Lesson video

Hello, and welcome to your music lesson today.

My name is Miss Al-Hanoush and today we will be exploring how different rhythm cycles can work together.

So in order to do this, let's have a quick warmup to focus our minds.

This is great for having to listen out to others and also for making sure that you are counting in time and performing in time.

So there are three different patterns that I am going to suggest to you.

Now you can use whatever body percussion you want to use for this.

The first pattern is really simple.

The first pattern is you're going to clap on the first beat of every three, like this.

One two three, one two three, one two three.

And so on.

The second pattern is to clap on the first beat of every four, like this.

One two three four, one two three four, one two, three, four.

And so on, easy.

The third pattern is to clap, you've guessed it, on every five.

So one, two, three, four, five, one, two, three, four, five.

We're going to layer these on top of each other and it should make rhythm displacement.

It makes some quite interesting polyrhythms as our rhythms adapt to each other.

So your challenge is whilst you're doing this, there is one bar that actually we are going to hit the same beat, the very first beat of the bar together.

Can you count how many times? And I don't mind which pattern you use.

Can you count how many times it takes for your pattern? So how many threes would you have to do? How many fours would you have to do? Or how many fives did you have to do until we all hit the same beat one together.

If you've got other members of your household available, get them to join in too.

Are you ready? One, two, three, four.

Did you count how many there were? So if you were clapping the three on every first beat of the three, there were 21 that you needed to count there.

If you were clapping every time it was on the four, you would have had to count 16.

And if you were clapping every time there was five, you would have had to clap 13 before we all hit that beat together.

Let's see what the lesson's got in store for us.

Hopefully we've now warmed up our minds and our bodies.

In this lesson, you will need a piece of paper, a pencil, and your body.

In a moment, you can pause the video to go and get that equipment if you don't have it to hand.

But it's also a great opportunity to switch off any apps or notifications that might come through on electronic devices, and also to find yourself a quiet place to work.

If you need to pause the video to do any of those things, do it now, and then press resume.

Here is the agenda for today's lesson.

Throughout this unit, we have used repeated patterns.

A repeated pattern or a rhythm cycle in music is called an ostinato.

We will begin today's lesson by developing and performing some ostinatos.

We will then explore how you can layer different ostinatos to create a variety of rhythmic ideas.

You will then compose a piece of music using the technique of layering.

We will then explore a range of time signatures and how composers have used these to add interest to their compositions, and what purpose they can serve.

You will then compose using a range of different time signatures.

I'm going to play you a rhythm.

I would like you to number one, tell me what I'm doing with this rhythm.

And number two, can you count how many beats in the bar? Here we go.

What was I doing with my rhythm? That's right, I was repeating it.

And did you count how many beats there were in the bar? Let's take a look and see whether you were right.

Did you count that there was three beats in the bar, three crotchet beats.

So our time signature is three four.

So one, two, three.

And I repeated my rhythm and these two dots at the end of my bar, just before my bar line, symbolise that I have to repeat my rhythm.

Now, this is called an ostinato.

An ostinato is a continuously repeated melodic phrase or rhythm.

So can you copy the rhythm that's on the screen after me? If you want to make it a little bit harder for yourself, you could add in chest slaps and claps for the different notes.

So chest slaps for your crotchets and claps on your semiquavers.

Let's clap this with them in unison four times.

Here we go.

One, two, three.

Well done if you managed to play that in time, especially if you managed to put some body percussion.

Here's your first pause task.

Using body percussion, can you create your own four beat ostinato? If you want a challenge, you can make a seven beat ostinato.

How many different ostinatos can you compose? If you want to challenge yourself further, you could create a two bar ostinato, and you could play your rhythm at the same time as mine to create a polyrhythm by rewinding the video and playing it together.

As an extension, can you think of any pieces of music that use ostinatos? Remember to assign different body parts to your ostinato rhythm.

For example, you could play all semiquavers as thigh slaps.

Pause the video now to complete your task and then resume once you're finished.

How did you get on with your pause task? Were are you able to create some really exciting ostinatos? Some seven beat ostinatos, two bar ostinatos? Did you get somebody in your household to perform an ostinato whilst you performed another one? There's an idea that you could do.

One could perform a five beat ostinato whilst another performed a four beat ostinato and you'd get some really cool rhythms. You could build up a whole piece of music based on ostinatos and assign different body parts to them and create your whole body percussion piece just out of ostinatos.

Let's see what else we can do to develop our rhythmic ideas.

You've now had a go at creating and developing formings in different ostinatos.

We're now going to explore how you can layer different rhythmic ideas.

Let's take a look at how we can layer some ostinatos.

Here's the top rhythm with a count in.

And here's the bottom rhythm with a count in.

Can you play both of those rhythms? You can choose whichever body part you want to be able to perform them.

Take a moment to do that now, you can pause the video.

So, we're going to layer these ostinatos on top of each other, and that will create a polyrhythm, which is two or more rhythms being played at the same time.

So for this, you clap the top rhythm and I'll clap the bottom rhythm.

If you want to assign different body parts, feel free to do so.

We're going to do this with a count in from the metronome, I'll count us in this time.

Here we go.

One, two, three, four.

Awesome if you've got that in time.

Okay.

Let's see if we can repeat, because it's an ostinato.

It's got to be a repeated pattern.

We're going to repeat these rhythms four times.

After the fourth time, I want to challenge you to see whether you can go from the top rhythm to the bottom rhythm and swap with me.

And I'll play that from the bottom rhythm the top rhythm.

Let's try it with a count in.

Here we go.

One, two, three, four.

You should have ended there, how did you do? Awesome.

Okay, so that is how we could, one way that we could layer ostinatos to create a polyrhythm.

What happens when we start to layer lots of different rhythms on top of each other? Well, we're going to continue with our idea of an ostinato by looking at the following four rhythms. So take a look at the rhythms below, can you play through them? Take a moment now to pause the video and do that.

Awesome, so here's how they sound.

Here's rhythm one.

Here's rhythm two.

Here's rhythm three.

And here's rhythm four.

So we've got our four rhythms. We're going to play each rhythm as an ostinato, so it's repeated.

You're going to play rhythm one to start with.

After four times of rhythm one, I'm then going to add in rhythm two, after four times of rhythm two, the backing track is going to play rhythm three for us.

And after four times of hearing rhythm three, the backing track will change to rhythm four.

if these ostinatos, these rhythms are too easy for you, feel free to play one that you have composed yourself.

Feel free to assign different body parts to these as well.

Let's have a go, there'll be a count in of four beats.

I will help you out by playing rhythm one first and then I will switch to rhythm two.

Here we go.

Here we go.

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

Rhythm two, keep going.

Here's rhythm three.

Here's rhythm four.

How did you do, did you manage to keep in time? You can do that activity again, but you can make it a little bit harder for yourself.

So you could play a two bar rhythm.

You could play a four bar rhythm and keep them going as ostinatos, or you could play one ostinato and then swap to a different ostinato.

How else could you play this? What about dropping rhythms in and out so that you change the texture of the piece.

Let's have a go at doing that.

So this time, start on a different rhythm and see if you can change whichever rhythm you do every four times.

And then you can drop in and drop out to a different rhythm and play a different ostinato.

Here we go.

So you can see that, oh, I was getting carried away and I wanted to carry on.

So you can see how you can develop lots of different layering techniques, lots different rhythms. Did you manage to drop in and out? I got carried away playing one rhythm to the next rhythm and creating lots of two bar ostinatos.

So I didn't actually drop out, but I hope that you had a chance to drop in and out.

And if you want to try that again, you can rewind the video and play along with the backing track.

The next technique that I'm going to share with you is called a hocket.

And this is a compositional technique, which was primarily used in mediaeval music.

And it's where a melody or a rhythm is passed between different instruments.

Lots of composers are influenced by this today.

And it features heavily in EDM music.

So let's have a listen to some hocketing in a piece of mediaeval music.

We're listening, the work gets passed from one instrument to the other.

It feels almost like a "I do then you do, "then I do, then you do." And that's what it should be.

It should be forwards, backwards, forwards, backwards to me, to you.

So let's take a look at the rhythm below and how could we make a hocket out of this music? So can you see what I've done? That's right, I've now put in rests.

So I've split the music between two different parts.

So we're going to have a go and see if we can do this.

And it's really to show off the different sounds of the instruments whilst keeping and maintaining that rhythm, the original rhythm that we saw.

So you're going to play line two for me, and I'm going to play the top line.

We're going to play this with different body parts.

So I'm going to clap it, and I would like you to either do a chest slap, or I would like you to do a thigh slap, up to you.

So mine's going to sound like this, rest, rest.

And yours is going to sound like this, rest, Nice and easy.

We'll play it with a metronome.

Just so we make sure that we're in time with each other.

Here we go, so here's our count in.

One, two, three, four.

How did you do? Let's swap parts.

So now you do the top line and I'll perform the bottom line.

Here we go.

So you're playing first.

One, two, three, four.

There we go, there's a hocket.

The next technique that I'm going to show you is exploring ostinatos of different lengths.

And what happens when we start to layer these ostinatos together.

So can you spot the difference between the top rhythm and the bottom rhythm? That's right, the top one is in four four.

So there's four crotchet beats in the bar.

The second rhythm is in five four, which means that there's five crotchet beats in the bar.

So let's see what happens when we perform these two rhythms at the same time.

Take a moment now just to familiarise yourself with the rhythms. So the top one sounds like this, here's a count in.

We're familiar with that one now, we've done that a few times, and here's the bottom one, five four.

One, two, three, four, five.

Did you see that I gave the count in at five that time.

'Cause there's five beats in the bar.

Okay.

So what I would like do is perform these on top of each other and see if you can notice what happens to the music.

So you perform the top rhythm and keep it going as an ostinato and I'll perform the bottom rhythm.

You can have a count in of four.

Here we go.

One, two, three, four.

And stop.

Did you notice what happened? Instead of being in time with each other, we begin to feel that the music is shifting.

It also gives us different lengths every time we repeat our ostinatos.

So by playing ostinatos of varying lengths, our music continues to develop.

For your first pause task, on your paper, write down what an ostinato is and notate one.

Perform your ostinato, then notate a polyrhythm.

And name two other techniques that we've explored and describe them each in a sentence.

Pause the video now to complete your task, and then resume once you're finished.

Have a look at our agenda.

We've now explored how you can layer some rhythmic ideas.

And it's now time to compose yourself using layering.

Take a look at the composition task on the screen.

This is my example.

You are going to be composing four different ostinatos and you'll decide how you will structure and layer them within your composition.

You will assign different body parts for each ostinato, and then perform your ostinatos in time to a steady pulse.

Have a listen to my example.

What did you notice about the different types of rhythms that I used? Did you notice that there was syncopated rhythms? Did you notice that there was a different time signature in there as well? As an extension task, can you structure your piece into a binary or ternary form, adding contrasting sections? If you play an instrument, you could add pitches to each of the ostinatos and use them to compose a melody on your instrument.

You could also use hocketing or a canon for ostinato entries.

Pause the video now to complete your task and resume once you're finished.

We've now composed using layering.

It's now time to explore a variety of time signatures.

I'm going to clap you an ostinato.

I'd like you to clap every time you think I get back to beat one.

I would then like you to try and count the pulses between beat one and when I get back to beat one again, and that will help you to work out what the time signature is.

Here we go.

Did you work it out? This was the rhythm that I just clapped.

And we can see at the beginning of the bar that there is four four.

So if you said four beats in a bar, congratulations, you are right.

There are four beats, one, two, four semiquavers here, four semiquavers make a beat.

And then our last crotchet is our beat four.

So one, two, three, four, and then we have our bar line.

So, time signatures.

The top number tells us how many beats are in the bar.

And the bottom number tells us the type or the note value of the beats.

So, take a look at the two time signatures on the screen in front of you.

How many beats of the bar are there in these examples? That's right.

In example one, there's two beats in a bar, two crotchet beats, and example two, there's three beats in a bar, three crotchet beats.

There are many different time signatures.

These are what we call simple time signatures.

I'm going to play a metronome for you.

I would like you to count the beats.

Here we go.

So one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two.

This is what we call duple time.

There are two beats in the bar, two crotchet beats in the bar, one, two.

What about this next example? Again, it would ding on the first beat of the bar.

So one.

How many beats did you hear? In that example, it was in three four.

One, two, three, one, two, three.

Sometimes we call it the "um-cha-cha rhythm".

Take another listen.

One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three.

Have a listen to the next example.

What do you think the time signature of this is? That one there was four four time.

What we call quadruple time.

So there were four beats in the bar.

Let's take another listen to that.

Can you clap on the strongest beat of the bar? Here we go.

One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four.

So the examples I've just played to you are all the types of crotchets.

And I know that they're crotchets because at the bottom, we have the number four.

If we were counting in minims, the bottom number would be two.

And if we were counting in quavers, the bottom number would be eight.

Now why do composers choose different time signatures to write their music in? Well, four four, sometimes known as common time, is usually used for pop music.

Whereas two two is usually used for marches or very fast orchestral music.

And three four, you usually hear this in waltzes, in minuets, and different types of dances.

So they use different metres, different time signatures to change the feeling of their music.

So listen to the following piece of music called "Shotgun" by George Ezra.

Can you tell me what the time signature is of this music? The best way to do this is to try and clap on the first beat of the bar, the strongest beat, and then count the pulses in between each one.

Here we go.

♪ I'll be riding shotgun ♪ ♪ Underneath the hot sun ♪ ♪ Feeling like a someone ♪ ♪ I'll be riding shotgun ♪ ♪ Underneath the hot sun ♪ ♪ Feeling like a someone ♪ ♪ South of the equator ♪ ♪ Navigating got to hit the road ♪ We can hear that this piece of music is in four four.

So if you thought four crotchet beats to a bar, well done.

Four four is usually used in lots of pop music like George Ezra's.

So what about this piece of music? Have a listen to this, and this time particularly listen out to the bass guitar and the drums. What do you notice about the time signature? ♪ I said ooh girl ♪ ♪ Shock me like an electric eel ♪ ♪ Baby girl ♪ ♪ Turn me on with your electric feel ♪ ♪ I said ooh girl ♪ ♪ Shock me like an electric eel ♪ ♪ Baby girl ♪ ♪ Turn me on with your electric feel ♪ This example's a little bit different.

So for this example, the drums are playing in four four.

Whereas the bass, we can actually count in three, or three four.

So composers like to mix up time signatures or let instruments play different time signatures on top of each other to make their music really interesting.

How does that make you feel about putting that in your compositions? Let's find out.

Next on our agenda is composing using different time signatures.

Here's your next composition task.

It's very similar to the one that you did earlier.

However this time, I would like you to compose ostinatos with different time signatures.

And I would like you to decide on how you would then structure them.

You can also include syncopated rhythms, you could get your household members to perform each of the ostinatos, and you could structure them into binary or ternary forms to add contrasting sections.

If you're an instrumentalist, remember that you can add pitches to each of the ostinatos and use them to compose a melody on your instrument.

Pause the video to complete your task, and then resume once you're finished.

How'd you get on with the composition task? Were are you able to perform lots of different time signatures at the same time? It's helpful if you've got some other people to be able to do that with you.

So, we've now come to the end of our lesson for today.

So let's just recap what we've been doing.

We started off by developing and performing some ostinatos.

We then explored how you can layer different rhythmic ideas, and we composed a piece using layering.

We then explored a variety of different time signatures, and you have now just spent some time composing using those different time signatures.

So the question for the lesson is how can different rhythm cycles work together? On your piece of paper, can you answer that question? Pause the video now to complete the task and then resume once you're finished.

So composers use lots of different rhythm cycles and make them work together through the use of layering and ostinatos and changing of time signatures as well.

And all of these are techniques that make their music really, really interesting.

So I'd love to see what you've come up with today, and there are two things that I need to tell you about.

So, number one is don't forget to complete the quiz to show how much you have learned today.

And number two is if you're proud of your compositions and you want to show off all the fab work that you've been doing, share your work with Oak National.

If you'd like to do this, please ask your parent or carer to share your work on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter by tagging @OakNational and #LearnwithOak.

That's all for me today.

Go and give your bodies a well-deserved rest and I'll see you soon, goodbye!.