Phenomenology of Rhythm

Introduction

So recently I started studying drum rudiments. Despite being an accomplished drummer I had never looked at rudiments because I thought they would be artificial and not apply to playing drumset as well as they did to marching bands. Through studying the standard 40 rudiments I have discovered that:

1. I could already play most of the rudiments, I just didn't know the names. Oftentimes I understood there to be something "essential" about certain patterns which turned out to be either rudiments themselves or very close to established rudiments (i.e. my feel and the maths were almost, but not quite in line).
2. Rudiments are artificial and don't apply to playing drumset as well as to playing in a marching band. The original list of Swiss rudiments was an essential piece of theory for marching bands sending messages to troops via their playing. The 40 strong list of rudiments we have today is a fudge between this and some weird attempt to fall short of being definitive.
3. The world lacks a sophisticated phenomenology of rhythm.

Phenomenology of Rhythm

By "phenomenology of rhythm" I mean a list of things that can be played on a drum kit. I think we need to build one, and I think I am uniquely well placed to do it. I am an accomplished drum kit player with a background in the feel and practice of playing drum kit rather than in the theory of it. I know enough about music theory to allow me to undertake this task, but not so much that my approach will be clouded by it. I have already explored harmony (in this blog) in a way that has set me up to use a similar technique to explore rhythm. Finally, and most importantly, I think we are at a point with rock music where we can look back, in a similar way to how one might look back at the classical period, and categorize and analyse the practice of the time. Or, in other words, there is a corpus or a canon to study.

Limitation of Combinatorics

There are a number of different approaches that could be taken to this. You could sit down and use combinatorics to list all the possible combinations of rhythms. The standard rudiments hold that they are informed by a laissez-faire version of this technique. But in practice musicians don't do this. There are a more limited number of rhythms that are employed. The situation is analogous to phonemes; there are comprehensive tables of sounds or letters that can be created in the human mouth and throat. However, no language uses them all. I am interested in the sounds that have been produced by drummers, not the rhythms that could have been played.

Canon

I suppose I better define a canon. What I am interested in is rock music including a drum kit. So I'm not at this point concerned with drum machines, or latin percussion or bodhrans or anything else. I want music played by a human drum set player with limbs.

To define a drum kit I will arbitrarily say it is a thing consisting of multiple percussion instruments, including, as a minimum, a bass drum operated by a pedal and a snare drum. A drum kit is played with a stick held in each hand (although there are very few exceptions). I do not consider a rhythm played with alternating finger tips to be drum set playing. I would usually expect the kit to include a modern hihat, and also ride and crash cymbals and a set of tom-toms. However, so long as the pedal-operated bass drum and snare are present, I think that is a drum kit. Once the core of this work is complete, we should dismantle these definitions and broaden the scope of the phenomenology. To summarise:
1. A drum kit has (at least one) pedal-operated bass drum.
2. A drum kit has a snare drum (or a functional equivalent taking its place such as a timbale).
3. A drum kit is played with a stick held in each hand (very few exceptions), and with the feet operating pedals.

By rock music I mean the style of music characterized by the heavy use of a backbeat that may have begun in the 1950s with artists such as Little Richard, although I am reluctant to draw any line. Led Zeppelin played rock music. The Sex Pistols played rock music. The Beatles played rock music. Nirvana played rock music. I am also wary of defining this canon in reference to the backbeat because any phenomenology that results will inevitably beg the question. As an arbitary cut-off point I'll draw the other end of the line for now at the year 2000.

Goals

I hope that in studying a phenomenology of rhythm, some better understanding of drum set playing will be arrived at. I hope this may become a tool for students, distilled into some form appropriate for that task. Finally, and more loftily, I hope that some unifying idea can be arrived at that links rhythm and harmony. I believe that there is some emotional similarity between the interval of a fourth, which is created by two tones in a relationship of 4/3, and of a polyrhythm of four beats contrasted to three beats. Each example repeats over a period of twelve units; with the drums we are talking about beats in a bar, and with the piano we are talking about wavelengths. I am hoping to demonstrate that rhythms are nothing but slow sophisticated harmonies.

Method

To begin the project I will start experimentally by collecting examples of rhythms from the canon and categorizing them. Once a corpus of data has been built up then I hope the road ahead will become clear. I expect to find something like 95% of rhythms to be related to the backbeat, that is, with an accented snare on the third beat (in four time). I am interested in patterns moreso than tempo, and hope to work from the usual to the unusual.

Thanks for reading. Let's begin.