Rubato

I'm currently teaching one of my granddaughters to play the piano.  At this stage you spend a lot of time getting the pupil to play in time, that is, making sure they understand the relationship of each note to another in an almost a mathematical sense.  One crochet has to be as long as another crochet, a semibreve has to be held the length of four crochets and so forth.  It's all very relative.  With a fast piece the crochet is shorter than it is in the slow piece, and as a longstanding player of music, you take this for granted, often failing to realise that it's not as obvious to a pupil as it is to you.

And as time goes on, and children play more complicated music, you begin to teach them that the first crochet isn't necessarily quite as long as the second crochet, or vice versa, because you give more emphasis to one than the other.  And that one bar may be stretched out longer than the previous one, even though they're both strictly speaking the same length.  I've just been practicising a piece for the Brass Band competitions with a cornet player, and of course there are different 'speeds' for different sections (meaning that the crochets, for instance, aren't the same length in the fast section as they are in the slow) but even within the sections, notes are stretched, sped up and generally twisted according to the mood of the piece at that point.  Music is actually hugely fluid, and this is a difficult thing to teach. 

I saw a film years ago, a documentary about Isaac Stern going to China after the Cultural Revolution, called From Mao to Mozart.  There were plenty of young Chinese musicians after the Revolution, and they were playing Western music, but they had no sense of the feeling, the rubato, the shifting of pace that is common to this kind of music. Western influences in China during the Cultural Revolution were banned, and the musicians lost touch with the way the music was played.   They played strictly in time, and of course, it sounded like clockwork.  There's a time and place for this in music, but it's rare by comparison with the normality of pulling music about like plasticine.  You get to a stage in life where you never think about this, you just do it. 

As a footnote to that movie, I remember a pitiful scene in which a music teacher told us how he'd been locked in the equivalent of a cupboard for some long time during the Revolution; the Red Guard did horrific things to artists.  In spite of that, after the Revolution's worst excesses were over, he continued to teach. 

Some typically biased thoughts on drummers

Did you know that the seat a drummer sits on is called a 'throne?'  Nope?  Join the club.  I only discovered this today when I got the somewhat enigmatic message: buy drum throne. I'd always assumed the thing the drummer puts his bum on was a seat, as you'd expect.  But no, it's called a throne, and perhaps this is why many drummers have such a high opinion of themselves.

I've met - and worked with - some great drummers in my time; I've also met some whose ambition seemed to be to obliterate the rest of humanity.  When I went to church at the Assembly of God, from the mid-70s to the late 80s, there was one brilliant drummer there who was so attuned to what other people were playing that they could vary the tempo to a hair's breadth and he would be with them.  He never dominated the proceedings, forcing the other musicians to follow his beat. 

But there are drummers who, having spent their entire musical training period in a basement with soundproof walls, have never learned that music doesn't revolve around what the drummer does.  They can be enjoyable to play with, when the music requires absolute momentum and strictness of tempo, but when it requires quiet, warmth, rubato, they're just dynamite.  It seems some drummers don't know the meaning of subtlety, or of variation in tempo.  This just becomes frustrating for other musicians, who begin to feel hemmed in.  Even though music seems to be a thing that's regulated to a cut and dried strict rhythm, every musician (expect maybe some of the aforesaid drummers) knows there are shifts and gains in music. This is particularly evident when you accompany a singer: to hold a singer to a strict rhythm throughout would be to destroy the essence of what they're singing.

Some drummers can't be told these things, unfortunately.  Giving a solid beat is what they have come to believe drumming is all about. Ask them to do anything else, and they sit on their throne and sulk, acting as if their integrity had been somehow demeaned.  Or else they just ignore you, and continue to do what they did for so many hours in the basement: hammer it out and forget that the rest of the world exists.

Here's a video of four drummers playing rhythmically but subtly - these guys know how to intermingle with each other.  They're playing a piece called 4by4, by NZ composer, John Psathas. Watch out for the moment, quite a long way through, when one of the drummers casually scratches his ear, tosses his drumstick in the air, and then carries on as if this complex piece was all in a day's work.