Customer Reviews

Rhythm Games for Perception and Cognition (Revised Edition)

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Unlike the previous reviewer, I found this book useful as a resource for teaching rhythm to groups of children. As is the case with many books on the Dalcroze method, the exercises may make more sense to someone who has had some first-hand exposure to the Dalcroze approach to teaching. The exercises are reasonably simple to begin with, such as passing a ball to a quarter note beat. They gradually expand in complexity to involve dynamics, changes in tempo, changes of direction, and so forth. These may not be particularly innovative from a Dalcroze perspective, yet they are far better than the standard music lesson approach to rhythm that involves clapping back rhythms presented by the teacher, and are simple enough not to lead to confusion.
I particularly enjoyed the accompanying CD. The music was fresh, and added a playfulness and a certain creative dynamic to the exercises. The only drawback to the music is that some of it was faster than what I would have preferred (for skips, for example), or too complex for younger age groups (for the exercise in dynamics). And I agree with the previous reviewer that one exercise was confusing to the student by not giving sufficient time to stop to an accented beat. But as a teacher you always have the option of using a drum, or making up your own improvisation at the piano. As for being a source of Dalcroze exercises, there are books I have drawn from more (such as Heather Gell), but this book is a good one to start with. Abramson doesn't deal extensively with the underlying philosophy of Eurhythmics in this book, or encourage the teacher to experiment, but at the same time, this book is all that I had expected it to be.
By the way, this book is much better than Abramson's other one "Feel It". I would suggest buying this one first.

I purchased this book because I wanted to remember some of the many wonderful games I had as part of my training in Dr. Abramson' rhythm class at Manhattan School of Music. It has been helpful to teach some of my students with rhythmic problems. I would recommend it to any music teacher. Dr. Abramson was an authority in Dalcroze eurhthmics, very well respected not only in USA but also worlwide. I am glad he left this books as a legacy for us teachers to continue his work.

I bought this hoping for new ideas to explore rhythm and movement in the classroom and was very dissappointed. Most of these games are uninspired (just walking to a beat) and mostly repeat each other (for example one game may be just to walk to a beat and the next is exactly the same but a little faster!).

Even worse is that these games do not encourage any sort of musicallity in the children. In fact, most of these games actually expect the children to react a split second after the teachers beat. For example, in chapter 3, game 1 children are expected to freeze when the teacher creates an accented beat except that in one version of the game no clue is given as to when the accent comes and accents are played at irregular intervals. When there is a game involving getting faster or slower the children are expected to keep up - again they can only ever be behind the beat as they will never truely know when the beat will fall. All of the impetus comes from the teacher and there is little, if no, musical demands from the children. Surely if the children were singing a song themselves and walking to their own beats this would encourage better musicianship than dry exercises initiated by the teacher on a drum or playing a CD (which, by the way, is a poor recording).

Generally, an example of very poorly thought out activities that are truly unmusical.