A Crash Course in Counting

I know what you're thinking: Um...(polite pause) I already know how to count. But do you know how to count rhythms? After all, tap is all about rhythms. It doesn't hurt to understand the structure beneath the music you make with your feet. It's particularly helpful if you choreograph and need to write down steps, or if you're teaching.

You can think of rhythm as the timing of notes in a piece of music (a tap step counts as a piece of music). In musical notation, the beats tell the musician when to play a note and how long to play it.

Big notes, little notes
Dancers don't read music the way musicians do, although there is a system for dance notation. If you've ever had music lessons, you know that music is divided into measures. In musical notation, measures are defined by vertical lines.

Most often, measures are counted in quarter notes, which means that there are four single beats to a measure. (A whole note, which takes up a whole measure (duh), can also be divided into thirds, eighths, sixteenths, etc.) You can count the beats in a measure as 1-2-3-4. In musical notation, a quarter note is shown as a filled-in circle with a line sticking out of it.

Note: It has long puzzled me that people count in eights for dance ("...five, six, seven, eight!"). If anybody can explain why this is, please satisfy my curiosity! I f you feel like counting things in eight beats, then be my guest. But for the purpose of this article, we're doing measures of four.

The first measure on the picture below is a whole note, which is one sound that takes up a whole measure (four quarter notes). A violinist would hole one note for four counts. Since we can't really make one sound that lasts four counts, it would be really more like a stamp or step and then silence for the rest of the measure. Count: 1 (2-3-4)

Next up: Half notes. They are made up of two beats each. If we shuffled this measure, it would be one shuffle-two sounds, with each sound taking up two counts. Count: 1 (2) 3 (4)

Say you were to play the measure of four regular beats in shuffles. That would be two regular shuffles, a sound for each beat (1-2-3-4).

Got it? Good?

"e" and "a"
If you were to play the measure of eighth notes, you would do four faster shuffles, each beat would have two sounds in it (Count: 1-and-2-and-3-and-4). There are eight sounds to the measure. Remember that if all of the steps we have been doing were part of one piece with a consistent beat, these four shuffles would take up the same amount of time as the whole-note stamp.

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