Howard Anderson

Core Music
3/4/14
What to Listen For in Music

The four elements of music are rhythm, melody, harmony and tone color.

Most historians agree that if music started anywhere, it started with the beating of a
rhythm.

From the time of the Greeks to the full flowering of Gregorian chant, the rhythm of music
was the natural, unfettered rhythm of prose or poetic speech.

When music was first put down, it was not measured off into evenly distributed metrical
units as it now is.

Many thousands of years were to pass before man learned how to write down the rhythms
that he played or those that he sang in later ages.


In this reading I learned that rhythm is the foundation of music. Back when the African
tribes would do there rituals they would create a rhythm accompanied by their own
aerophone and idiophone instruments. As the years go by we expand on our knowledge
of interpreting music in a textual form. Metrical meter became popular over time so the
composer could classify his piece with a time signature. There are certain rhythms that
have a nonmetric meter such as polyphonic music.