Looking at her own clapping, testing her proposal of five in the middle, Sarah’s count up slips elusively and in its travels takes on new meaning for “the middle:”
- ”It’s four in the middle…”
- “but it’s five actually.”
- “It’s three.”
- “It’s four.”
Ruth proposes five but quickly says, perceptively, ‘Oh no, I’m counting both ends’. Four claps marks the metric boundary but the arrival at the downbeat (the fifth clap) marks the gestural ending. The children are working with the question, how do we parse a musical universe? What, then, did they make of my comment, ““Four-to-one?”
Making Music Count 