IJIM: Pieces of music with bars that are actually just beats (i.e. they have a multi-bar rhythm)

glennmagusharvey

It Just Intrigues Me: I tend to think of larger, more compound beats than some composer write.  So I get a more compound/"larger" time signature when I try to think through something, than what I get from seeing the music.

Alternatively, when I see the music, it confuses me at first because I assume the barlines indicate basic units of rhythm when they actually indicate basic subunits of rhythm.

For those who don't know what I'm talking about: This is about how one hears the rhythm of a piece of music.  The music itself stays the same, but one's understanding of its rhythm can change--for example, one person might count out "one two three four one two three four" while another person might count "one and two and one and two and", while listening to the same music.  The unit of the repeating pattern is basically what a "bar" is.  On paper this is expressed by putting vertical lines ("barlines") through the staff between each instance of a "bar".

The "time signature" is just a way of expressing how many beats/subdivisions there are in a bar.  It basically specifies how many of a certain type of note there is.  In a bar of 3/8, it's like there are 3 x 1/8 or three eighth notes worth of (relative) time value in each bar.

You don't have to stick with 3/8 to get the same effect, though.  You can rewrite the music in 6/8 by taking out every other barline, and it'll still sound the same...basically.  (A performer's interpretation might be subtly different.)

Additionally, you can rewrite 3/8 in 3/4 and get the same effect with the same number of bar lines but writing the notes twice as long and playing them twice as fast--as in, you write all the eighth notes as quarter notes, but a quarter note now has the same time value as an eighth note did previously, so you still have three of whatever in the bar.

 

I was listening to this:

This is the third movement of Beethoven's "Tempest" Sonata.

It's written in 3/8 time.  With a bunch of sixteenth notes--six timeslots for 16th notes in each bar length.  When you listen to it, you should be able to count out "one two three one two three" (or a pretty fast "one-and-two-and-three-and-one-and-two-and-three-and", and you'll get the same result when you simply don't say the "ands").  This is how Beethoven wrote it.

When I first played the piece, I got confused.  I felt like I was really bogged down in the weeds of the piece.  As I went through bar after bar I felt like I was completely missing the point of the piece.  Well, that happens often when sight-reading, but still, it didn't seem anything like the way it sounded when I heard performances of it.

Only later, after listening to the piece a few more times, did I realize something:

I was hearing four beats.  No, not four beats in each little bar of 3/8.  I was hearing four beats spanning the length of four whole bars of 3/8.

So if I wrote this piece, I would have written it in 12/8, and made it clear that there are four beats (lasting three eighth notes each, like having three sub-beats per beat) in the bar.  Rather than dividing each of "my" bars into four little bars.

This also reminded me of how I felt pretty much the same way regarding Chopin's four Scherzos--they each are also written in a very fast simple triple meter, like this above piece.  In fact, they're in 3/4, and they're even faster.  If I wrote them...I would have written them in 12/4.  Because pretty much the entire piece consists of four-bar miniphrases, and each bar goes by in a flash anyway.  (Or maybe I'd have used 12/8 because easier readability.)  Since each bar goes by so quickly, they function more like single beats rather than three beats.

(There's a legacy explanation that's probably the reason why Chopin wrote them in 3/4.  The Scherzo as he writes it is descended from an older Scherzo style that's basically a sped-up version of the Minuet, which is a dance in 3, usually written as 3/4.)

 

Anyone got any idea why I like things with longer bars and think they make more sense that way?  Anyone else feel this way?

Bee

I sometimes feel entire bars of 3/8 as a really slow single beat.  It mostly depends on how heavily they're accented.  If it's a smooth legato run of fast stuff I'll probably just feel it as a single beat.

A few years ago we had a marching band show that flipped around how the 3/8 was constructed to alternately sound like 3 and 1.