Time and the Circle

It has been creeping up on me for quite a while now. It was, however, only recently that this instinct found an audible voice and began to apply itself to my playing and teaching regularly. It is the concept of musical time as it relates to the circle.

Regardless of meter, complexity of rhythm, tempo and other extraneous musical parameters, circles find their way into my thoughts when I play. Not present and practiced, but more like the way we think about a memory, with careful and unintentional yet unavoidable avoidance of any true clarity. Circles represent to me wholesomeness, regularity, continuation, and flexibility in the same manner that does the passage of time.

Circles are what makes the wheel, and the wheel moves in a consistent manner according to its external influences, and will, barring some catastrophic interference, change speed in a very predictable manner. If the slope on which the wheel is rolling changes its angle, the wheel will accelerate or decelerate, but only at exactly the rate which corresponds to the forces that presently act upon it. In our physics analogy of the day, these forces are the "gravity" of the music (the baseline tempo which "grounds" us), the "friction" of the medium (the performer and his personal range of difficulties, whether they are breathing, digital dexterity, etc.), and the "slope" of the music (cadential tension is a common cause of "upward slopes", or slowing down, while augmentation of key, musical anxiety, and many other factors could cause a "downward slope", or acceleration). Wheels roll, and given a surface environment of zero friction (which we simulate with a conductor or metronome) will continue onward at a constant speed. In addition, if you were to watch the wheel move in slow-motion, the exact same part of the wheel would make a full rotation at a perfectly regular interval. This is, in full essence, playing with good time.

An ostinato pattern played with perfect groove in the most tailored of pockets will demonstrate what it means to make a circle, or a loop, in music. But even outside of this obvious context, if you listen to a performer playing with perfect "time," you can almost feel the circles inside the sound.

I have been sharing with my students an exercise which I have invented to help fish this concept from the murky mind-waters to our actual senses. I have found categorically that the students with the best sense of rhythm and time are immediately better with the exercise than those with a faltering concept of rhythm. This supports the value of the exercise, and it is simple and as follows:

1) Put a metronome or constant source of tempo on whichever speed you desire

2) Draw circles that repeat themselves once every measure (you decide the time signature). In other words, the pencil or pen reaches the topmost point of the circle at the downbeat of a new measure, but does not hesitate and continues immediately to draw another circle. The pencil does not leave the paper.
3) The point of the exercise is the draw circles in a consistent manner (that is, without speeding up or slowing down the actual drawing of the circle) and that are exactly the same size and same position on the paper.

There are a lot of variations to the exercise that are valuable and eye-opening, in my opinion, so if you try it feel free to be creative. My favorite variations include randomly altering the time signature starting at the top of the circle/measure (this is very difficult to do the first time correctly!), and having someone else steadily change the tempo in a particular direction. Also, leaving just one audible beat per measure is like extra credit and requires really good subdivision.

Finally, I have made a couple of observations when performing and teaching this exercise. One is that circles are a shape that is much more consistent to good time keeping than polygons are (triangles for 3/4, pentagons for 5/4, etc.). Polygons subdivide the measure for you into exact points, and in music we just don't get clear downbeats all the time. (P.S. Writing little marks about the downbeats in your music is a crutch and doesn't help your sight-reading!). In addition, I've noticed that drawing a polygon causes you to hesitate just slightly at the corners of the shape, and consequently have a burst of acceleration directly thereafter. One might say that the circle has no angles and therefore does not support subdivision, however, truthfully a circle has essentially an infinite amount of pivoting points, so the subdivision is the most intense, and will basically be at the highest level that you personally can manage to keep track of.

Try it!