When you are relaxed, your heart beats about 72 times a minute and you breathe about 18 times. This ratio of four beats to one breath is connected not only to CPR, but to music, poetry and dance. Musical rhythm is physical.
Take two pencils and drum while counting aloud: One, Two, Three, Four...over and over, without skipping or prolonging a beat. This is called beating “in four” or “in common time.” Then try beating left, right, left, right while counting One Two Three...over and over. If you do this correctly, you will see how uncommon beating “in three” really is. It will take four complete patterns before the first beat falls on the hand which began the exercise. The stresses or accents will shift as you go.
At the beginning of a piece of music, you will see two numerals, the time signature. The top number is the number of beats in a measure. The bottom number is read as a fraction and tells what kind of note gets one beat. This is the subject of a great deal of confusion in music reading.
We would be much better off if we gave various kinds of notes names like “breve” and “quaver” as the English do, but we are stuck with fractions. Just like the song in “Fiddler On the Roof”, it’s tradition, so you have to memorize the symbols.
A whole note is a round open circle with no stem.
A half note is a round open circle with a stem.
A quarter note is a black circle with a stem.
A whole rest or silence is a black bar hanging from the fourth line from the bottom on the staff. A half rest is a black bar usually sitting on the third line from the bottom.
A quarter rest is an M standing on its end.
If the duration of a note was as obvious as the pitch (highness or lowness) of a note were shown spatially, it would be easier to figure out how long to hold it. However, for various reasons a whole note may not take up four times as much space as a quarter note in your sheet music.
As for rests, some modern composers don’t bother with them and Braille music simply leaves a blank space when the beat is silent. However, anyone who has ever played with a school band or bell choir knows how important knowing about rests is. Unintended solos are no fun at all. In piano, though often one hand or the other is keeping the beat, we still need to be confident about interpreting the symbols for notes and rests.
In the 18th century, during Beethoven’s lifetime, the inventor Johann Nepomuk Maelzel came up with a device he called a metronome to help musicians set the speed of a piece and to stick to the beat. Much music is still marked with M.M. (Maelzel’s Metronome) settings telling how many beats the music has per minute.
Beethoven liked the metronome (the crafty Maelzel also invented ear trumpets to help the increasingly deaf composer.) We believe Schumann’s metronome was broken because of the unlikely tempi he indicated. The brilliant musicologist Charles Rosen said that there were only three metronome indications he took seriously in all music literature, and that all three were in Beethoven.
Vocabulary
Musical rhythm or meter: Notes and silences moving in time.
Beat: A unit of musical rhythm.
Heartbeat: The human heartbeat is about 72 beats per minute, an average rate in music.
Note values: The duration of the musical note, whole, half, quarter, etc.
Rests: Silences in music.
Metronome: An instrument of torture invented in the eighteenth century.
Breve: A double whole note in England. A single whole note is a semibreve.
Quaver: An eighth note in England.
Tempo (plural, tempi): The rate of speed in music, sometimes indicated by metronome marks but almost always with a supplementary Italian term which may also describe the mood of the piece.
Beethoven: Ludwig van Beethoven, 1770-1827.
Schumann: Robert Schumann,, 1810-1856.
