Introduction

For about 40 years Ed Harkins taught a graduate-level seminar at the University of California, San Diego, that he called “advanced rhythm reading." This book is a collection of exercises Ed wrote and used in these classes. The classes would consist of Ed writing an exercise on a whiteboard (sometimes stopping to enjoy the fumes from his dry-erase markers) and/or, later, projecting one from his computer. The class would then try to clap, tap, or vocalize the rhythm, almost always with uneven results. As time permitted we would copy some of them down in our notebooks and practice them between classes.

Although on the surface these exercises would seem to be primarily useful to performers who might be called on to perform rhythmically complex music, they also show many inventive ways notation can be bent to communicate rhythmic ideas that will be of use to composers. Many of the rhythmic ideas themselves might inspire ideas in composers (Ed himself studied composition). They often carry fascinating implications about rhythmic perception. Ed's classes were followed by musicians and music scholars of all kinds.

The 500-ish students who have taken Ed's seminar over the years (and, probably, some of the thousands of undergraduate students in his musicianship classes) will know what to do with these exercises, but other readers might need some explanations. To somewhat oversimplify, the exercises both demonstrate and encourage musicians to develop many different ideas and strategies for analyzing and performing difficult rhythms. These ideas and strategies come with shorthand names such as Nudged Rats and BAMO. These are used as tags in this collection and are collected as an index in the back matter. (You might picture a seedy-looking man in an ice cream truck saying, “You want the regular Noodgie or the Noodgie w/ Rats?)

Where possible and appropriate, each tag can be traced back to a defining exercise with a description of the tag's meaning. Some of the tags apply to many of the exercises, and in these cases the index can be used to find all the others. (If you are reading this on a screen this is supported with links.)

This book's title, “Rhy" is another shorthand, which Ed pronounces as “rye" or “wry". It appears in the captions for two exercises in chapter 3 as “Easy Rhy, Hard Pi".

There are sound recordings of many of the exercises, which you can download separately, or, if you have downloaded them together with a PDF, or if you are reading this on a web browser, should be playable as additional links marked “play audio".