THE TEACHING OF TIME AND RHYTHM
It is impossible to over-estimate the importance of careful study before
a teacher attempts to train children in a sense of time and rhythm.
Not only must an intellectual conception of the importance of the
subject be arrived at, but a subconscious realization of it. The
function of rhythm in the world should be perceived, and such natural
phenomena as day and night, the seasons, the tides, and countless
others, seem to be examples of the same principle. The same influence
may be traced in social activities. Work cannot be organized and carried
on where rhythmic order is not found, and no conception of the brain or
of the artistic faculty can emerge uninformed by rhythmic continuity.
A human being imperfectly endowed with a sense of balance or rhythm is a
danger to the community, and one who is entirely without this sense is
spoken of as 'insane'.
In the training of the teacher it is well to call attention first to the
rhythm of speech, before entering into that of music. Those who have had
a literary education have already studied the metrical properties of
poetry and prose. They will readily agree that such phrases as:
'My father's father saw it not.'
'Happy New Year to you.'
'Because I sought it far from men,
In deserts and alone.'
'We must go back with Policeman Day,
Back to the City of Sleep.'
can be thought of as written in [2/4], [3/4], [4/4], [6/8] times
respectively.
M. Jaques Dalcroze has shown, through his Rhythmic Gymnastics, the
extraordinary effect that rhythmic movements can have, not only on
physical health, but on mental and moral poise. For highly nervous
children some such work is of especial benefit, but for all children it
is of great value. It should be supplemented in the ear-training class
by constant practice in beating time to tunes. The teacher begins by
playing simple tunes, with strongly marked accents. The children should
discover these accents for themselves, and should be taught to beat
time, using the proper conductor's beats from the first.
The French time names--_ta_, _ta-té_, &c.--are invaluable in early
stages. They are based on sense impression, and are picked up quickly by
the children. By taking the crotchet as the unit to start with, the
old-fashioned plan of exalting the semibreve, the least used note in
music, to a primary place, is avoided.
If the order given in Somervell's _Fifty Steps in Sight-singing_ be
followed, the question of complicated time will not be forced too early
on the attention of the children. Pupils trained on other systems have
sometimes been found incapable of singing melodies written in
complicated time, even though they can beat time to the notes, giving
the time names, without mistake. The same thing is noticeable in their
instrumental work. This is due to the fact that one side of their
training has been developed at the expense of the other--time at the
expense of pitch. There seems little point in teaching a child such
time-values as
[Illustration: (crotchet tied to first note of a quaver triplet,
followed by four semiquavers and another crotchet)]
when it can only read at sight in the key of C major!
In taking an exercise in sight-singing for the first time with a class
at an elementary stage the following practice has been found beneficial:
1. The children sing the tune straight through at sight, without
stopping, the teacher beating time. Mistakes are then pointed out and
difficult phrases practised.
2. The children stand and sing the tune straight through again, beating
time as they do so.
3. Individual children then stand and sing the tune by themselves,
beating time. In this way the child gets to know the sound of its own
voice, and the teacher can correct any individual faults of intonation,
voice production, &c. Some children will always have an inclination to
shout when they sing with others, partly through excitement and partly
because they cannot hear their own voices in any other way. If this be
permitted the quality of tone will rapidly degenerate, and the effect of
the whole class work will suffer.
Nothing is more delightful than to hear young children sing quietly, and
without in any way forcing their voices.