These two short excerpts are intended to help you hear syncopated rhythms. The first is the theme of a classical symphony, and it is played with no syncopation whatsoever. The second is an adaptation of the same melody from a recent album by rock guitarist Carlos Santana, and it is highly syncopated. These excerpts will be most useful if you listen to them along with the presentations that I have put together. Hopefully these will work fine on your computers--if not, let me know. The presentations are NOT accessible from off campus, unfortunately.
Unsyncopated Symphony no. 3, 3rd movement (composed in 1883)
The New York Philharmonic; Leonard Bernstein, conductor.
The commentary that follows will appear along with the presentation, but I have duplicated it here in case you have trouble reading it or getting the presentation to work.
In this excerpt from a classical symphony (composed in 1883) the melody and the meter are in complete accord--there is no syncopation whatsoever. Each measure has three beats, and the first beat (aka the downbeat) is always emphasized. Most of the phrases are made up of pickup notes that lead to a long, heavy note on the downbeat.
You may also notice that the beat speeds up and slows down. This is especially clear at end of the excerpt, where I stop the counter precisely because the beats are stretched out and hard to follow. This is not a sign of sloppy playing, it is the correct way of performing this kind of music--the theme here is full of pathos, and the orchestra's conductor is expected to milk that for all it is worth (in this case it's Leonard Bernstein, one of the most famous of all American conductors and, incidentally, a big jazz fan). This kind of ebb and flow in the tempo is called "rubato," and it is quite common in certain kinds of classical music but rare in jazz.
Besides the lack of syncopation and the use of rubato, you can hear several other distinctions between typical classical and jazz styles. There are no drums in this excerpt, and drums play at best an incidentally part in most classical music composed before the early 20th century, while they are central to most jazz. In this excerpt, almost all of the instruments are massed together, piling the sound up into thick, rich waves, while jazz is usually very clearly layered, with the bass, drums, piano, and horns each doing their own thing. Also there is no improvisation in this excerpt--all the musicians are playing exactly what was written by the composer--while in a jazz performance there is a great deal of improvisation.
You may also have noted that this music is based on a three-beat measure, while jazz typically uses a four-beat measure, but there is no great significance to this difference--jazz can (and since the 1950s often has been) played in triple meters (that is, with measures divided into a multiple of 3).
Syncopated Love of My Life (1999)
Carlos Santana with Dave Matthews
The commentary that follows will appear along with the presentation, but I have duplicated it here in case you have trouble reading it or getting the presentation to work.
Though this recording is worlds apart from the Brahms in terms of the overall sound, this particular theme has been lifted almost literally from the symphony and placed in the song. You can hear the same contour and the same phrasing, which reiterates a simple pattern--three notes going up (the last one held out) answered by three notes coming down.
One significant change is that Santana's version is syncopated throughout. The display above should help you pick this out--underneath the 1 2 3 4 count of beats, the words "strong," "weak", "strong" come up to indicate the relative emphasis on each note of the melody. What I want you to notice is how the accented notes in the melody are placed between the beats, while the unaccented notes fall on the beat. The three note phrases lead up to and land on the last note, just as they did in Brahms's version, but that last note doesn't coincide with the downbeat, it anticipates the downbeat. The anticipation is especially easy to hear the very first time, because it is followed immediately by a cymbal crash on the downbeat. (It may also help to listen to the way this same theme is sung: "You're the LOVE... Of my LIFE," etc.) Syncopation like this would have sounded bizarre to Brahms or any other European living before the early 20th century. It sounds completely normal to us, though. It's a legacy of the music brought to American by African slaves and it now infuses almost all forms of popular music. The change from three beat measures in the symphony to four beat measures here is not nearly as significant--three and four beat measures are idiomatic in both African and European styles.
Relative to the symphony, there are several other features in Santana's recording that reflect its African roots. One is the loose, improvisatory feel of the Brahms theme when it is sung, the way it floats over the beat. Others are the prominence of the percussion, the way the bass, drums, guitar, vocal, and other parts are layered, the vocal inflections of the guitar playing, and the style and voice quality of the singer.