looks you in the eyes…gently pulls your hands out and patty cakes you into the groove…
Trust me…Just…trust me…
Yep, that makes sense. Living with different rhythms, melodies and harmonies are part of a culture’s foundation.
White people clap on the 1 and 3 because that’s what you do in the sort of music we’re familiar with.
But that’s the thing. When I think of the music I and my peers are familiar with, it’s mostly all 2 & 4 music, not 1 & 3. That’s kind of where it’s a disconnect for me. Like I said, in my experience, most white people my age do clap on 2 & 4, but there seems to be a sub-segment that don’t, for whatever reason, and I’m wondering why. I mean, think of any rock concert with a white band on stage and there’s that part in the song where all the instruments drop out minus the drums and the band does that theatrical “everybody let’s clap along” part. It’s never suggested to clap along to the 1 & 3. It’s always 2 & 4. I suppose you can say, well, it’s the musicians leading the way, so they’ll always go with 2 & 4, but I don’t see why the listening audience wouldn’t groove along the same, as the last 50 years of pop music have pretty much been all about the 2 & 4.
And the sub-segment that don’t are the ones who usually listen to different music than what you and your peers listen to. Not all music is pop, you know.
Sure, but the people who are clapping along to this music and at the concerts I assume are people who actually listen to this music and so should be familiar with pop and the 2 & 4 backbeat.
^ To clarify (and I thought my many parentheticals above made this clear) I’m not talking about people who have no experience with this music. I’m referring to people where I wrote: “And sorry for the gross overgeneralization regarding “we” and “white folk,” but I’m using that as short hand to mean those of us of European ancestry who grew up in a musical culture, i.e. listening to popular music, where the backbeat was emphasized.” I’m not talking about folks who grew up just listening to polka and classical and whatnot where it’s all about the downbeat. Clapping to the 1 & 3 or 1-2-3-4 makes sense to me there. My curiosity concerns the people who did grow up with pop music and, for whatever reason, clap on 1 & 3.
Has anyone seen the sheet music for this to see what is noted? BTW, I always believed it was 7/8 time.
Are you talking about “Unsquare Dance”? As I mentioned in a previous post (#41), it’s typically notated in 7/4.
Those are the ones with no excuse except just having no sense of rhythm.
Well, but the ones I’m talking about do have a sense of rhythm. I’m not talking about folk who just can’t keep a steady beat. It’s just that these people invert the accent. I’d say it’s more like they have a different sense of rhythm or something like that.
This whole conversation is a little weird to me at this point. Because while I can technically count the more complex time signatures, I can’t count them and play them at the same time. To play in them, I kind of have to stop thinking about it entirely, get my mind into a fairly blank state where it “feels” it, (drum intros are invaluable here), and play.
In the case of Unsquare Dance, I can play the bass part. But if I’m honest, I can’t count it. Trying to count any division of 7 whole beats to that song just messes me up. I lose the feel and in turn fall off the beat. My dad was a heavy Brubeck fan, so I grew up listening to the song, if that makes any difference.
4/4 time signatures kind of have the same problem for me. Depending on where you’re counting the 1, everything else is malleable. The difference where everyone is counting the 1 at is often a source of confusion in bands without written music, IME.
Oddly enough, even with my rhythmic idiosyncrasies, drummers seem to like playing with me. Probably because I’m totally dependent on them to tell me where the accents are. When I write a song without a particular beat in mind, the drummer invariably tells me that it’s a very strange song from a drummer’s perspective.
I’d like to add, apropos of nothing: I’m doing tons of stuff in Unsquare Dance’s rhythm, such as scrolling browser pages with the arrow keys, because of this thread. Thankya, I think.
Not really. How exactly the breakdown works can be different, but I cannot think of a 7/8 piece that isn’t a group of two 2/8 and one 3/8.
Music really just tends to break down into groups of two and three. It’s why we group eight notes. I think there’s just something intrinsic about it in how our brains process it.
Without breaking it down that way, I find it pretty much impossible to keep the beat. And I have both played and sung a decent number of 7/8 pieces. The pulses being there feel as natural as the built in pulse in 6/8 or 4/4.
I find that hard to believe, though. I’m not saying those people don’t exist. I’m saying, they’re at a concert with this type of music, so they probably listen to quite a lot of it. It seems there should never be enough of them to drive everyone else to clap on 1 and 3.
I actually think that these groups of people actually hear the music differently. They hear the accented beats, but not the accented rhythm. The accents on 1 and 3 are still there, and if you’re playing a low instrument like the bass or bass drum, you’ll hear them and have to play them.
That’s perfectly normal, I think. Once you get the pulse and feel down, there’s no need to count. Some people can pick it up just by listening; others need a little counting aid until they can really feel and internalize the pulse. There’s plenty of stuff out there I’ve played that I have no idea what the time signature is as I’ve never sat down to really count it out, but I know how it feels.
You might want to check out the work of Kira Gaunt, who is a ethnomusicologist, and her academic work is mostly focused on the intersection of music, race, and gender. She’s firmly in the nurture camp on this issue, and (I am broadly summarizing here) her belief is that this is learned early – like baby and preschool age – and that while there is a lot of overlap between black families and white families and music, in general (again, speaking widely, about large demographics and not about any one individual experience) black families are more likely to sing/play more rhythmically complex songs to babies and small children, and are more likely to gently correct/instruct the kids at a younger age. It’s more than “growing up listening to a certain kind of music;” there’s another element of intentional intervention that is more likely to happen in black families (even when, in her research, black parents report not doing anything special in terms of instruction, they’re tending to compare themselves to other black families where this is the norm). So you’re looking at kids as young as 5 or 6 and can already see a difference in proficiency in this area between (large populations of) white kids and (large populations of) black kids. And I think because they are so young, it’s sometimes mistakenly read as nature.
Cool, I’ll see if I can dig it up. Thanks, delphica. I surmised that it’s probably mostly on the the nurture side of things, but I was curious as to what parts of growing up/nurturing were taking place to engrain certain rhythmic traits and that work seems to address all that.
I listen exclusively to schottisches and mazurkas, so I only clap on the one and three.
Very helpful, thanks!