Week 1: The element of rhythm

Introduction

One of the fundamental aspects of music is that it exists in time. Before the age of recorded sound, music notation was developed to try to capture the ephemeral and fleeting qualities of music. In this course you are not going to be looking at notation, but you will examine the organising and regulating function of musical time. You will consider the underlying heartbeat of the music (its pulse), the speed of the music (its tempo), how musical time is organised (its metre), and how patterns of varying different lengths of sound characterise the music (its rhythm).