My students get a good foundation in decoding and encoding rhythm because I think
literacy in any language is a really important thought organizer in that language, but when I’m on my own making a lead sheet, 9 times out of ten I’m just writing words and slicing them up with barlines.
The way that conventional notation uses numbers gives the false impression that each unit being counted or labeled is equal to every other unit with the same label, and that’s just not the case.
Sometimes I think that the point of Rondo a la Turk is that in terms of math, every measure is equal to the others, but in terms of music, something entirely different is going on. He’s thumbing his nose at math.
