I sit at a traffic light and feel a rhythmic thump at the back of my car.  My eyes automatically fall to the dashboard to see if a warning light is telling me that my car has developed a fatal flaw.  The thumping becomes louder and moves up the side of the car to my left.  The thump becomes sound.  It is “beat” music coming from the car in the left lane.  Thank you, Lord, my car isn’t dying.  Rhythm…beat.  The music is incidental.

Rhythm is part of our human make-up.  My physician expects to hear a consistent lub-dub when he places the stethoscope on my chest.  I notice when my heart skips a beat or when my heart dances six or eight asynchronous beats in a row.  I have eight ticking clocks in my house.  I do not consciously hear their tick-tocks unless one should stop.  The silence is noticeable.  Back to my car: the windshield wipers are supposed to go back and forth at regular intervals…rhythmic.  In fact, I get irritated when I switch them to delay for any length of time, especially if they aren’t synchronized with the back window wiper.  Rhythm is an essential part of our progression through the element of time and space.  Rhythm is necessary in music.

Rhythm is the basic element in music, directing the duration of tones.  The stress or accent is placed on certain tones.  Although the progression of rhythm in western music theory has become more and more complex over the last nine centuries since the 1100’s, it has basically remained unchanged in form until the last half of the twentieth century.  At that time the concept of “polyrhythm”, common in West African and Indian history, became more and more common in more modern times with music from The Beatles on up to current popular music. “Polyrhythm is the simultaneous use of several rhythmic patterns whose accents do not coincide” (Wikipedia).

Part of what makes a hymn tune easy to sing and stick in the singer’s mind is the consistent rhythm. Rhythm is a good thing.  Melodies in which the rhythm patterns change may be pleasant to hear, when sung or played as a musical offering; however, to ask a congregation to sing this dysrhythmic hymn, let alone remembering it afterwards, is expecting more than their capabilities.  Another innovation in modern music is to write music that the rhythm changes in the melody line.  Modern composers of Church music, in an attempt to modernize a boring tune from the past, take the words and rework them into tunes often that truly express the emotion of the original poem.  Unfortunately, when mixed rhythms are used in these re-worked hymns—four  beats, changed to one beat, up to three beats, and then back to four—the focus is drawn away from the words in search of the rhythm. 

Melodies do not need to follow clock-like rhythm and can be very boring when they do.  Neither is it necessary for the harmony to follow along at the same rhythm as the melody.  J.S. Bach demonstrates this in his many counterpoint compositions.  The basic rhythmic beat, however, is there, subtly undergirding and binding the melody and harmony.  A rhythm that is consistent throughout a hymn may not be remembered or even noticed for itself.  Rather, the rhythm facilitates singing and recall.

I’ve noticed that a current trend in some musical accompaniment is to accentuate the rhythm and even eliminate the written harmony.  This disturbs me, because I am now conscious of the rhythm rather than the flow of the words. Words are the most important element of hymnology, whether it is chanted in ancient cadences, sung a cappella, or harmonized and accompanied by multiple instruments. In spite of the importance of the basic rhythmic beat, to lose its subtlety and accentuate it is to lose the impact of those words.

Back in my car again, I switch on the radio and push “seek” to find some melody that I can sing along in rhythm with my heart beat…my windshield wipers…the rolling of my tires.  I don’t know a lot about music, but what I have learned in these three short studies has helped me to understand my disturbed reaction to contemporary Church music.