Rhythm Counting Systems with David Newman, Leah Sheldon and Greg Ristow

Rhythm counting systems: what they are, how we use them, and why might we choose one over another. We break down the plethora of approaches (including 1-e-&-a, Takadimi, Gordon, Kodály, and Orff) into groups, and share tips from our own experience teaching these from preschool to college. 

Links:

Free Printable Rhythm Resources on uTheory

Eastman/1-ti-te-ta Counting System

Traditional American/1-e-&-a Counting System

Gordon Rhythm Solfege

Takadimi Counting System

Varley, Paul. An Analysis of Rhythm Systems in the United States: Their Development and Frequency of Use By Teachers, Students and Authors. (Ed.D Dissertation, UMSL, 2005)

Show Notes:

0:30 Introductions

01:20 What are counting systems? What ones do you use?

03:05 Kinds of Counting Systems: Analytical/Metric Subdivisional vs Mnemonic

04:45 1e&a/Eastman/Traditional American approaches

06:11 Gordon Rhythmic Solfege

07:55 Takadimi

10:11 Mnemonic/Pattern-based/rhythm word approaches (Orff)

14:00 Note-syllable approaches (Kodály)

16:00 Kinesthetic Approaches (Dalcroze)

17:35 What are shared goals of counting systems?

19:40 Conceptualizing rhythm as existing within a metric grid, rather than as the addition of longer- and shorter-duration notes

21:22 How do you use these systems when you're teaching?

24:00 Role and value of using rote teaching with rhythm

25:50 Teaching the reading of rhythm using counting systems

29:23 Value of using multiple approaches: using both a subdivision & pattern-based system, and with each system varying the kind of activities and engagement

31:45 Teaching dictation using rhythm counting systems

33:00 Protonotations ("Box approach", "Beat sheets", drawings, symbols, etc...)

35:45 Call and response exercises

37:55 What are strengths/weaknesses of analytical-subdivisional approaches and mnemonic/pattern-based approaches?

43:50 Creating a sense of meter, especially in systems that don't make them explicit

49:30 A shared goal with pitch solfege systems is to learn a rhythmic system so well that in the end, we don't need it at all

51:40 Challenges of analytical/subdivisional systems

53:50 Wrap-up

Transcript

[theme music]

0:00:20.3 Leah Sheldon: Welcome to Notes from the Staff, a podcast from the creators of uTheory, where we dive into conversations about music theory, ear training and music technology with members of the uTheory staff and thought leaders from the world of music education. I'm Leah Sheldon, head of teacher engagement for uTheory.

0:00:37.3 Greg Ristow: And I'm Greg Ristow, I'm an associate professor of conducting at the Oberlin Conservatory and the founder of uTheory.

0:00:43.1 David Newman: And I'm David Newman, I teach voice and music theory at James Madison University and I write code and create content for uTheory.

0:00:50.6 GR: Our topic today is one that several of you wrote in to say you would love to hear. Shoutouts to Noel Warford, Michael Joviala and Maddy Tarantelli, in particular.

0:00:58.9 LS: We'll be talking about counting systems or rhythm systems, which are basically solfège systems for counting rhythms.

0:01:05.6 DN: There are a lot of systems, but we'll break them down into categories and give examples of why you might use one or more of these to help teach rhythm.

0:01:14.3 LS: We've also got links in the show notes to helpful references, including printable rhythm system resources you can find at utheory.com/teach/resources.

0:01:24.9 GR: So, yeah. Let's dive in. What is a counting system? Probably many of us have had encounters with these growing up. The most common is, in America at least, is probably the 1-e-&-a, 2-e-&-a approach. So yeah, so what are these? Why do we use these? And I wonder, what systems do you use, Dave and Leah?

0:01:45.7 DN: Well, when I started teaching aural skills, I didn't use any system at all, I definitely used a version of counting in college when I was learning. Mostly in choir though. Then we switched to Takadimi at James Madison University. And then recently we have switched to what we're calling the Eastman System, which is 1-e-&-a and 1-la-li, 2-la-li. I guess that's not really the Eastman System, but it's some hybrid. [laughter]

0:02:19.4 GR: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, totally. I think it's probably... One of the things you mentioned you did a lot of it in high school choir. I think that for a lot of us, that's probably where we learn our counting systems is through our school music programs.

0:02:32.6 DN: Right.

0:02:33.2 GR: Certainly for me that 1-e-&-a, 2-e-&-a was a constant partner to my years in band. How about you, Leah? What systems do you use, have you used?

0:02:42.6 LS: Yeah, I grew up using 1-e-&-a, 2-e-&-a, so just a traditional counting system. Used that throughout college as well. In my first couple of years of teaching, especially at the elementary level, I actually taught with Kodály syllables. And then when I began teaching at the middle school and the high school I was mostly teaching counting again.

0:03:05.2 GR: Yeah, yeah. So there are different kinds of approaches to this and in a lot of ways, I think they parallel the debate about how to teach reading, just how to teach reading a language. And there are approaches that you might call phonics approaches, where you kind of break down the rhythm and analyze the relative durations and then there are approaches that you might think of as being more whole language or whole word approaches, where you learn basically rhythmic patterns in groups. So you might learn like an eight and 2 16th, ti-ta-ta as pine-apple, or 2 16th and an eight as cherry pie. So we're gonna talk about these approaches in different categories, we'll talk about what we're calling analytical or metric sub-divisional systems and these are the kind of traditional systems like the American Counting System, 1-e-&-a, 2-e-&-a, or the Eastman System 1-ti-te-ta. Gordon, the du-de's and Takadimi as well. And pneumonic or pattern-based systems, these are especially used in the Orff approach to music education.

0:04:16.4 GR: Note syllable systems, as Leah mentioned, the Kodály system, where we have things where the syllable is associated with the note duration, so ta as a quarter-note, ti as an 8th note, etcetera. Although doesn't follow that exactly. And a little bit kinesthetic approaches like the Dalcroze approach to music education, which combines a bit of the analytical metric subdivisional system approach and pneumonic approach with work through movement. So yeah, let's dive in. Let's talk first about these analytical or metric subdivisional systems. We've said a couple of times, probably the most common is that 1-e-&-a. It doesn't really have a name, if you look around, people call it the Eastman System though the Eastman System is proposed by McHose and Tibbs was actually 1-ta-te-ta, which is still in use in quite a lot of places. When we say that, what we're saying is that if you take 4 16th notes in simple time, you would call each of those notes by a syllable 1-ta-te-ta, right? So if I had 2 eighth notes, I could say 1-te, 2-te, 3-te, t-te for a measure. If I had a measure of 16th, I'd say 1-ta-te-ta, 2-ta-te-ta, t-ta-te-ta, 4-ta-te-ta.

[laughter]

0:05:30.8 GR: Which, you know, the Eastman System seems to have been... Is newer than the Traditional American System, which I think most of us are familiar with 1-&-2-&-3, right? It's modified so that you get a more percussive beginning to each syllable. In the Traditional American System, we go 1-e-&-a, 2-e-&-a, t-e-&-a, 4-e-&-a. And if we're in compound meter in the Eastman System, we go 1-la-li, 2-la-li, or if we have 16th notes, say we're in six-eight and with 16th notes, we can subdivide all the way down to 1-ta-la-ta-li-ta, 2-ta-la-ta-li-ta, 1-ta-la-ta-li-ta, 2-ta-la-ta-li-ta. See that's Eastman/Traditional American System and a lot of people use a combination of those. Leah you wanna talk about Gordon?

0:06:14.5 LS: Sure. So Edwin Gordon's music learning theory really focuses on teaching the students to audiate and think in rhythms and that's done through learning the patterns that are really based on macrobeats, microbeats and then what he calls melodic rhythm. So for example, if the macro beat were a quarter-note, that would be duuuuu-duuuuu and we break that down into eighth notes then we have duuu-de, duuu-de all the way down into 16th notes du-ta-da-ta and in compound meters, we're breaking that into du-da-di-du-da-di and if there's further subdivision, du-ta-da-ta-di-ta. But again, the whole approach of Gordon is to help students audiate the rhythm. So it's not necessarily looking at the rhythm and reading it from notation, but hearing it so it's subjective. What one person hears as a macrobeat might not be what someone else is hearing as the macrobeat. But it at least it gives us a way to analyze the rhythm that's heard and be able to break it down into those syllables.

0:07:31.6 GR: And the Gordon music learning sequence places a big focus, I think what you're saying, is on the sound before sight kind of thing.

0:07:39.7 LS: Yes, yes.

0:07:42.2 GR: Yeah. And if you're listening and you're saying, oh my goodness, they're saying all these syllables and how am I going to remember what's what, don't worry. We've prepared resources on these counting systems for you at utheory.com/teach/resources. So how about Takadimi, David?

0:07:58.3 DN: Takadimi is interesting. It was conceived relatively recently, about 20 years ago, maybe a little longer, as a way of sort of making a fluent way and a logical way of dividing up each beat, so. And I think all of the systems that we've talked about so far, they're... We've talked about them referencing a quarter-note beat, but they can be used with a half note beat or a whole note beat. They're really beat-based and how you divide up that beat. So when you divide up a beat into four parts in Takadimi, you use, surprisingly enough, Takadimi. [chuckle] And if you divide it into three beats, you do ta-ki-da and if you divide that further into six beats, then you use ta-va-ki-di-da-ma. And one of the things that they tried to design it around, aside from the fact of changing the part of your mouth that makes each syllable so that they're easy to do fast syllables together, is that they made sure that di is always the middle of the beat, so the middle division of the beat. So even if you have ta-ka-di-mi, ta-va-ki-di-da-ma, di still lines up in the same place.

0:09:30.6 GR: Cool. I have to say, I love the sound of Takadimi when I hear people do it well and fluently. It has kind of... I find it as a sort of musical flow, maybe because of what you're talking about with where the syllables are, that my beloved 1-e-&-a doesn't have so much.

0:09:51.0 DN: And people like the crispness of the consonants as well, which is my colleagues' main complaint with the counting, is that wa is very ambiguous about it, where it starts.

0:10:08.3 GR: Yeah. For sure, for sure. So these are all these what we've been calling analytical or metric subdivisional systems, which is to say that given a beat that's either in simple time or at a time where the beats divide in two or four, or in compound time where they divide in three or six, then we can break down the beats into the notes within the beat into various syllables. These are the most probably common approaches to teaching rhythm. We also have mnemonic or pattern-based approaches, sometimes these are called rhythm word approaches, where you assign different... You can assign different words, actually literally English words to syllables.

0:10:48.0 GR: So I use these a lot myself when I'm teaching compound meter, which has fewer commonly used patterns. So for instance, say we're in six-eight and we have three eighth notes, if we're in geography land, that might be Ca-na-da, Ca-na-da. The dotted quarter could be Ro-me, Ro-me. The eighth and a quarter could be... I don't know. What's a good da-di, da-di-da? I've used Lo-ngy, Lo-ngy because I learned these at the Longy School of Music, but that may not apply anywhere else. And for eighth quarter, I've always used Scot-land, Scot-land, Scot-land. So just wind up with... And I think one of the nice things about these mnemonic approaches is that they get students thinking at a beat level and not at a micro sub-divisional level. And they get them there very quickly.

0:11:45.5 DN: That's super important. And I did the... I realized I did the same thing. In 2011, I made a video that ended up going a little bit viral with... Using food words that we had come up with in my class for simple meters. It wound up on a t-shirt somewhere.

0:12:06.2 GR: And this is... I think, especially anyone who's had training in Orff is saying right now, Oh yeah, this is what we do. This is just very, very central to the Orff approach to teaching music education is thinking in these words. And there's that connection as well with Gordon and I think a lot of music education philosophy of... That allows doing a lot in sound before actually moving to musical notation.

0:12:40.8 DN: Yeah. Which is another great advantage of it. Although I regularly see memes being shared on Facebook with words attached to various rhythms and there's always one that's wrong. [chuckle]

0:12:56.9 GR: Yeah. Where the stresses just don't work, right? Yeah.

0:13:02.4 DN: Yeah.

0:13:02.4 GR: Yeah. We'll talk more about various strengths of these. But one of the challenges of, if you're assigning a word to each pattern, is sometimes, the way these patterns line up in music, they don't all begin... The musical idea could begin before the beat, not necessarily on the beat. And then, how does that change the words you might wanna say?

0:13:30.9 DN: Right.

0:13:31.3 GR: The danger of, sometimes, these patterns, is that they always... You wind up with words that always stress the first note of the pattern, which may not be where the stress actually falls, musically. So yeah, so we have the mnemonic or pattern-based approaches. And, generally, people who use those tend to call them approaches rather than systems, because there is this idea of, let's find words that match and maybe one class will have a different set of words because that's come out of the students ideas in another class. There are also note syllable systems. We mentioned Kodály. Leah, do I remember that you taught with Kodály?

0:14:14.0 LS: I did, I did. And, although I have my Orff levels, I drew on a variety of approaches based on what we were working on. And even in my own circle of music education peers and colleagues, there were some discrepancies between what the actual syllables are once you get to the 16th note level. Some may disagree but...

0:14:37.3 GR: Can you talk us through the basic syllables? Can you talk us through the basic syllables for Kodály?

0:14:42.6 LS: The quarter notes are always ta and a pair of eighth notes is ti-ti and 16th notes are, either, ti-ka-ti-ka or ti-ri-ti-ri, or I've even heard, ti-ki-ti-ki. So, the disadvantage being that you're not necessarily distinguishing where the macrobeat is versus the microbeat. Like, an eighth note isn't ta-ti, it's always ti-ti. But it does make it very easy for students to identify types of notes from a very early age and understand that, oh, it's a pair of eighth notes and that's a beat that's divided into two sounds.

0:15:26.9 GR: And because of that, there's not... You don't have to make this determination early on are we in... When Looking at music, is this in simple time or compound time? 'Cause you can just name each note by it's syllable, or each rhythmic...

0:15:41.9 LS: Yeah, so much so to the point that students in kindergarten through second grade, may not even know that that's a quarter-note. That's a ta and that's a ti-ti. Which is probably a challenge. [chuckle]

0:16:01.1 GR: Good, so yeah. So, okay, so we've talked about analytical or metric subdivisional approaches, mnemonic approaches, note syllable systems like Kodály and then kinesthetic approaches, the Dalcroze approach is, probably, the most famous for this, where... Most Dalcroze teachers will connect rhythmic patterns to particular rhythm motions. And one of the things that I do a lot, when teaching basic rhythms, is, I'll do an echo canon with students. So I'll say, okay, I do what I do, four beats later and I'll tap my nose as I say, tu-tu-tu-tu and then they'll tap it back and I'll, with my right hand, left hand, tug gently on each ear and say, chk-chk-chk-chk for eighth notes, to a little raising arm motion, ou-ou for half notes and do a clap, with a long, kssss, for whole notes and you can spin that out in a bunch of ways to get to reading and things like that. But that is... You're connecting sound to different motions and in the Dalcroze approach, I think similar to Orff, it's not that there is one approved motion for a particular rhythm pattern, but there's a real emphasis on having these movements, these sounds, these words, be drawn out of the students as they learn to feel the different patterns. Leah, you've got your Orff certifications, would you say that's parallel in the Orff approach?

0:17:35.7 LS: Yeah, absolutely.

0:17:37.3 GR: Yeah, great. So, with that overview of counting approaches, what are our shared goals of using counting systems? Why do we use them?

0:17:48.6 DN: Accuracy [chuckle] but also understanding. But they all do encourage different ways of understanding.

0:17:54.5 GR: Yeah, for sure. I think some of them are definitely geared towards helping us to get quickly between sound and notation, they're very notational-based approaches, especially those... The metric subdivisional ones, but I think... And, Leah, what you were talking about with the Gordon approach, right? That maybe there's more of a focus on oral analysis.

0:18:15.3 LS: Right and exposure. Exposure to rhythm patterns and meters and giving students, even young students, an opportunity to build a rhythmic vocabulary and to, down the road, then, have a deeper understanding of rhythm and reading it and writing it from notation and also just facilitation for ease of imitation and repetition and everything that comes with sound before note.

0:18:50.4 GR: I think it can also really reveal if there is some rhythmic issue happening. Adding syllables or words to it can help you, as a teacher, diagnose what's going wrong. Let's say you have a student trying to perform two sixteenths and an eighth and they're performing it wrong, you say, "Okay, we'll try it on rhythm syllables," and they say, "Okay, 1-&-a" then what you've discovered is they've misidentified looking at it, visually, where the 16ths were versus where the eighth was, right? And so it can help you get to understanding, Is this a visual theoretical misidentification, a misrecognition of a pattern, or is this an issue in the actual accounting of it? And if you're doing mnemonic words then that becomes very apparent right away, yeah.

0:19:42.3 DN: I'm also reminded of a student that I had where they just couldn't do rhythms, they couldn't dictate rhythms properly. And I finally figured out that they were trying to figure out how long each note was, instead of figuring out where it happened within the framework.

0:20:00.5 GR: Yeah.

0:20:01.6 DN: So, that is another...

0:20:03.8 GR: David, I think this is... You've touched on something that I think is really huge and that maybe a lot of us aren't aware of, but I think there... I would say, there's a good 20% of students out there, at least that I see at the college level, who come in and they believe rhythm is about the addition of short and long notes together and not about orientation within a metric grid of some sort. And especially, I do... There're a lot of things I love from the Kodály method. But especially students whose only approach to reading rhythm has been Kodály and a ti is this long and a ta is this long and a to is this long, can fall into that trap. So I think it does go back to if you're using an approach like that, it's important to combine it with another approach where as we've been talking about, where they understand where they're fitting within that metric grid, because students who think of rhythm as the addition of long and short notes, the minute inaccuracies that add up each time they perform a note, get bigger and bigger. And what do those students do if they get lost in the middle of a measure? There's nothing to help them find their way back in, so I'm so glad you brought that up, David.

0:21:21.6 GR: So let's talk a little bit about how we use these when we're teaching. And I guess the classic things are... We're generally either going from notation to sound in some way, whether that be performing on an instrument, or we're going from sound to analysis or sound to notation, right? We hear something, we wanna be able to play it back, we hear something, we wanna be able to write it down, we hear something, we wanna be able to say, "Yeah, that's a du-ta-de." So yeah, maybe let's talk about reading rhythms and teaching rhythm reading. Leah, I think you probably have the most recent experience teaching this at the most basic level of, "Oh, my God, I'm facing a class of elementary students and middle school students, etcetera." Can you talk with us a little bit about how you would work with students in that context?

0:22:14.5 LS: Sure. And it also... It does depend on, not necessarily what system you're using, but it does with young learners, you have to have a very clear objective and outcome. And for example, with a teacher who's teaching with the Gordon learning sequence, you're looking at whole-part-whole instruction in most cases and the rhythm solfège really plays into the part of that, where you've shared a song and now you're breaking it down into parts and you're isolating the rhythm patterns from the song. And that's where you're chanting rhythms using the du-des. And then putting that back into the big picture, again, back into the whole for students to have learned to sing a song or to perform a song versus using Kodály syllables that more quickly transfer to notation, that could be something as simple as looking at the rhythm on the board, labeling the notes with ta and ti-ti and then having the students chant that rhythm, first together and then until they're able to do that individually on their own.

0:23:31.7 LS: So it really depends on what you're working on and we don't even possibly have time to get into all the ways to go through that. But as just a quick overview, most of the time it's just working with a whole group of students, having them chant together as a group, maybe slightly older students then are able to work in small groups and be doing that on their own, especially with Orff, coming up with their own words for the rhythms that are presented to them, drawing on either a book that was just read or a song that was sung. So, the options are endless.

0:24:10.4 GR: Yeah, they are. One of the things that you love that I forget about a lot, especially working at the college level, is this idea of, maybe first learn something by rote and then figure out what's in it. And that can be really, really beautiful to do, yeah. And I think it's generally our default when we're working with younger students, especially at the elementary level.

0:24:31.9 LS: Absolutely and that depends on teacher's philosophies too. But generally, if you are someone who has Orff levels or has gone through the Gordon Institute of Music Learning, then you're probably gonna be doing rote teaching and whole-part-whole instruction.

0:24:50.7 DN: Even at the college level, I think Cynthia Gonzales recently told me that she never makes them do a rhythm or a melody by dictation that she hasn't already done with them in class, that they haven't already defined in class.

0:25:09.4 LS: And it doesn't mean that your students can't independently do this. Again, Gordon's whole point is, that your students are able to audiate rhythm patterns. So you're gonna get to a place with your students, if you do enough chanting and if you're teaching an appropriate sequencing, that your students can look at a pattern and think, audiate how it's going to sound or be able to chant it in tas and ti-tis, or... Like I said, come up with words that fit. So, they can also read it, we're not... I'm not talking about only teaching by rote at the elementary level, but that's definitely a big part of it.

0:25:50.8 GR: Yeah, so let's talk a little bit about... Actually, if we did wanna focus now on teaching the reading of rhythm, ways that we might use these systems. Let's talk metric analytical systems, so these are the Gordon, are Takadimi, are Eastman or American traditional systems. I think the two most common ways would be you're looking at a rhythm and then you either count aloud all of the subdivisions at whatever subdivisional level you need, while clapping the rhythm, so that might be something like 1-e-&-a, 2-e-&-a, 3, kind of a thing, or you speak the rhythm using just the syllables that begin each node of the rhythm. So if you take that same rhythm of... If that was 1-e-&-a, 2-e-&-a, 3, if I were speaking or chanting or intoning, people often prefer so that it's a bit more vocal, becomes 1-&-2-&-a-3, kind of a thing. Yeah, does that match with how David, Leah you do things when using these approaches?

0:27:05.3 LS: Yeah, I think to add another layer on to that when you're teaching instrumentalists though, that you're also teaching them to be constantly having whatever system is running in their head because they're not clapping and counting aloud when they're playing their instruments, they're pulling their instruments. So, constantly being able to have the... If you're counting then you've got the 1-e-&-a's running in your head while playing, so. There's a whole host of techniques that come up with instrumentalists, so now we're sizzling on mouthpieces the rhythm, or we are just T-T-T, the rhythm, because that's how we're gonna articulate it on the instrument source of... [chuckle] I don't know if we're trying to go down that path right now, but... [chuckle]

0:27:55.2 GR: No, I think that's beautiful, yeah.

0:27:58.3 DN: That really emphasizes how important it is to have that inner metronome going and whatever we can do to reinforce that inner metronome with inner subdivisions. [laughter]

0:28:12.4 GR: Yeah. This takes me... I wonder... We had a doctor beat in the end which is this metronome that probably a lot of us experience that will actually count aloud the 1-&-2-& and 1-e-&-a and you can turn up or down all the subdivisions, probably with that goal of getting... Leah as you were talking about, that constant sub-divisional line running in your head as you are performing.

0:28:45.0 LS: Right.

0:28:45.0 DN: There's also the... If you're reading music, there's a visual component and then there's a, "What does it sound like?" Component. And so I know that in the Musicians Guide series, they encourage written exercises where you just write in the syllables that you're using, so that you've dealt with the visual component, so that's again one of those assessment opportunities where you can sort of figure out whether there's a problem understanding what you're seeing versus understanding how it sounds.

0:29:23.6 LS: Right. And again, when you're working with middle school level students, for example, you're not always just picking one way and sticking with that, you're trying a whole bunch of different ways to get at all the different learners in the room, so. Just like David said, yeah, sure, I would have students write in the counts and then sometimes we would also... They came to me with knowledge of ta's and ti-ti's, so let's go ahead, write in ta and ti-ti. And then we would go through and we would chant them a couple of different ways and then however the students were thinking in their head when they're playing, they've had an opportunity to vocalize that and reinforce that. And this kind of leads me to a point. I think it is so important to have two frameworks for the students, especially if they're coming from something like ta and ti-ti or just using words connected to rhythm patterns. It is so important then to be connecting that to something analytical so that they have a means for figuring out what the rhythm is independently.

0:30:31.5 GR: Yeah, this seems to be a theme that's come up on just about every episode so far, this idea of using different ways of thinking about things with Solfege systems, something to name the letters, the actual pitch space versus something to name its function in relation to a scale, to a key. I'm 100% with you on that Leah. I think we need something that does let us do that subdivisional analysis, but we also need something that gets us to that pattern level thinking where we're not looking at every rhythm as though it were a totally new thing that we had to analyze, but we recognize a lot of what's within it.

0:31:11.5 LS: And I'm not saying that there's any right or wrong way to do it, I think it takes a variety of approaches. Like David said earlier, there have been times out on the football field, that I was shouting words just to get the students to bring the rhythm together so we could get it lined up and you are like, "Whatever works." [laughter]

0:31:30.0 DN: I love whatever works. [chuckle]

0:31:33.0 GR: Especially on the football field, oh my Lord.

0:31:37.3 DN: Oh, gosh.

0:31:38.4 GR: Something we choir directors pretty much never have to do.

0:31:40.8 DN: Yeah.

0:31:41.7 GR: Yeah. So yeah, reading, that's great. And then dictation is really oral analysis and Leah you talked about with the whole-part-whole approach, the idea of taking a song we know, a piece we know and then breaking it down, what are the rhythmic patterns in here, what's going on? And whether we write that down or not, that's a kind of dictation, right?

0:32:10.9 LS: Mm-hmm.

0:32:11.8 GR: And very related to what... Say, if we were at the college level in an aural skills musicianship classroom, the kind of thing we'd be doing there, if we're using analytical methods there... If students are familiar with them and have used them a lot, then they can often go straight from sound to, "Oh, yeah, that's a 1-&-a," or that's... Whatever in the system we're using. One of which I think is probably worth mentioning is what some people call the box approach, which if you're using a sub-divisional or analytical system, or let's say that you're just starting off with beats and rests, so you have... Say, we're working three/four, you have three boxes, you have a rhythm, ta-ta and the students mark, "Oh, there's one in box one, there's one in box three," and learn how to translate that to notation. If you break it down to the eighth levels, here we're still on three/four then now you have six boxes, a box for one and two and t-& and the students mark down where the notes begin and translate that to notation. And actually, for students who've used a drum machine, this feels very natural to them, 'cause drum machines and things like Ableton or Logic, wherever you see all your subdivisions spread out and you turn on or off different sounds on different subdivisions. Do you all use the box approach? I use it very early on and I try and get away from it as quickly as I can myself. [laughter]

0:33:50.5 LS: I used... It's basically the same thing, I call them beat sheets, where there's literally a picture of a heart because we're feeling the beat. So maybe a four/four, then there's four across and it's a four measure patterns, you've got four across, four going... It's the same exact thing.

0:34:09.8 GR: Are the four down the subdivisions of the beat for you or is that four measures?

0:34:16.6 LS: So four measures, but we can easily subdivide the beat by drawing a line right down the middle of the heart.

0:34:22.7 GR: I love the heart, that's so great. And beat sheet, that's so much better.

0:34:26.6 LS: It's very, very popular, but it's... I've stolen that from many other educators, that's not something I came up with by any means.

0:34:35.6 GR: And now I'm going to steal it from you. These will forever be beat sheets when I teach now, it's great. [chuckle] Yeah.

0:34:42.4 LS: You don't have to stick to heartbeats, you can get creative, but... [chuckle]

0:34:45.3 GR: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I suppose drums work too, there's something nice about a heart, although a heart's really hard to divide in four.

0:34:52.0 DN: I've used both, spatial... Spatial analysis works really well for me, but for a student who has trouble with spatial awareness, that isn't gonna work really well necessarily. I've also used beat level systems like piano roll notation and also symbols symbolizing what happens within each beat.

0:35:16.7 GR: So yeah, beat sheets or whatever we wanna call them, these are kinds of protonotation, there are things that provide an intermediate step between Western musical notation and sound and there are lots of different ones. Jenine Lawson Brown just published an article on one in Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy and actually we'll be talking with her about that in an upcoming episode. And yeah, those can be great for helping smooth that transition between our aural recognition. One of the things that I think is really useful that certainly those of us who have a Music Education Degree were taught to do is probably a lot of call and response kind of things, where I'll do a pattern aurally for students, I'll perform aurally O and students will respond with whatever approach we're using. So if we're using a Kodály approach, I might go... I'll choose intentionally not to use Kodály syllables, I might go boom-boom-boom-boom-boom and they go ta-ti-ti-ta-ta, that kind of back and forth and all of these approaches enable doing that sort of real-time aural dictation. I think one of the things I found teaching aurals was at the college level, is maybe some of us tend to go too soon to let's write down what we're hearing, that maybe we skip sometimes that first step of do we actually have these rhythmic patterns in us for each beat before we're trying to write down an eight bar rhythm?

0:37:04.6 LS: And on the complete other end of that with the youngest learners, that often looks like picture notation or just for example, where your students are... Maybe not even dictation, maybe this is even more composition but your students are composing rhythms using pictures of strawberries and blueberries and squeaky shoes, 'cause I'm drawing from a Pete the Cat lesson that I used to teach and they're writing these wonderfully complex rhythm patterns without any notes, not even stick notation. So again, maybe this is... Maybe we consider this a protonotation, but...

0:37:46.0 GR: Absolutely.

0:37:46.7 LS: We've got patterns of strawberries and blueberries and they can look at it and they can chant it and so now they have a means for dictation as well.

0:37:56.3 GR: Leah, I think when you said the importance of combining two different approaches, can we circle back to that? Can we talk a little bit about why that's so important? In other words, what are some of the strengths and weaknesses of say, analytical subdivisional approaches versus mnemonic pattern approaches and why might we need to combine both things?

0:38:21.2 LS: Right, so like I was just saying, the younger students before they're even, maybe even reading words can be dictating rhythm and composing and using symbolic notation if you're using a word-based approach or even a pattern-based approach. But then if you continue to just, to only do that, then when they're in an ensemble or they start taking piano lessons or whatever it is that they're doing, they're looking at this notation going, I don't know this, but then they hear it and they know it. So helping them make that connection is going to allow them to be independent musicians much sooner than just down the line, suddenly, okay, now we're gonna count this instead. And they're not realizing that it's something that they already know, they think they're learning something new versus if we had introduced it much earlier than they've already got the skills.

0:39:19.1 GR: Yeah, yeah. And, you know, so if we're talking about mnemonic, or pattern-based approaches, one of the things that I found working with students who've learned primarily or exclusively using this system is sometimes those students really think at the beat level. And for instance, an example of poor performance might be Cherry Pie, watermelon, apple, right? Where that's like you can hear the thought of the time in between that it takes them to get to what each mnemonic is. And of course, right, that's something that we have worked to smooth out and you might get that as well in an analytical subdivisional system. But in the mnemonic approach there's nothing that specifically says, here is the underlying metronomic subdivisional flow to it. And so, usually when we're working in these mnemonic systems or pattern-based approaches, we're doing something else to encourage that. And so that's... It might be something kinesthetic with students patting the beat or swaying the beat or conducting to help build in that flow and that understanding of it. Certainly, another thing about these pattern-based approaches is... And Leah, this goes to exactly what you were saying of so I know these patterns in experiments, orally I have this protonotation, whether it's drawing ice cream cones or whether it's... You know. But then...

0:40:54.3 LS: The options are endless. [laughter]

0:40:55.8 GR: The options are absolutely endless. I've done so many little compositional activities with, you know, ice cream, ice cream. Yeah and yes, absolutely, right. And ice cream cones are very easy to draw quickly, which is helpful for little kids. But yeah, as connecting that to the analytical side of things, so that students can eventually... Well, wait a second, I don't know this pattern. What is this? This isn't... This is a less common rhythmic pattern that maybe I don't have a word for. And how do I count that? Yeah. I find the mnemonic approach leads itself to a lot of creative kind of work, those compositional activities you were talking about. But it may not engage... It makes it a little harder sometimes to engage with on an analysis of the music.

0:41:48.7 LS: Right. If students know that this is a macrobeat and this is a microbeat and they have a way to apply that to writing or reading, then they know that they can figure out how rhythm is gonna go, is this du-du-de-du-du or this is ta-ti-ti-ta-ta. But they probably aren't gonna look at notation and go Oh yeah, that's a watermelon and... [laughter]

0:42:20.5 GR: Yeah. But you know...

0:42:23.1 LS: And that's how they've been taught consistently. Again, I'm not... Nothing is off the table.

0:42:28.1 GR: Yeah. I'm actually down in Colorado right now, covering a maternity leave for a Dalcroze friend of mine, who runs this wonderful community music program for kids ages four through high school. And they have five levels of Dalcroze classes that they go through. And they learn all of their rhythmic patterns, like, just about everyone you could think of on color names. And it is the most complete mnemonic pattern-based approach I have ever seen. And to the point that, you know, I will put the rhythm on the board and I'll say, What's this? And they will say, that's a neon lemon yellow. [laughter] Right? They just... That is how they hear those.

0:43:19.3 LS: So I'll make my point again, that it really depends on the teacher and the sequence and what the learning objectives are.

0:43:26.6 GR: Totally, totally. Yeah, you know, but I have had like, oh, I wish... You know, especially with the upper levels of those classes. And like, oh yeah, we need to also start layering on to this a rhythmic analytical system because it's not enough to see them in little blocks of patterns. Yeah, one thing we haven't talked about so much is some of these approaches lend themselves to helping us know where we are in a measure better than others do. Like the traditional American counting system, one and two and the Eastman system, where they name the beats. You can hear right away, Oh yeah, okay. That's where I am in the measure. And that's important, right? The relative stress shape of the measure tells us a lot about how to perform music, so if we're not working with the Eastman or traditional American system, how can we get students to feel that, to internalize and know how to translate measure shape into performance?

0:44:41.2 LS: Conducting.

0:44:42.5 DN: Even at the middle school, elementary school level?

0:44:47.1 LS: Yeah, absolutely. Especially for students who are in an ensemble. I started out teaching them conducting, 'cause otherwise they don't know what I'm doing in front of them.

0:44:56.6 GR: Awesome.

0:44:56.9 LS: They have no idea. They need to know that, like, if they're not sure, for example, where we are in the music, how do they find the downbeat again, they need to know what a downbeat looks like in conducting, because if somebody doesn't teach them that they probably don't know.

0:45:15.0 GR: Right.

0:45:15.6 LS: And if you're not counting using numbers, then if they're just thinking in their head and in another system that is not giving them numbers, they're just thinking, du-u du-u du-u and everything's quarter notes then they're gonna be so lost.

0:45:35.3 DN: We do also, at the college level teach... Just to have them conduct with it. And we definitely did that when we were doing Takadimi, so that we knew where we were in the measure, just required conducting. But I have also taken my students and had them dance to something, [chuckle] step, clap, step, clap and just show that there is a meter that is so common, we call it common time and that they already know how to conduct it with their feet and their hands. So, yeah.

0:46:12.3 LS: And my other answer was gonna be Dalcroze. [chuckle]

0:46:14.8 DN: Yeah. [laughter]

0:46:17.4 GR: Yeah and for listeners who don't know, I come from a real Dalcroze background, I do a lot of teaching using approaches from the Dalcroze method and I also teach teachers to teach the Dalcroze method. And David, when you asked, even at the middle school, elementary level, I'm about to teach a class of 4-year-olds in a couple of hours. And on our lesson plan for today is we're going to be doing a game where we're in two/four and we're patting, touching our head, back and forth. And then on three/four and we're patting, clapping and touching our... Excuse me. No, we're patting, we're in a circle and then we clap our neighbor's hands for a side and then we touch our head one, two, three and then when we're in four/four we go pat, clap, touch our neighbor's head, so it's pat, clap, neighbor's head. Right, so it is... And that is of course, right like that, so that it's the traditional conducting gestures.

0:47:16.3 DN: Gotcha.

0:47:17.5 GR: And then as the students... When I'm working with slightly older students, say I'm working with 7-year-olds where they now have the dexterity to be able to bounce and catch a ball, you can translate into... Yeah, you just build all those things in through various conducting like motions and sequences.

0:47:38.9 DN: That's brilliant, I love it.

0:47:39.9 GR: It's great fun and you're having students... You give students... Let's say we're in four/four, right and so we might be doing, bounce, catch, toss, catch and walking around the room, or we might be in place. A great classic Dalcroze game is I play a rhythm, a measure later you translate that rhythm into movement in your feet across the floor. So, they're moving with their ball, doing their bounce, catch, toss, catch the hair, di-da-da-di-da-da and they're still bouncing and catching, but now they're also walking it across the floor doing that. We've assigned specific things, so quarter notes are steps and eighth notes are step touches or you can do... You make them up and change them. So yeah, yeah, movement, it's great if you have the space to move across the floor, but yeah, certainly, we can all think of any patterns, movement patterns to get a sense of where we are in the beat. And the classic one of course, if you have instruments in your hand, it seems really basic, but tapping the foot, it's just... It doesn't help us know where we are on the meter but it certainly does help us know where we are in the beat. Yeah and then eventually teaching students to just squeeze their toe and then just feel it and... [laughter]

0:48:56.9 LS: I was just gonna say or just tapping toes because telling smaller children to tap their foot becomes a whole stomping fiasco. [laughter]

0:49:06.3 GR: Yes it does, but it can be really helpful actually to see... I certainly, in piano lessons have had students just tap in a way that I can see it so that I can identify are they aware of where the note falls in relation to the beat?

0:49:23.5 DN: And I suppose with all of these, then we have to make sure that we leave them room to unlearn that behavior when they're performing. [laughter]

0:49:33.8 GR: Yeah, yeah. Oh, in this... And if we go back to episode one on solfège systems, this idea that we want to learn a solfège system so well, that at the end of the process, we don't actually have to think about it, I think applies here for these rhythmic approaches also. We wanna learn them so well so that at the end, I don't have to be thinking my du-ta-de-ta's or my 1-e-&-a's or my watermelons. I know so deeply how these rhythms feel, how meter shape feels that I can just perform it, hear it and if I need to, I can go back to analyze it or figure out what the patterns are. Yeah, but that's that last stage, fluency. Certainly, fluency is the goal, speaking music as a language, hearing music as a language, reading music as a language, are the shared goals of solfège and rhythmic counting systems.

0:50:35.1 DN: I love hearing from both of you that a combination of techniques is helpful. Because I think I've thought that too, but I feel obligated to commit to a system and I think maybe for an analytical system, it's useful to commit to one system so that students aren't trying to embrace multiple analytical systems but having multiple approaches sure gives students a lot of avenues into understanding.

0:51:09.9 GR: Yeah and I've certainly found for some students an analytical system is like oh yeah, this is me, I want this, I love this. And for other students, a mnemonic pattern-based approach is what really speaks to them and so it can be... Leah, you mentioned as well speaking to the different ways that students in your classes learn really, yeah, yeah.

0:51:34.4 DN: Plus there are problems with the analytical systems that you might want another method to supplement and we should talk about what some of those drawbacks are.

0:51:46.4 LS: I think we've touched on some already, but they can be very mathematical and maybe this plays into knowing where you are in the measure but it lends itself to being unmusical since the students are literally looking at it, maybe even like a math problem. They're going through and they're counting and writing in subdivisions and now it's become this complex thing on paper that is not music they're performing, but it's this problem to be solved.

0:52:20.6 GR: Totally. I think also with these analytical subdivisional systems, if you start thinking about patterns, they sound really similar like du-te-ta versus tu-te-de. The actual sounds tu-te-de versus du-te-ta, there's nothing there that makes the whole thing different from the other whole thing. Whereas if you're working with mnemonic things like cherry pie or pineapple, they have a very different sound from the first moment in a way that these... The Takadimi, du-ta-de-ta, 1-e-&-a don't have a different sound from that first syllable for each pattern.

0:53:06.9 DN: Although I noticed that within the analytical systems, there's also some that are stronger in that department and some that are weaker. It's always bothered me that that's one of the weaknesses of Gordon, is that all of the syllable sound so similar. But it was only recently that I had read and I don't know if this is true or not, that it was actually designed to help young students articulate well and that's why they all have that same sharp consonant at the beginning. So, it's a flaw, but it's also an advantage, so it just depends on what you feel is important to reinforce.

0:53:49.6 GR: Great, well, this has been a great discussion and have we... Would you agree we've covered everything we wanted to cover, have we missed anything?

0:53:57.4 DN: I think we got to a lot of things. [chuckle]

0:54:00.6 GR: Yeah, great. So lots of resources to be found in the show notes also our sheets on rhythmic counting systems at utheory.com/teach/resources. Great, well, David, Leah, thanks and for all our listeners, if you've enjoyed this episode, if you wanna hear more things like this, let us know what you'd like to hear, write us at notes@utheory.com.

[music]

0:54:28.5 DN: Subscribe to notes from the staff on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts and check us out at utheory.com/notes.

0:54:36.4 LS: Notes from the staff is produced by utheory.com.

0:54:38.7 GR: UTheory is the most advanced online learning platform for music theory.

0:54:42.6 LS: With video lessons, individualized practice and proficiency testing, uTheory has helped more than 100,000 students around the world master the fundamentals of music theory, rhythm and ear training.

0:54:52.9 GR: Create your own free teacher account at utheory.com/teach.