A Drum Solo Obsession is Born, Not Made

"Music was my first love and I was led to dance through that, although I was a miserable failure at playing any of it myself at the keyboard. I am reminded of Mozart, who said that he really cared more for dancing than for music... But I came to love dancing very much, almost as much as music."
-Doris Humphrey

I sat in front of my 6-inch blue piano and played a melody. I edited it until I was satisfied. I wrote down the musical notes and signed my creation with a glamourous version of my name: Blanche Órti. After looking at it for a few minutes, a voice inside my head said: "Who do you think you are to write a song?" Quickly, I tore it into little pieces feeling a shame that to this day brings tears to my eyes. I was seven years old.

Sandwiched between my pianist sister and my rockstar brother I grew up thinking something was wrong with me. They swam in the abstract and invisible world of music. I felt blind in it. They played songs. I drew all day long, comfortable in the visual realm, where time didn't rule. I held on to the belief that talent is born, not made, that I was born a lost cause. I had heard my mom say of too many singers on TV things like: "She can't sing! She has no talent!" What if I, too, was unaware of my own incompetence? 

And so I decided I could never be a musician. But I loved music. "Blind" and all, I still took piano, mandolin and guitar classes throughout my childhood. In adolescence I became a fan of the more sophisticated forms of rock—the ones that had odd time signatures, jazz influences or Middle Eastern scales.

Carrying my secret wound I embarked into my dance training. When I moved to New York, I also took regular singing and music classes and began to fill the gaps of my western music knowledge. I learned to sight read. I learned about time signatures and modes... oh happiness! I loved the patterns, the mathematics of it.

Feeling

But the true eye-opener has happened as I learn the importance of feeling. Sure, it was fun to decode what I was listening to, but it's even more fun to understand why and how music stirs feelings in humans. Only recently did I finally ask: "What are these rhythms and time signatures for, anyway?" As I understand it, the use of rhythms is not just for a fun mental exercise, merely because we can group elements in two or four or ten. Each rhythm holds a powerful and expressive personality. Rhythm holds the basic makeup of what a piece of music feels like. And rhythms hold the key to being a great dancer.

I see rhythm as the skeleton of a song, the basic structure that holds everything together. Without bones, we would be an amorphous pile of soft tissue on the floor. Rhythm gives songs their shape, the way bones give us ours.

The most basic drawing of a person is the stick figure. A stick figure shows no muscles, no facial features, no clothes—it is the simplest representation of the skeletal system. But even stick figures can be very eloquent: 

In the same manner, even the most basic rhythmic structure can be very expressive. Take for instance a time signature of 4 beats per measure (meaning that the rhythm repeats its cycle every 4 counts). This is the most common rhythmic structure in western music. It feels very natural, it's very stable, familiar, predictable. It feels like a contained story, such as the cycle of life: birth - growth - reproduction - death. It has four components like the seasons, the phases of the moon, the cardinal points, the four mental functions, the legs of a table, the walls of a common room, the four elements (fire, earth, water, air) or the Sex and the City chicks representing the KWML personality types. In Tarot, 4 is the card of The Emperor, the male creator. 4 is said to be the number of order in the universe. Most songs you've heard have a rhythm of 4.

Songs in this video:
Arcade Fire - Neon's Bible
Amon Tobin - Proper Hoodidge
Dennis Dunaway Project - Kandahar
Gary Jules - Mad World
Black Eyed Peas - Where is the love?
Dusty Springfield - Son of a Preacher Man
Moontan -  Escalate
Tim Rayborn - Ifrit
Gorillaz - Superfast Jellyfish

Notice how much heavier the "1" is. This heavier note is called the downbeat. The way a conductor marks this time signature is a reflection of how it feels: he moves his hand down on 1, to the side on 2, to the other side on 3, and up on 4, to begin the process again.

Let's take a look at how rhythm is represented on paper.

- Blanca

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RHYTHM & DRUM SOLO WORKSHOP
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