a little harder to find it!