"just maybe, no promises"

This fall in my Theory & Practice I: Global Approaches to Music class at NYU Steinhardt School I am yet again privileged to have under my supervision a spectacular group of students whose range of interests, creative intuitions, and intellectual voraciousness is almost overwhelming.

Our discussion of asymmetrical metric cycles, African rhythm, and the underlying principle of the magnifying effect of rhythmic counterpoint took on vast, humanistic proportions as we pondered the universal nature of rhythm, separated rhythmic experience from time, and realized that the purpose of creating counterpoint is, paradoxically, to reinforce the individuality of its component lines—that they become even more themselves when placed against each other, their differences highlighted, their dynamic coexistence making a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

This led to an assignment in which I had students create something, in any genre, in which they paid specific attention to and radically, intuitively experimented with rhythm. I then had each of them select any two of each other’s creations and, without altering them, superimpose them contrapuntally in a disposition that actually brought out each one’s individuality. The secret was difference—and rhythm. As I found my self living with and witnessing their unprecedented work, I felt compelled to participate alongside them in the experience we were having. This video combines, contrapuntally, a piano composition of my own made independently on October 22 with a rhythmically rich reading of an original text by my student Sydney Scrimpshire. Listen to how the piano enhances the power of her reading.