Introduction to Rhythmic Notation
This page, and the few links that follow, deal with meter and rhythm. I assume that all of you either have a good background in reading rhythms, or are taking the Rudiments co-course and gaining experience in that way. This chapter will not explain basic rhythm reading. However, it will go into somewhat more advanced aspects of rhythmic notation and meter, look at mixed meters, and also deal with musical symmetry and assymetry.
Rhythm Defined
Rhythm is as central to music as it is to language. To speak is to express oneself in a rhythmic manner; poetry, as form of “spoken music,” simply heightens and often formalizes rhythmic speech into repeating patterns of stress and meter. Some theories on the origin of language, such as those expressed in The Singing Neaderthals by Steven Mithen (2006. Harvard University Press) posit that early humans sang before they spoke, and that speech grew out of a toned singing type of activity. This book is in our library if this concept intrigues you.
One of our first exercises will be to set words and poetry to a meter
and a rhythm.
In Western music, the method for notating rhythm evolved over the course
of many centuries. The history of the development of rhythmic notation
need not detain us here, but it is a fascinating topic and anyone interested
can go to this link (or find others) and learn more about its development.
Early
Notation
While rhythmic notation is of inestimable value in communicating one’s
rhythmic intentions to another musician, and also essential for performing
the kinds of large ensemble music central to the Western music idiom, I
would point out from the outset that rhythmic notation is not in itself
the rhythm of the music, but only an approximation, a grid upon which the
normal flow of music has been grafted. Indeed, it is useful to think of
rhythmic notation (and pitch notation too, as we will explore) as a digital
medium, where the unending, "analog" stream of a musical performance
is approximated by fairly simple divisions of a musical pulse, much like
live musicl is sampled 44,100 times per second in a recording studio to
come up with a digital version of the recorded music for storage on a compact
disk.
With this background, let’s review and define rhythmic values more closely.
Rhythmic Notation
Musical time can be divided into either two or three. That’s it. Everything else is just a version of two or three. Duple meters (meters of 2 or 4, primarily), where we count “two to the bar” or “four to the bar” are balanced and even. It is the music of the march or the tango and seems to match well with our own “twoness:” two legs, two feet, two arms, two eyes, two ears, two halves of the brain. Triple meters (meters of 3, 6 or 9, usually), where we count “three to the bar” or “six to the bar” or "nine to the bar" are uneven. It is the music of the waltz and requires that we skip along, adjust our stride, accommodate the asymmetry.
These two meters are really two different worlds, just like the numbers
2 and 3 are different worlds—there is no power of 3 (3, 9, 27, 81 … ) that
is equal to some power of 2 (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64…). As we will see
in this text, the contrast of 2 with 3 is a ratio of extreme importance
in music.
In the oldest practices of notated music – during early Medieval times—triple
meter was the first to be notated and was considered the “perfect” meter.
The notation of duple meter was developed second, during the Ars Nova period
(1300s) and was considered the “imperfect” rhythm. The essential
point here is that the division of meters in duple and triple reaches back
to the dawn of the development of musical notation. They also connect to
the whole sense of dance, as folk dances largely divide themselves into
those with a duple and those with a triple meter. (There are some folk
rhythms, for example those found in Greece or Eastern Europe, that have
a mixture of twos and threes).
It is important when you work with rhythm that you are aware of this distinction.
Duple meters are commonly 2/2, 4/4, 2/4, less commonly 2/8, 4/8, 8/4. Triple
meters are commonly 6/8, 3/4, 9/8, 12/8, less commonly 3/8, 6/16 and so
forth. They are quite different in feeling, and yet can co-exist
in many significant ways. Here is an invented passage that moves freely
between various time signatures, a common practice in more contemporary
composition.
In this system, the bottom number always refers to the actual note value
that is assigned the beat, and you will rarely see anything other these
four numbers: 2 for the half note, 4 for the quarter note, 8 for the eighth
and (far less often) 16 for the sixteenth note. The note above, of course,
refers to the number of beats in a measure. Before the 20th century, most
music maintained a constant meter for a piece of music, a movement within
a large-scale work, or a section within a longer movement. In the 20th
century, all manner of “mixed meters” occur, not just in classical forms,
but sometimes in rock music as well.
In the next link, still part of this chapter, we'll look at examples of metrical forms and mixed meters.
Next: 1D Metric Examples