What is TaKeTiNa?

TaKeTiNa is a unique musical group process for activating musical and human potential through rhythm.

The TaKeTiNa process gives every person access to his or her rhythmic endowment. It conveys rhythm as one most naturally learns and understands it. Instead of learning rhythmic patterns, the learner is guided directly to experience the elementary musical elements that are anchored in the consciousness of every human. This connects participants with their own deep, original rhythmic knowledge.

The extra-musical effects of the TaKeTiNa process range from the transformation of behavioral patterns that hinder oneself all the way to the awakening of intuition, creativity and the ability to communicate, because in the TaKeTiNa process, musical learning is always part of a human learning process. Everything that hinders us in life is reflected as a musical-rhythmical problem and can thus be transformed through rhythmical-musical work. Thinking and feeling, intuitive presentiments and cognitive action, external movement and inner calm begin cooperating with one another; one's thinking quiets and room for visions and change opens.

In TaKeTiNa, the body is the main instrument; the learner encounters rhythm directly and intensively. Using the voice to sing, the hands to clap and the feet for sequences of steps, TaKeTiNa participants are guided at three simultaneous rhythmic levels. The pulse of a bass drum accompanies and stabilizes the basic rhythm of the steps; contrasting rhythms are gradually introduced in the hands. Constantly changing call-and-response melodies add an improvisatory element as well as a destabilizing force into the process. The interplay of stabilizing and destabilizing elements necessarily causes individual participants to fall out of rhythm – but the rhythm of the group brings everyone gently but powerfully back – a process which enables every participant to develop his or her own deep musical self-confidence.

TaKeTiNa rhythm teaching complements the wealth of existing musical, psychological and neurobiological knowledge with new perspectives and terminology oriented to natural phenomena. It is a holistic manner of learning drumming and an inexhaustible source for composing and arranging music. Learners acquire direct access to the rhythmic worlds of Africa, Asia and Latin America; the unique features of European music, jazz or hip hop can just as easily be understood as well.

The TaKeTiNa method was founded by Reinhard Flatischer in 1970; it continues to be developed and supervised by Reinhard and his wife Cornelia Flatischler.