Counting … .

For years I’ve struggled with “counting” in music; I’ve become better at reading the notes on the grand staff, but when it comes time to transfer the notes to a rhythm that I’ve not heard before, it’s been a lifelong nightmare so far.  The “interference” doesn’t last through the night; if I’ve heard the way that the rhythm should be, I am fairly adaptable.  It’s been since I started playing the drums when I was not yet a teenager that the “problem” started.  When I began studying music seriously, now more than fifteen years ago, I began playing the guitar hours a day to try to engrain the scales and modes and chords and “rhythms”.  I had learned before that it is important to have a “muscle memory” level of playing in order to project an instrument – I learned from “high pressure golf” – to the level where as a player you can almost become a spectator, with your eyes and your ears, to the music as you are playing.  At that stage, it is possible to project – in music, to “voice lead” [where the audience is likely to hear exactly what you played as you meant them to hear it]  -- in such a way that a question arises “did you mean to play it that way” or “were you conscious that it said [“”]”?  When a player achieves that level of playing, from my point of view, then, for the first time, writing music can become possible on a level slightly higher than just “that sounds nice”, approaching more of a social value creation than just “a melody”. 

This week, I ran across a book which was written to teach a particular “rhythm form” through the use of a counting method where the “pulse” of the count is kept in “an upper box” and “the beat” is kept/marked in a “lower box”.  While this is fairly standard in its approach to teaching how to “count” complex [or even not complex] meters, I was reawakened to something I had realized many years ago while “reciting” the Lotus Sutra as part of the practice of Buddhism – the Sutra was in “Ancient Mandarin” and the “little characters” each represented a “beat” in the phonetics of the story that was being recited out loud as part of the practice – :  If you tried to “count” the characters and maintain a 4/4 rhythm [side-note:“do you ever wonder how it came to be ‘4/4 == common time’”?], you would probably run into difficulty getting through “the book”; it takes practice to understand the rhythm.

Learning how to “read the rhythm” and to put it onto an instrument, while “counting” and “hearing”, these are complex tasks all put together; but music, music is meant to be fun.  Perhaps there’s just a little too much competitiveness about one character in pursuit of “the right rhythm”, and not enough searching for connection.  I suppose, when I learn/teach myself that piece of the puzzle that has been slipping in and out for years – how to count,read, play, and make friends on stage – I’ll forget about everything all over again, be “born again” in a new life … .  Then again, “tomorrow never knows” …