Lesson 85: Virtuoso Studies, Part 5 — Complex Rhythms

Play a hemiola pattern (three over two) cleanly at performance tempo.
Read and play a passage in 5/8 or 7/8, common in twentieth-century recorder music.
Use the metronome on unconventional subdivisions to make irregular rhythms feel natural rather than counted.

Lesson 23–24 — 3/4 and 6/8 (the foundations of compound meter awareness).
Lesson 29 — tied notes and syncopation.

Hemiola (three against two).
Asymmetric meters (5/8, 7/8).
Metronome subdivision strategies.

The complex rhythm becomes simple at the moment you stop counting it.

The final virtuoso study is rhythmic. Baroque music contains hemiolas (three-against-two metric shifts) at almost every cadence; Renaissance music contains shifting meters within a single piece; twentieth- and twenty-first-century recorder music contains irregular meters (5/8, 7/8, 11/16) as a basic vocabulary. A player who has not drilled these will be reading them in real time at the performance, which is exactly when they will fall apart.

Hemiola — three against two

A hemiola is when a passage that is notated in 3/4 sounds like two bars of 3/2 instead — six quarter notes regrouped as two groups of three. Baroque composers use it at cadences to slow the pulse to a stop. The drill below switches metric perception mid-bar.

Bars 1–2 feel three-to-the-bar; bars 3–4 feel six-to-the-pair (the hemiola); bar 5 lands.

The metronome strategy: practise the hemiola passage with the metronome clicking the half note (not the quarter). The half note is the new pulse during the hemiola; the click teaches your ear which beat to feel.

Irregular meters — 5/8

5/8 is most naturally counted as 2 + 3 (two short plus three long) or 3 + 2 (three plus two). Different composers prefer different groupings; the score's beaming usually indicates which. The drill below establishes the 2+3 pulse.

Each bar is two eighths plus three eighths. The first beat is a longer wait than it looks.

Irregular meters — 7/8

7/8 is most commonly grouped as 2 + 2 + 3 or 3 + 2 + 2. Same drill, different grouping.

The daily warm-up

Ten minutes per session:

Three minutes of the hemiola drill at quarter = 80 with the metronome on the half note.
Three minutes of the 5/8 drill at quarter = 96.
Three minutes of the 7/8 drill at quarter = 96.
One minute of switching meters mid-piece: play four bars in 4/4, then immediately four bars in 7/8, then four bars in 5/8. Listen for whether each meter clicks in.

Now play these

Telemann: Twelve Fantasias, TWV 40:105: The fifth fantasia. Telemann's hemiolas at cadences are the textbook examples.
Telemann: Twelve Fantasias, TWV 40:106: The sixth fantasia. Useful as a continuation of TWV 40:101–105 across Lessons 81–85.

When the hemiola drill sits without conscious counting, the irregular-meter drills feel natural rather than mechanical, and the cadences in a Telemann fantasia clearly use hemiolas in your recording, move on to Lesson 86.