Answering a question from a drumming forum— I can give a longer answer here, because a) it would be pompous to do that on a forum, and b) I don’t want to waste my time writing something that will just get annihilated when the forum owners decide they don’t want to do it any more.
So, a question on effective rhythm in composing and arranging, especially with respect to the interactions of rhythms:
I want to discover theory and practice frameworks which look at what works rhythmically in helping to create aesthetically satisfying music.
I’m not interested in analyses that mainly focus on rhythmic substrata provided by rhythm sections. Wanting to look at how everything interacts rhythmically, especially the main melodic sections of a group: the “lead” singers and instrumentalists who often perform the most rhythmically sophisticated and interesting functions of a piece of music.
For example, David Reck’s book “Music of the Whole Earth” uses an approach I like. He looks at how traditional musics from around the world use their own typical rhythmic patterns of tension and release. And getting more particular, as an example he looks at the wonderful complexity of the rhythmic interactions of every musician’s part in Ike & Tina Turner performances. Unfortunately though, in this book, he doesn’t get into the specific details of these interactions.
I’m guessing that a lot of students and academics have done their own theoretical work in this area but I’ve been struggling to find what I’m looking for. (I’ve only had basic music lessons in playing various instruments and never any composition/arrangement lessons.)
Would you be able to recommend any books, studies that you’ve found useful?
I have no good direct answer for that, but a lot of meta answers on why it doesn’t work that way, and why you can’t just get it out of a book.
You’d be surprised re: the topics people have not written about. Or not written about in a way that satisfies your particular interest. It can take years to find satisfactory answers to questions like this. Usually you have to figure it out yourself, via an ongoing broader musical education and musical life. You probably have to learn some other things to get to the thing you wanted to learn— like getting a better than ordinary understanding of rhythm; writing it, reading it, knowing what you’re hearing. Better at composing and arranging generally, and probably at playing an instrument.
The books, the research documents for this, are the records— audio recordings. You already know what is effective and aesthetically satisfying, because you’ve heard some music, and have found some things to be effective and aesthetically satisfying. It’s up to you to listen and figure out what’s going on.
It doesn’t need to be handed down from an outside authority. Your own feelings are good enough. To the extent that the person writing the book had any original thoughts about it, they just said why they think something sounds cool… in academic language, buttressed with some research— into what someone else said they think sounds cool.
Your entire value as a composer and player comes from following your own ear. There is no other way to do it. You can know some stuff and use some devices, but your ear has to be the thing driving it. Even if you only got it from a book, it has to pass through your own ears to be of any creative use.
If we’re thinking effective, it can’t be an impersonal thing, it has to be something you noticed, that has meaning to you— a vibe, a feeling, you don’t need to be able to put words to it. It may not be easy to isolate a rhythm effect from other aspects— melodic, harmonic, articulations, timbre, dynamics, lyrics, orchestration.
Where you start is to just describe what happened. You should be able to listen to a piece of music and say some things about it. For example, here is a piece of music with a lot of mass appeal:
No complaints, the guy said aesthetically satisfying.
It opens with a little two tone thing that doubles up on itself. The drum beat is a 2-beat, a polka. Counting the rhythm in a fast 4, you’ll notice the melody starts on the 2 and ends on the 1, as does the hand clapping thing that ends the phrase— well known as part of the titular “chicken dance.” A little syncopation there, and forward motion. We get a little lift from one line ending on 1 and next line starting on 2. The B section is more vocal-like, still with the pickups starting on the 2, or the 4, with some syncopation in longer tones, if you take ten seconds to write down the rhythm there.
You start noticing things like that about the music you listen to, paying special attention to anything that that stands out as particularly effective, or particularly anything. And you should be able to listen objectively, but you also shouldn’t need someone make you listen to something as egregious as The Chicken Dance to assert your own tastes.
It seems that more and more people see music as something to be learned, not experienced.
It has to be personal first and foremost, otherwise it is just an exercise, nothing more.
By the way: You really should check out the version with the German lyrics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRynKWg5ozg
Oh my God. The spandex really completes the effect there.
For some reason it got me thinking of Alabama Song:
https://youtu.be/aeF0ZioTsTg?si=9g7bbvnv7q1cjcGk
I’ve been trying to figure out what people are doing with music– seeing a lot of questions that would have gotten sorted out if they were learning an instrument seriously, and playing in ensembles. I think they’re all just doing it on their laptops.
This isn’t meant to specifically bag on the guy who asked the original question, but it does bring to mind a lot of weird attitudes people seem to have these days about art. In particular, people (mostly people who have never seriously tried to create something) seem convinced that only high-level ideas are worth thinking about. Pop music critics, for instance, seem to think the only meaningful description of a piece of music is where it sits on their little genre continuum; conversely, the actual melody, the chords, the performances by the players are regarded as besides the point. Except that if you play music, you realize that those things are literally what the song is.
A couple of different people told me recently that they think they would be good writers, except they don’t like putting sentences together (one person who told me this also said he cannot read a book unless its on tape! how can you write a book if you can’t even sit down and read one??), which is about like saying, “I would be a great painter, I just don’t want to have to put paint on the canvas.” Good art, though, is really about the interplay between all the levels. If you’re completely bored by the details of an art form, then you aren’t really interested in it; you like the idea of being creative, but you aren’t interested in actually creating things.
The apotheosis of this noxious attitude is AI, where you type in the prompt and let the computer make every small scale decision for you, because you’ve decided all of those little details are superfluous. In fact, the sum of all those tiny little decisions is what makes something unique.
I think we’ve all gone through phases musically where we start thinking of things in weirdly abstract terms (something like what this guy is getting at), but that’s not a substitute for getting down to the nuts and bolts. If you’re interested in rhythm, you should think about actual rhythms and how to play them. There isn’t some large scale ethos that supersedes that sort of fundamental knowledge.