Counting Rhythms and Counting Systems

Rhythm Counting - or counting rhythms - is a critically important activity for classroom/ensemble instruction of music performance. The isolation of rhythm from other aspects of performance allows the students several critical advantages over the holistic instructional approach:

1. Rhythm counting can be perfected! Music that is not perfect - or nearly so - is difficult for many of us to even enjoy. So we must teach students that perfection is possible from the beginning of their time in an ensemble. We can best do that with counting before we address any other aspect of performance.
2. Rhythm counting can be perfected by every student. Many music teachers profess to teaching every student, but few really do that. Most of us teach a specific skill until we hear a pleasing response (rhythmic or musical) from the general direction of the class, then we move on to the next teaching task. The result is that we begin to ignore those students who did not get it the first time. (In truth, we don't even know that they didn't get it.) The slower students are extremely cooperative in this effort, because they attempt to hide from us. So between their hiding and our ignoring them so we can move on, we create a subculture of students that we hide for the rest of their performance careers. The RhythmBee Program is built on two philosophies that offer an alternative to that common practice.
3. 1. Incremental development is a guiding philosophy of the RhythmBee program. Implementing that as a consistent practice breaks the learning into such small bites that every student has time to install both previous and new learning to the level of "automaticity."
   2. Continuous Review allows every student to learn (or re-learn) previous lessons. Even when a new student checks into the class mid-year, it is often not necessary to catch him up with individual counting instruction. The examples of enthusiastic (and perfect) performance around him and the fact that he cannot lose his place in the RhythmBee instructional units allow him hundreds of opportunities to correlate accurate performance with the appropriate symbols.
4. Confidence in counting performance allows each student to approach singing or playing an instrument with far greater confidence. In the case of beginning instrumentalists, the first day with an instrument is so much more comfortable because they only have one new task to master.
   
5. Confidence in rhythm performance makes printed music as familiar as the student's native language because rhythm performance has become a function of muscle memory rather than a cerebral task.