Rhythm And Clap

Rhythm is the oldest music. Before any instrument, there were two hands and a piece of wood, a stomach and a flat thigh, a wooden spoon and the rim of a steel pot. The dholak that you hear at every Punjabi shaadi is a refined version of a much older idea, that a beat repeating in time turns a room of strangers into a room of friends. Today you will make rhythm with nothing but your own hands.

Try the simplest pattern. Clap, clap, pause, clap. Clap, clap, pause, clap. Repeat for twenty seconds without breaking. This is a four-beat measure with the third beat silent. Notice how the pause is part of the rhythm. Without the pause, the claps blur into noise. The silence is doing as much work as the sound. This is true of all music and most speech. Urdu poets call the silence between two claps the saans, the breath. Without breath, no song.

Now try a chant. The most famous Pakistani rhythmic chant is the kabaddi raider's breath, the long held kabaddi-kabaddi-kabaddi spoken in one breath while running across the line. The chant works because it is one syllable repeated, fast enough to fill the breath, slow enough that the referee can count. Kabaddi is sport, but it is also a rhythm exercise that the Punjab has played for centuries. Chant kabaddi for fifteen seconds in one breath. Notice that breath has a beat just like a clap.