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Looper's Delight
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The classical composer and theoretician Arnold Schoenberg has been credited as saying that all composition is just very slow improvisation. It stands to reason , then that improvisation can be thought of as very fast composition. The use of Rhythmic Subsets when responding to another persons rhythm is a very powerful, real time strategy for improvising (or real time arranging as it can be thought of in this sense) and for composition and arrangement in non real time playing. Here is an examples of what I'm talking about and a powerful way of utilizing In a question about the double stroke exercise, someone asked me about the relationship of the Tresillo rhythm (two beat syncopation combination I C) to the Cinquillo rhythm. (two beat syncopation combination M F). Both rhythms were carried with the West Africans that the Moors enslaved into Spain when the Moors conquered Spain and then later were brought to the New World when the Spanish Christians defeated the Moors. They are the African rhythmic basis of Afro Cuban music. This creative legacy of the horrible practice of slavery also brought with it, the rhythmic basis of blues, jazz and, later, r&b and rock n' roll in American music history. Tresillo is, literally, a subset or a skeletilization (reduction) of the rhythm Cinquillo X * * X * * X * X * X X * X X * If you analyze rhythm sections in pop music from around the world, frequently rhythms are played that are subsets of the dominant ostinato rhythm in the parts that make up the whole ensemble. This is particularly true in the African Diaspora model of groove playing for dancing. A really wonderful exercise is to play only subsets of a particular rhythm. You can get incredible results using this technique and it is astonishingly how many measure you can play without repeating yourself. In a way, this is a kind of negative improvisation but the results it give you are always consonant, rhythmically speaking with whatever ostinato forms the basis of the rhythm or groove you are playing. The formula for determining how many possible subsets there are internal to a rhythm is 2 to the N power where N = the number of notes in a rhythm. As an example, the number of subsets in this rhythm X X * X = 2 to the 3rd power (2 X 2 X 2) so the rhythms internal to this rhythm are, including the very important last rhythm which is a rest on all 4 16th notes 1) synco A X * * * first single audible note 2) synco B * X * * second single audible note 3) synco D * * * X third single audible note 4) synco E X X * * first double audible combination 5) synco I X * * X first two note 'apart' combination 6) synco J * X * X second two note 'apart' combination 7) synco N X X * X first triple note combination 8) synco P * * * * the ever important and frequently neglected null set. When you take a rhythm like Cinquillo (M F) X * X X * X X * there are 32 possible rhythms internal to is (2 to the 5th power = 32) Tresillo is one of them This is a really powerful and complex game if you start playing with rhythms as complex as Cascara from Cuban Rumba music X * X X * X * X X * X * X X * X where there are an astonishing 1,024 possible measure of music you could play utilizing subsets of the rhythm and never once repeating yourself Mastery of all the possible combinations of ALL 16 notes is close to impossible (there are 65, 536 subsets of 16 notes - 2 to the 16th power) unless we realize that any 16 note pattern is merely the addition of two 8 note patterns. Buy memorizing the 256 two beat Syncopation combinations we have not learned some of the possibilities of skeletilization but ALL of the possibilities. This is really, really powerful rhythmically and worth the 1 to 6 months of work it takes to master all these exercises. Ones rhythmic ear will grow immeasurably by working through the 256 16th note combinations and the 64 triplet 8th note combinations. If you use this way of thinking when you are improvising it forms a very powerful way of moving the rhythm and yet never being what the Cubans call CRUZADO or crossed with the rhythm. Just for starters, try improvising with only the subsets of Cinquillo to see how powerful this is. Below is a list of all of the subset possibilities of any combination of notes up to 16. 1 note rhythm = 2 subsets 2 note rhythm = 4 subsets 3 note rhythm = 8 subsets 4 note rhythm = 16 subsets 5 note rhythm = 32 subsets 6 note rhythm = 64 subsets 7 note rhythm = 128 subsets 8 note rhythm = 256 subsets 9 note rhythm = 512 subsets 10 note rhythm = 1,024 subsets 11 note rhythm = 2,048 subsets 12 note rhythm = 4,096 subsets 13 note rhythm = 8,192 subsets 14 note rhythm = 16,384 subsets 15 note rhythm = 32,768 subsets 16 note rhythm = 65,536 subsets