Customer Reviews

Rhythm Reading: Elementary through Advanced Training (Second Edition)

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For any of you looking for a good book on rhythm reading the book by Daniel Kazez titled "Rhythm Reading - Elementary Through Advanced Training" is quite good. Daniel Kazez is a cellist and teaches at Wittenberg, University in Springfield, Ohio.

It moves from simple rhythmic principles to more complex with lots of practice exercises. It introduces each rhythmic figure as a cell and focuses on the rhythmic patterns with simple word patterns that help in the initial learning. The book also has exercises that contain many rests. So many other books of this type consist of endless patterns of rhythmic figures without rests. Having to count through rests increases the difficulty and gives much better overall musical practice. Most of the exercises are written on single lines and really focus on the rhythm rather than trying to read notes on the usual 5 line staff. Later in the book there are more musical examples to help put the rhythms in musical context. There are review questions after each chapter and listings of pieces of music that illustrate the various rhythms just studied.

All in all it is a very good book for anyone wanting to improve their rhythmic skills.

This book of rhythmic studies is intended for undergraduate college/university level study.

Features include:
-lots of exercises in simple and compound metres and some in irregular metres.
-beginning chapters introducing rhythmic cells in simple time (with quarter note beat) and compond time (with dotted quarter note beat)
-following chapters using different note values as the beat (dotted half note, half note, eighth note, dotted eighth note, etc.)
-practice in reading economical notational devices such as measured tremolo, multi-measure rests etc.
-brief introduction to hypermetre
-chapters on different sub-divisions of the beat (e.g. quintuplets)
-introduction of basic conducting patterns
-some 2 pt exercises (for one player) and some with two & three parts for ensemble playing

Kazez introduces many rhythmic cells in both simple and compound time and gives suggested speech cues for each as memory aids. Some examples of speech cues used in this book:

-"ba-ker" - two even eighth notes performed in the place of a quarter note beat (or two even quarter notes in the place of a half note beat, etc.)

-"te-le-phone" sixteenth note, sixteenth note, eighth note - performed over one quarter note beat.

-"pa-sta" Dotted eight note, sixteenth note

-etc.

The speech cues aren't essential to the book though. It's possible to use other rhythmic syllable systems, such as Takadimi or Kodaly-based syllables.

"Rhythm Reading" will not teach you how to read rhythm. It will only give you examples of rhythms you are likely to encounter in western music. The author does state the following: "It is expected that students using this book will have at least a rudimentary knowledge of music reading." This is an understatement, you need a strong background in music reading to get any benefit from this book.

This was a college text book for me...thanks for getting me through class!

"...Rhythm Reading offers, in addition, concise explanations of musical terms, concepts, and performance indications; helpful hints on practicing and performing the exercises; conducting patterns for the more common meters; 22 written worksheets that FOCUS ON SPECIFIC ASPECTS OF METER; AND A SELF-TEST FOR EVERY CHAPTER....."
[from the book of the back cover]