When I think of the word rhythm, what comes foremost to my mind is a picture of my grandpa's metronome. My grandpa, when he lived in Russia, was a fairly well known voice professor who dedicated his whole life to the perfection and instruction of the human voice. As long as the human in question was applying said voice to opera and only opera, that is. Opera, in my grandpa's mind, was the only music worth bothering with. All other music he condescendingly referred to as "the bebop" with a lot of Russian eye rolling and sighing. He taught me about rhythm by sticking his old wooden metronome on the edge of his piano, and commanded me to never take my eyes off it during the whole voice lesson. Since it was conveniently eye level to my ten year old self it was pretty easy to get completely mesmerized watching the little weighted metal stick swish side to side, side to side, side to side. I'm thinking now, almost twenty years later, that it may have been part