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Musical Rhythm

Musical kurs are a dressage pattern of movements showing your horse's training to music. When my sister and I set out to ride our first musical kurs, we didn't have far to go to obtain what we needed. That is partly due to the family all being musicians. Our chief goal was to find music to fit our horses' tempos. We got our battery-powered metronome to determine that. First, we lunged them at liberty and then in side-reins to compare the rhythms. Our biggest concern was the trot tempo since we were only going training level.

A clinician had taught us that the walk and canter tempo would be identical because of the moment of suspension in the canter. This clinician stated that a lot of people make the mistake of riding canter to a minuet in 3/4 time instead of finding music in 4/4 time. We were pleased to discover that the walk and canter tempos actually did match so we only needed two compatible pieces of music to splice together.

The next step was finding the music to fit the horse. My horse was a 15.2 hh Quarter Horse that looked like a Thoroughbred. I decided on a jazz theme. My sister's horse looked like some sort of warmblood even though he was pretty much a Heinz 57 bred in the USA. She chose Wagner's, The Ride of the Valkyries, to compliment his big, bold stride and stature. We were fortunate to have the use of my brother-in-laws stereo equipment. The tempo of the jazz music was slightly faster than my horse's trot, so by using the pitch control, I was able to get the tempo exactly right.

After recording together the musical pieces, we took our beat-up old cassette player out to the arena to practice. Both horses noticeably reacted to the music is such a positive way! They actually tried to stay with the tempo on their own. My sister said that we should have been riding to music long ago. What a fun training aid for rhythm we had discovered.

We both knew that rhythm is essential to correctly training a horse, but what we gained from finding out about rhythm in this detail was wonderful. It was quite often that you would hear my sister singing a song in tempo to her horse's gaits to help maintain a steady rhythm. Good thing she could carry a tune!

Learn more about this author, Jeanne Adams.
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