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All music comes from the same place – the canvas of silence. What is placed on the canvas is where the differentiation of one piece of music from another occurs. Are we creating a Western classical symphony? An Irish drinking song? An Indian raga?

Okay. Before we get started, it bears mentioning that if you haven’t been exposed to this material before, there is much to cover.  You may want to return to this regularly to refresh your  awareness. It also bears mentioning that the material here is a summary of years of study of different musics from around the world. Typically in the west, there is a certain understanding of what terms we use when talking about the rhythmic aspects of music. I have borrowed liberally from these terms, but I am not presenting the strictly western concept of rhythm. Instead, here you will find a distillate of common features of virtually any (metronomic) rhythmic tradition. Finally, it is important to know that the theory of music doesn’t sound like anything. It is a map – and just as a recipe for beef stew doesn’t have any particular flavor (though the stew itself does!) a map (or more precisely, the tools for map making) does not have any particular sound. From this we can conclude that sound is the authority; the map is only good so long as it can be used to create/replicate the music it is supposed to describe. If it fails to do so, the map – or map-system may require revision.

In “Anatomy of Rhythm” I lay out a means by which the student of rhythm can map out various rhythmic patterns to a significant degree of complexity. This model serves as a way to understand the theoretical structure of most global rhythmic systems.

The next step is to learn how to apply this theoretical knowledge to your instrument(s) of choice.  “Flow technique” is a strategy that is especially useful . There are hundreds or possibly thousands of types of drums which may require many different approaches to technique.  As such it is beyond the scope of this post to apply “flow technique” to every drum. It can and does apply to most single headed drums where both hands or sticks perform relatively symmetrically.

“Tell me, oh great musician, who is your teacher?” Tansen replied: “My teacher is a very great musician – but more than that. I cannot call him musician, I must call him music”. – Hazrat Inayat Khan, The Mysticism of Sound and Music

In Rhythm As Motion I discuss the value of learning rhythm by learning the underlying components that are common to all metronomic rhythmic systems. As an aspect of that I would like to discuss the difference between structure and content. In “Exploring music Deconstructively” I explore different methods for identifying pulse and meter and acknowledge that there are occasionally multiple “right answers”. The reason for this is that when you only have the content (what you hear), you are reliant only on the music as you hear it to make sense of  what is happening. As a participant in the music, this is sometimes not enough information to know how to address the music. When possible, it is helpful to know the underlying structure from which the the composer/musicians are operating. It is also useful to have a sense of what kinds of structures are available as a means of developing creative music. An awareness of the relationship between structure and content can provide broader  possibilities for content from the perspective of tension and resolution.