Music Is Timing

Note: this post has a number of brief audio examples. If they don’t work for you, could you please let me know in the comments? Thanks!

I once had a beginning student named Harry, who was 72 years old. He did quite well, generally, but one day I heard him playing a tune all wrong.

The tune is called Kate Dalrymple, and starts something like this:

As you can hear, there are different length notes — in this case, quarter and eighth notes. Harry had played the tune alright at a previous lesson, but on that day, he played it kind of like this:

Every note was the same length! He was reading the notes and completely ignoring the rhythms.

I said, "Harry, what are you doing? You know this tune. See the quarter notes, and the eighth notes?"

Said Harry, "I didn't want to waste time."

Okay, this is where it might be relevant that he was a 72-year-old beginner. Some students I’ve had at that age feel the pressure of time and have even given themselves a fixed amount of time to "get good" at the instrument! (As I like to point out, nobody gets good at this, we just get better.) But Harry's hurry can be found in lots of people who are younger — kids, lawyers, business people. There always seem to be reasons to "not waste time." In one study, people were asked to stand up after they felt that a minute had passed, without making any attempt to count seconds. One businessman stood up after six seconds!

The thing is, music IS time. What Harry played was not the tune Kate Dalrymple; he simply played the notes from that tune with no regard for the essence of the tune, which is its timing.

Here’s a simple scale, which is a tool used everywhere in music, but is not heard as a tune or a melody in and of itself .

But if I add a simple change in timing, making two of the notes longer, and the notes that follow them a little shorter, the result is a melody by G.F. Handel (thanks, Susan, for your comment below!):

“Joy to the World” is just a scale with a little timing thrown into it, but that timing turns it into music.

One more example. Can you recognize this immediately?

Maybe if we add a little timing to the same notes?

If you play the happy birthday song with the right timing, even if the intonation and sound quality are terrible, everyone will still know what it is! But play it beautifully with the wrong timing, and it will simply be confusing.

People learning an instrument often focus so much on getting the notes right that they sacrifice timing altogether. Some will fix a note here and there at the expense of unwittingly destroying the continuity of a phrase or whole tune. Unwittingly, because their priorities are backwards — music is really all about timing, not about playing the right notes at the right time.

In fact, getting through all the notes in time is never quite enough, is it? Compare the first little recording above of Kate Dalrymple to this one:

It has all the right notes at the right time, but it it is certainly missing something. In his classic study of Shetland fiddling, Peter Cook talks about “lift” vs “lilt,” where lift is basically the beat, and lilt is the timing between beats. Everyone he spoke to agreed that it was the lilt that made the music danceable, but nobody could describe what lilt was. They could only recognize it when they heard it.

We’ll discuss this more in another post, and other details about how important timing is, such as what even is a beat? How do you find it? Why is it that a computer never sounds like a human musician?

But for now, give it some thought as you listen to music yourself, and as you play. Check out some really old recordings, made before it was easy to digitally edit everything, adjust pitches, and cut and paste to perfection in the recording studio. Whether you listen to James Scott Skinner bashing through one of his tunes in the 1920s, or a classical violinist like Joseph Szigety, you’ll hear captivating music. You’ll also hear mistakes, but the mistakes are all in momentary glitches in pitch or tone, not in the timing.

Music is nothing without timing, and great music has an irresistible spirit that makes you want to keep listening or even to dance.

And just food for thought, fiddlers — while good music is about good timing, on the fiddle, the timing is all in the bow. We’ll talk more about this too, so stay tuned!