Natural rhythms?

[herodotus]

A while back, a discussion began in a different thread about a controversial musician.

The thread was filled with personal differences and rancor, which I had no desire to be a part of. But there was a sub-topic within the thread that is worthy of discussion in it's own right. Hence this new, baggage free thread.

Anyway, the discussion concerned which rhythms were 'natural' and which were not.

On the one hand was the common sense notion that 4/4 was the most natural basis for rhythm. I mean, there certainly is a lot of it in the world, right? Plus, people march in 2/4 or 4/4, which is also fairly natural.

On the other hand, so the controversial musician was said to assert, was the notion that 4/4 was NOT natural. In support of this notion the controversial musician pointed out that nobody talks in 4/4.

Now this was the start of the interesting part. I don't want to re-start the useless angry bickering, so I will not get more particular, but the basic back and forth was as described above.

I myself am not sure what is natural. But I realized that part of music history backs up the controversial musician's assertion. The notation of pitch is much older than the notation of rhythm, like hundreds of years older. And the way pitch notation worked is that the pitch symbols, called neumes, were written above or below words, which of course have their own rhythms, which were well understood in antiquity.

So music, which was always sung in the West, had speech-defined musical rhythm hundreds of years before Mensural Notation, which was around for hundreds of years before modern notation with its numerical time signatures, of which 4/4 is one.

Anyway, discuss.

And be nice, people.

[herodotus]

God I hate posting from my phone.

[woggle]

Musically there seems to be no natural rhythm - you like what your culture/environment uses, become used to that and find it difficult to play along with rhythms outside of those your culture uses. So it is hard for someone from a typical Anglophone country to play Balkan rhythms but not vice-versa. But whether there is something to regularly timed pulse I don't know. It is not that common to have an irregular pulse eg slowing down or speeding up (some traditional Japanese music has this).
Even swing is reasonably regular even if you dont count it in 3s - you have a short and longer beat that repeats. What doesn't seem to be around as a pulse is one beat of length one, another of length.75, then 0.9, then 1 again, then .5, then two thirds, then 1 etc etc
I dont think the word base rhythm thing is strong as a way of breaking pulse - most of the stuff I have heard like that eg Indigenous Australian song - has a regular pulse

[Michael L]

Here in Australia, Aboriginal drumming in ceremonies (pre-Western notation) is at 60bpm because that is the normal heart rate, so I second = I beat. Singing is at 15 bpm because that is the normal breathing rate, so 60/15 = 4, thus we can say that 4/4 is our natural breath/heart/second ratio. Dividing an hour into 60 minutes and then into 60 seconds is >5000 years old (pre-Babylonian), so we can claim that the length of a beat also has a long history, and perhaps even invoke evolutionary conservation.

At the same time, we can look at the correspondence between pitch relations and rhythms, such as explored by Charles Seeger and his student Henry Cowell in the early 20th c (see Cowell's New Musical Resources). The overtone series is whole numbers, and there is clear preference in Western music scales for such consonance. Polyrhythms with similar numerical relations are also generally preferred (but exceptions to everything). An interesting 'KVR' example dates from 1931 when Leon Theremin and Henry Cowell built the world's first drum machine. The Rhythmicon is a keyboard instrument that plays unpitched percussion at rates determined by the overtone series, thus creating pitches at higher notes.

[jancivil]

Ok, it's far too hot here even after dark to do any work so I'll bite.

First: "4/4" is not through itself a rhythm. It's a division of time. I would not personally call a 4/4 beat, four on the floor a rhythm, but marking time.

Once on this board it was asserted that 4/4 is the natural beat because that's how the heart beats. I cannot verify this by my own body. I don't think this is possible, because you have delimited what happens by a number and it appears to be arbitrary. Why is it not 1, or 6? And that assignation seemed to be entirely circular to the cherished premise, '4/4 is the natural beat'.

I would not make such assertions. I would say, however, that now, with this heartbeat we do have a rhythm.
That's my definition and I'm not going to get into defending it.

In terms of a time signature, why is 3 not as natural as 4 for the nominator? This appears to be cultural and received; from what would purportedly be the prevalence of finding it, let's say 'in the west', Western Europe and as received from there in the United States and so forth.

I don't know why Frank Zappa is a controversial musician.
A controversial figure as a media persona, I guess so.

But this little brouhaha is my fault so here's the context: He said to Chad Wackerman, according to Chad in some interview I found on Youtube: "4/4 is the most unnatural thing in the world.". CW was taken aback and FZ said "Well, do you talk in 4/4?"

My experience as an 11-year old starting out on drums was, 4/4 came to me without thinking about it. I actually remember looking at some sheet music I'd obtained (I read a little) in order to do this Ventures number or whatever it was with my first attempt at having a combo and it took a moment to convey the time, 3/4, to the other two. That is conditioning. And I suppose I had heard a waltz or like that.

4/4 or Cut Time 2/2, or 2/4 for marching. Is marching natural? Is regimenting your walking to strict tempo natural? I'd be skeptical.

But FZ was all about speech rhythm, which he mentioned he found correct in Johnny 'Guitar' Watson's solos.
And before this he had a teacher or a band leader in school where he got Scottisch, rudimentary drumming.
So, I had a little of that and I don't think it's a huge leap to get from here to speech-inflection in rhythm.
(I'm not going to be able to keep FZ 'the unmentionable person who... ' just because of individuals I can, and do very nearly completely ignore now. There will be too much has to be left out from my end.)

Back to meter: it's evident that in certain Eastern European areas, a meter of 7 is... not unpopular.
Or what is Blue Rondo a la Turk in? 9. Dave Brubeck on tour found that in Turkey.

Is this unnatural, where 4 is natural in and of itself? That's just cultural hegemony.

[jancivil]

I dont think the word base rhythm thing is strong as a way of breaking pulse - most of the stuff I have heard like that eg Indigenous Australian song - has a regular pulse

I'd go further, I don't think it is grasped as anything without a pulse, for the most part on planet earth. I could be mistaken: there may be some area completely obscure to me where this is not true, but when I work with very involved rhythm, whatever the idea is, I feel lost without defining '1'. I like to cross the bar (temporarily erasing it for that matter), no problem but with no meter (which may itself be untethered from the pulse which isn't even explicated but implied)... I don't think I know how to proceed. That's an intellectual limitation, possibly.

[donkey tugger]

Blimey, takes me back to my A Level English where we had to study the rhythm of language. All ye olde poetry (and I'm assuming song..) was I seem to recall written in iambic pentameter. For some reason I always recall this example from 'The Pardoner's Tale'', by Chaucer;

"I wish I had thy collions in my hand
Instead of relics or of sanctuary.
Let cut them off; I will thee help them carry.
They shall be shrinèd in a hog's turd."

[Michael L]

Perhaps the concept of tension <> resolution in tonal music is also related to certain rhythms and relations being more natural so that difference is defined as deviation (a breakthrough theory book, Geometry of Music explores this in detail.)

I will never criticise Frank Zappa!
However, he always proclaimed his difference from prevailing norms (a dapper Zappa played the bicycle on Steve Allen's show in 1963, see YouTube: watch?v=y9P2V0_p6vE) so I suggest when he strongly objects to 4/4 it is a tactic and "Zappa doth protest too much!".

[jancivil]

The notation of pitch is much older than the notation of rhythm, like hundreds of years older. And the way pitch notation worked is that the pitch symbols, called neumes, were written above or below words, which of course have their own rhythms, which were well understood in antiquity.

So music, which was always sung in the West, had speech-defined musical rhythm hundreds of years before Mensural Notation, which was around for hundreds of years before modern notation with its numerical time signatures, of which 4/4 is one.

Is the rhythm of all of this natural speech, though? I mean I'm familiar, in fact in 'Music Theory' at CCM we had to sing from the neumes. I don't remember it, but my general impression is The Church will have considered everyday speech vulgar. But a lot passed under that bridge that was not metered!

Has anybody else sought to transcribe and sort out the rhythm of speech? This was a big thing for me before I'd read any of this from FZ. I don't speak any Chinese dialect, so on the 30 Stockton or 15 Third St line I'm hearing all of this not understanding one word so it was all rhythm. I found it inspiring, compositionally. I remember my roommate and partner-in-crime musically went in to mention it to Sheinfeld at SFCM, his composition professor and he came back talking about Chinese poetry. And I was, 'yeah that isn't it at all'.

But we get into odd numbers and nested stuff inside of that, and it might be worse than that.

[Michael L]

it might be worse than that.

Or be better! After all, Stockton runs by Union Square where Steve Reich recorded "It's Gonna Rain" and turned it into polyrhythmic speech.

[jancivil]

"I wish I had thy collions in my hand
Instead of relics or of sanctuary.
Let cut them off; I will thee help them carry.
They shall be shrinèd in a hog's turd."

It seems like to me there is a received way of expressing these syllables, subdivision by twos.
I was a musician before I ever heard the term 'iambic pentameter'. I had a band where the drummer put that to me and I had no clue.

So in terms of notating rhythm, the 'I' is an upbeat. I found it odd to talk about meter where the upbeat is the first thing counted. Anyway.
Bear with me, I'm going for a point:

I
wish I had thy <quarter notes> collions in my hand <four 8th notes and a quarter + a quarter rest> = one bar of 4/2.
little question of this although one could get cute with it.
In
stead of <two quarters> relics or of <four 8ths> sanctuary - Hold up.
4 out of 5 of 5-in-the-time-of the last beat of 4/2? Are we going to have to shoehorn it into 8th notes? That's pretty trite sounding IME.

I find the former natural speech rhythm at this point; w. the latter it's still conforming as proper 'metrical poetry'.
Then the next two lines are a big question mark to me and I'm going to take it 'naturally'.

[donkey tugger]

"I wish I had thy collions in my hand
Instead of relics or of sanctuary.
Let cut them off; I will thee help them carry.
They shall be shrinèd in a hog's turd."

It seems like to me there is a received way of expressing these syllables, subdivision by twos.
I was a musician before I ever heard the term 'iambic pentameter'. I had a band where the drummer put that to me and I had no clue.

So in terms of notating rhythm, the 'I' is an upbeat. I found it odd to talk about meter where the upbeat is the first thing counted. Anyway.
Bear with me, I'm going for a point:

I
wish I had thy <quarter notes> collions in my hand <four 8th notes and a quarter + a quarter rest> = one bar of 4/2.
little question of this although one could get cute with it.
In
stead of <two quarters> relics or of <four 8ths> sanctuary - Hold up.
4 out of 5 of 5-in-the-time-of the last beat of 4/2? Are we going to have to shoehorn it into 8th notes? That's pretty trite sounding IME.

I find the former natural speech rhythm at this point; w. the latter it's still conforming as proper 'metrical poetry'.
Then the next two lines are a big question mark to me and I'm going to take it 'naturally'.

It was 30 years ago so my memory is a bit sketchy at best...I do recall when we listened to recordings of it in the original dialect (as best as they could reconstruct it), it did sound very 'off' rhythm wise compared to modern speech.....but of course the unfamiliarity of the words themselves probably enhanced that perception a great deal. Interesting stuff for sure

[Gamma-UT]

I myself am not sure what is natural. But I realized that part of music history backs up the controversial musician's assertion. The notation of pitch is much older than the notation of rhythm, like hundreds of years older. And the way pitch notation worked is that the pitch symbols, called neumes, were written above or below words, which of course have their own rhythms, which were well understood in antiquity.

Just because it wasn't notated individually doesn't mean there weren't rules. The Medieval theorists incorporated a lot of religiously inspired thinking into what they called music theory. Definite and unchanging rhythms were associated with specific musical forms even though there was no notated meter. Because a lot of that was solemn music, it was probably made deliberately unnatural in order to distance it from the common folk music played in bawdy bars.

Tempus perfectum, for example, from the Ars Nova days was built on threes. It doesn't take too much to guess why, when religion was responsible for most written Western European music of the time, rhythms built on threes were important. Tempus imperfectum was the name applied to 6/8 and 2/4 meters.

Richard Taruskin's "Music from the Earliest Notations..." goes into a lot of detail on this stuff, though as we don't have recordings or anywhere near a complete set of records on what was sung and played, there's still a lot of speculation about what was meant by rhythm and meter in the early theory texts. It gets even fuzzier when going back to Greek music - though that seems to have more in common with poetry, so rhythmic groupings like trochees, iambs and anapests may have been much more important than any sort of regular meter.

To my mind, the fact that there were strict rules on how words are stressed in different forms of poetry or music – you will do this this way – and held throughout the piece, it suggest that none of them are 'natural' but used to reinforce the differences to normal speech. If someone started to talk to you in iambic parameter in a converstation at a bus stop, you'd probably start wondering whether you should go find another bus stop.

[woggle]

and my review of I think the premiere
http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue51/6893

[fmr]

Back to meter: it's evident that in certain Eastern European areas, a meter of 7 is... not unpopular.
Or what is Blue Rondo a la Turk in? 9. Dave Brubeck on tour found that in Turkey.

Is this unnatural, where 4 is natural in and of itself? That's just cultural hegemony.

This "cultural hegemony" is not even european, I think. The time divisions (and you're right, 4/4 is not a rhythm, it's a bar/time division, and nothing more "artificial" than that) that were prevalent long before there was notation were a division by two (imperfect) and a division by three (perfect).

Time division by three is eminently "danceable" and European folk music is filled with this kind of time divisions. I am not folk specialist, but I would risk saying that a ternary time division is at least as popular as a binary time division.

Quaternary time division is an evolution of the binary time division, therefore more modern.

But if we want to go in a proper "rhythm" discussion, then we have to enter in the rhythm of the words, which very much "commanded" the musical rhythm. The old Greeks studied extensively the metrics of their poetry (the "metrical feet") and translated their system into the music. Latins imitated that system.

Arabs also created their own prosody metric system. I'd say that, since the beginning, it was the prosody (the internal rhythm of the words) that controlled and created the musical rhythms. Therefore, this was different from language to language. Even today, I'd say that the prosody still has a strong role in musical rhythm, although instrumental music and its evolution somehow helped to create some rhythmical evolutions.

EDIT: Gamma-UT referred to some of the topics I approached here in his post