Exploring "Pulse Magnet": Some Final Reflections
In the last three posts in this series, I've been explaining my process for developing a couple of arrangements for students to perform. These are arrangements based on Matthew Hindson's "Pulse Magnet", and my goal was to bring out the tension that I felt was embedded into the rhythmic ostinato at the start of the movement.
If you've been following along with me this far, you might still be asking: Why? Why base whole arrangements on tension that you created by using your ears and not your eyes? And, more to the point, what is the learning benefit for students when you just confuse them by writing almost the same music two different ways?
In a lot of ways, the educational benefits come down to some things that I've written about elsewhere on this blog, to do with Simon Barker's notion of "embodied knowledge". There is a difference between being able to see that you can split rhythms into different time signatures and being able to feel how those different subdivisions affect the feeling of the rhythms. But even more fundamental than that, I think all this time stuff is important because it demonstrates that rhythm is far more mouldable than time signatures demonstrate. Let me try and explain.
Rhythm As Event
If you ignore pitch, and imagine that I'm tapping the table with my finger at a rate of 1 tap per second, there are an infinite number of ways that you can notate that event. You could write the event as crotchets at 60 beats per minute. But you could also write it as crotchet triplets at 90 beats per minute. Or crotchet quintuplets at 75 bpm. And the calculations could go on forever. The point is, unlike a concert A440, which cannot be described as any other pitch, divisions of time can be conceived, felt and notated in multiple ways.
You could say that all of these conversations become irrelevant when a composer decides what the time division of rhythms should be, and that's fine. But I would say that some of the most interesting rhythmic music in the world draws its interest from the ambiguity present in its rhythmic framework. It's what makes you get up and move! It's what makes it alive.
Take this song by the Afro-Peruvian singer Eva Ayllon for example. Tap your foot or clap along to the pulse from the start of the video. I'm going to bet big money that, providing you hear things with a Western ear like I do, you are going to be majorly thrown off by the pulse from about 29 seconds in:
The really interesting thing is that if you keep tapping in time with the "new" pulse in the chorus, it works for the rest of the song. In other words, the whole song is in two different "time signatures". Western musicologists would call it polymetre. I think it's even deeper than that. But that's another conversation.
Rhythm in Education
So what does this all have to do with an HSC Music 2 class? Although it is unlikely that any upcoming HSC Music 2 aural exams will feature pieces composed in polymetre, the world of rhythm is the dominant discourse in music today. The work of composers like Matthew Hindson and Andy Akiho is considered innovative in classical circles because of their rhythmic techniques, but in a way they are are only just dipping their toes in to what is happening elsewhere. I don't think it's wise for music educators to be shut off from these other developments, even if the majority of them are happening in popular music and jazz. And so I think it's really important to be exposing students to different ways of hearing, playing and talking about rhythm.