Apr. 8, 2009 - Celery Dance
There are days when I realize how unfortunate my children were to receive me for a mother. Thankfully, there are also days when I see that their fortune was not so bad after all…
My oldest came home with a new piece in band yesterday, called Gypsy Dance. Today she pulled it out to show me its crazy rhythm. She will be playing percussion on this piece, so she really needs to get this rhythm down pat. The time signature is one I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. It reads “6/8 + 2/4.” A bar of 8th notes would sound something like this:
DA da da DA da da DA da DA da
My daughter was playing all the 8th notes evenly, which is correct (each 8th note is exactly the same length), but I explained to her that she needed to put a slight accent on the first part of each beat so the band could clearly feel the rhythm.
We sang this rhythm over several times, drummed it on the table, and then did the same with other rhythms in the same piece. With the same basic rhythm, there are bars with 16th notes added in, and others with quarter notes tied to eighth notes, complicating things somewhat. But we drummed them out and I think she’s got it. It’s a quite a peppy rhythm, and I rather like it. You can almost see the gypsies dancing…
A little later this same daughter was sitting at the kitchen table working on her science while I was chopping veggies for tonight’s soup. My 6 year-old was standing on a stool beside the stove, reading Frog and Toad to me.
As I chopped celery, my daughter commented that she’s still got that rhythm in her head. I wasn’t surprised. Further, she said, it was driving her nuts that my knife was not chopping to that rhythm! (She is a lot more like her mother than either of us likes to admit…)
This is when I won the mother-of-the-year award. Ok, maybe that’s a little extreme, but surely this will make me mother-of-the-day. I began to chop my celery in the rhythm of Gypsy Dance. WHACK chop chop Whack chop chop Whack chop Whack chop… You could almost see the celery dance! “Much better,” she said. Well, I aim to please, especially if it will help my children with their school work or music.
However, since I want to keep my thumbs for a few more years, I decided not to attempt the section with 16th notes.
