Rhythm Gestures: Teaching Literacy and Infusing Artistry

Rhythm gestures are a new kinesthetic tool for teaching literacy and building artistry—a kind of solfège for rhythm. Students show rhythm and pulse through simple gestures that correspond with common rhythmic units and patterns. Kinesthetic reinforcement of the interaction of rhythm and meter transforms rhythmic performance into something seen and felt, not just heard. It is useful with rhythmic reading exercises and within the larger rehearsal context.

Pairing solfège with hand signs and body levels helps to develop reading skills but also builds the inner ear. A well-developed inner ear is essential for artistic expression—transcending fundamental literacy to the realization of musical expression. Rhythm gestures do the same thing for rhythm: assist the development of fundamental reading skills while building an internal sense of music through time.

Pitch artistry involves awareness of leading tones, tension, and resolution, place within vertical harmony, and weight within horizontal phrases to make music uplift and cry out. Solfège, hand signs, and body levels provide a teaching structure to address various levels of pitch information. Musicians internalize and begin to audiate—to hear inside the brain before they produce a pitch.

Rhythmic artistry involves flow, direction, weight, and timing to make music breathe and dance. Rhythm gestures incorporate recognition of symbols, grouping of patterns, division of pulse, rests, and a sense of momentum to build layers of association between rhythm and meter. The rhythmic aspect of musical performance communicates more than a correct place in time; interactions of rhythm and meter are essential underpinnings of artistic expression. Rhythm gestures enable a sense of musical feel—of the way the music moves with weight, direction, flow, and intention through time.

Why don’t new singers pay attention to rhythm? Why do ensembles rush? Why is every member of the band tapping their foot to keep time? Why is it that even non-beginner ensembles can produce music that is technically accurate but artistically uninspired? Within a large group, how can I tell which individuals are struggling to decipher rhythmic notation, and how can group learning reinforce individual skills?

Singers do not always pay attention to rhythmic notation because they must

1. locate their line on the page within a larger score, sometimes on the same staff as another part;
2. read and pronounce text (printed below the musical notation) and perform both lines of information (text and pitch) in time with their ensemble;
3. follow contour with eye and ear to produce a correct pitch without the aid of a button or key; and
4. examine note heads and stem tips to notice that the symbols have slight differences indicating changes in duration.

A choral singer’s eye focuses on the place on the page, line of text, and pitch contour first; rhythmic value last. If their words are in line with the ensemble, they are rhythmically correct—they can see and hear alignment without full attention to the details of rhythmic notation.

In contrast, instrumentalists

1. generally have only their notes on their page;
2. have no text line to decipher as they analyze rhythmic notation, allowing their eyes to stay focused on the staff;
3. follow contour by relating notes to a fingering that results in a pitch at least close to the intended pitch; and
4. examine note heads and stem tips to decipher rhythmic notation.

For instrumentalists, rhythmic literacy is the primary system for playing their part within the ensemble. If they are not deciphering rhythmic notation, they can get lost trying to put their part with the whole.

Ensembles rush because musicians are performing “correct” rhythms without an association with the strong and weak patterns of meter, to equal division of the pulse, or to a consistent pulse through periods of rest. Faster, slower, shorter, and longer become relative to each other instead of to the underlying meter.

Technically accurate but uninspired musical performance is akin to monotone speech and can happen at any level. We need inflection to capture attention when we speak—rise and fall of pitch, variations in duration and volume, and stressed and unstressed syllables within each sentence. All syllables are not created equal. Likewise, all pulses are not created equal: stressed and unstressed metric patterns combine with pitch and volume to create musical inflection as we turn notation into sound.

Without some kind of kinesthetic movement that is easily visible from the front of the room, I can’t tell which of my students needs my help to improve rhythmic artistry. Nor can they notice and fix their own problems as they work within the ensemble. They may hear that something is off, but they cannot identify and fix it easily. I can test them individually, and I can narrow them down until I figure out which one is incorrect, but they may continue to be oblivious to their mistakes unless they can see and feel that they are not with everyone else.

Why Physicalize Rhythm with Rhythm Gestures?

Movement is a long-proven tool for aiding the development of musical skills. When singers use hand signs with body levels as they decipher pitch, each singer demonstrates direction and distance for themselves within a unified whole. They see and sense when others are showing a different shape, moving in a different direction, or jumping to a more distant pitch and can self-correct to match their peers.

Until now, there has not been an equivalent system for internalizing pulse, meter, and flow. When we move from rote learning to learning from notation, the weight and pattern of meter is lost. We teach rhythms, but we do not connect to the underlying pulse in an expressive way. In the world of pitch, this would be like teaching notes without the context of tonality. We decipher rhythmic notation correctly but not musically; we do not read rhythm and meter. Even when we count through the measure, we treat all beats with equal weight. Musical flow depends on stressed and unstressed sounds, forward momentum, stretched values, and holds to move meaningfully through time.

Why Rhythm Gestures?

Rhythm gestures provide a way for all students to learn along with a single performer or within the whole ensemble. As students participate in someone else’s performance or reinforce the rhythmic flow of their own part, the choreography of the hands and levels reinforce learning. They see, feel, and self-correct based on the movements around them while internalizing the relationship between rhythmic values and underlying metric flow.

Based on foundational movements of conducting, rhythm gestures use space, weight, and time to physicalize strong-weak patterns of meter. They do not require students to remember the direction associated with the position in the measure. A conducting pattern involves direction: down, left, right, or up based on the meter signature, a layer of knowledge young readers may not be ready to meet. They have not yet internalized steady pulse, division of the beat, or pattern over pulse. With rhythm gestures, readers internalize rhythmic relationships and learn to feel both duration and flow without physicalizing the direction of the beats in a conducting pattern.

Once their internal clock is developed and they have created their own sense of steady time, they can decode conducting gestures on a deeper level. There is a kinesthetic relationship established within each student that informs an instinctive response to gestures of weight, time, and flow. If they go on to conduct themselves, they add a layer of direction to already established gestures of ictus and flow.

Developing a New Learning System

In Fall 2020, those of us who returned to in-person teaching were charged with adapting our methodologies for success within COVID protocols. I was responsible for reducing aerosol emissions in singing classes, including aural skills. I needed to assess from the teacher’s space without entering the six-foot bubble set aside for each student. This pandemic-driven (panic-driven) solution became rhythm gestures.

As a young pianist, I learned to count. In choir, I learned to count-sing and tap the pulse as I sang. I didn’t learn Kodály or Takadimi or another system of rhythmic reading. A college professor taught me to read mixed meter by counting the number of eighth notes in each note: “1” on every eighth note, “1, 2” on every quarter note, “1, 2, 3” for a dotted quarter, etc. This was useful for establishing a sense of flow in unmetered chant and for moving together in asymmetrical meters.

As an aural skills teacher, I learned that verbal rhythmic systems are essential tools for beginning readers, who face the task of deciphering a system of symbols in time. The first step is to get them to recognize each symbol—to see whether the note head is blank or solid, to see an associated dot beside the note, to recognize how many flags or beams are attached to the top of the stem, to differentiate among the various symbols for rests. Systems like Kodály and Takadimi remove meter from the equation and allow readers to focus on deciphering symbols while simultaneously performing the correct duration. Later they can learn to identify the beat within the measure; first, they need to recognize and differentiate values and patterns.

Rhythm gestures can be used in combination with any verbal counting system—Kodály, Takadimi, counting, or even as singers sing on text—because they are physicalizations designed to help readers recognize, group, and feel how rhythmic patterns work with and against the underlying pulse. They relate rhythmic patterns to weight, momentum, and flow before these patterns connect to meter. They reinforce concepts in a linear way for learners of all ages, filling a gap in rhythmic teaching that exists after symbol recognition and before conducting gestures.

Rhythm gestures provide a way for music readers to “sound out” a measure “syllable by syllable” before they begin reading “sentences.” As they learn, they internalize weight, pulse, flow, division of beat, and grouping of notes into patterns. They are able to self-correct and reinforce their learning as they move with other students. These foundational gestures become instinctive and lead directly to more fluency in recognizing and in developing conducting patterns—and rhythmic artistry—with time and repetition.

Individual Assessment within a Group Context

Rhythm gestures are also useful for assessing individual comprehension and enabling self-correction in a group setting. When students use rhythm gestures in their study of a sight-singing example, I can step in and guide them before their first reading because I can see errors before they happen. Ensemble rhythms become more precise as the whole ensemble uses rhythm gestures to re-prioritize rhythmic accuracy in their performance.

With pitch exercises, hand signs with body levels demonstrate comprehension of notation. The body helps to build associations to the notated pitches as the ear and voice develop accuracy. With rhythmic exercises, students like to clap or tap furtively—they like to hide. Or, they think they have it but then can’t perform accurately on their own. Rhythm gestures can be done in limited personal space—from a desk or from within an ensemble—but they are obvious enough that both student and teacher can immediately see and sense when something isn’t right.

Some learners may work through the system slowly, building foundations in rhythm as they learn to decipher musical notation. Older learners might work through the process more quickly, returning to this tool only when rhythm needs to be prioritized or when a director wants to quickly assess individual comprehension in a specific passage. At every level, rhythm gestures provide a bridge from technical accuracy to musical flow and expressive practice, moving us from beginning reading to more expressive, intuitive, artistic performance.

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See Rhythm Gestures in Action