Rhythm

"Rhythm may be defined as the way in which one or more unaccented beats are grouped in relation to an accented one." Cooper. G and Meyer LB. (1963) The Rhythmic Structure of Music: University of Chicago Press p.6
What is Rhythm? Rhythm is what makes music move and flow. Rhythm is made up of sounds and silences. These sounds and silences are put together to form patterns of sound, which are repeated to create rhythm. A rhythm has a steady beat, but it may also have many different kinds of beats.

As a group we looked at African drumming. African musicians do not think of music and dancing as a separate thing. They think of it as one, in fact the word for dance and music in African is the same. I love this idea because it shows how important the dancing side of it is for African musicians. They use their bodies as instruments and to guide them through rhythm. We learned some African drum beats and played them as a class. The finished product was very good and pleasing to be a part of. Not only did we look at African Drumming, we also looked at Japanese war percussion, Military percussion etc and I was quite good at guessing what each percussion piece meant/what it was about. 

For our task we split off into groups to come up with our own interesting percussion pieces. My group decided to choose Military drums, some with and some without the snare. It didn't take us long to come up with a solid piece which we rehearsed and perfected in no time at all. We performed it to the class and got some amazing feedback. One of our improvement points was to perhaps stand up with the drums and move around instead of sitting on the floor in a circle. I particularly enjoyed this task and I am excited to do similar things in the future. I gave other groups some good feedback as well because I really enjoyed their pieces and thought some of the dynamics were very effective. I think doing this task has allowed me to explore the drum as an instrument, but also all different types of drum and percussion instruments.