This text assumes that you are already have a working knowledge of rhythmic notation, so we will only briefly discuss most of the basic rhythmic terminology. If you would like to explore the terminology further (or simply review), I have included some materials from Open Music Theory in the Further Reading.
Rhythm is the temporal aspect of music; it is how we organize the sounds and silences of music within time. At its most basic, rhythmic notation tells us when a sound or silence starts and ends, but musical rhythmic notation tries, and mostly succeeds, to show higher levels of organization to make understanding the groupings within the music more understandable to the musician.
First, a few basic terms: Meter is the manner in which we organize strong and weak pulses in music over time, and it is from this grouping that we determine the length of each measure. Western music typically uses a time signature–represented at the beginning of the music as two stacked arabic numbers–as a shorthand to quickly convey the meter to a trained musician. At its most basic, time signatures tell us two things:
If we imagine meter as a hierarchy, the measure is the top level and beats are the next level below. Beats are then divided into divisions, and divisions can be further divided into subdivisions. There is no further terminology below the subdivision, but you are welcome to affix “levels” to the term such as first subdivision, second subdivision, and so on.
Finally, please note that your perception of meter is somewhat subjective and can be greatly altered by many factors, especially tempo. Where one listener might listen to a piece with four quarter-notes per measure and feel that the quarter notes are the beat, another listener may listen to the same piece and hear a slower tempo with the half-note as the beat.
A regular meter is one in which every beat is the same length. There are two types of regular meters, and the following example looks at the first of type of regular meter: the simple meter.
Using the following examples, determine:
This is always an interesting class discussion, because creating objective definitions depends on the students differentiating their opinions from the underlying principles of the concept.
While most students intuitively understand the concept of a simple meter, it is often difficult to agree on the common characteristic of all simple meters. When asked to identify what all simple meters have in common, students often focus on the visual or mathematical representation of the time signature–for example, “The top number of the time signature is divisible by two.” Not only is this not true for all simple meters (e.g. 3/4 or 5/4) as shown in Examples 4a, it still would not differentiate this class of meters from compound meters. 6/8 and 12/8 are both compound time signatures that have a top number that is divisible by two.
The common characteristic of all simple meters is how the beat is divided. Simple meters are any regular meter in which the beat is divided into two equal parts.
When looking at the above examples, simple meters can be divided into collections of duple, triple, and quadruple meters:
These words–simple, triple, quadruple, quintuple, and so on–are used to signify how many beats are in a measure.
In discussing simple time signatures, most students correctly identify the function of the top and bottom numbers of the simple time signatures (but struggle with the same concept for compound meters).
For simple meter time signatures:
To easily figure out the bottom number’s rhythmic value, you can imagine that the bottom number becomes the denominator (lower number) of a fraction under a numerator (upper number) of 1. A bottom number of 4 becomes 1/4–a quarter. A bottom number of 2 becomes 1/2–a half. This method works for all simple meters.
It seems that for every unique syllable, there is a beat-counting system for affixing syllables to beats, divisions, and subdivisions. Each of these have their strengths and weaknesses, but for this theory course, we will be using the following for simple meters:
beat numbers for each beat (e.g. 1, 2, 3, etc.)& for the division (e.g. 1-& 2-& etc.)e (pronounced ‘ee’) and a (pronounced ‘ah’) for the first level subdivisions (e.g. 1-e-&-a 2-e-&-a)While this system can blend together aurally if said quickly, its primary benefit is that it has a unique syllable for each level through the first subdivision, and this makes communicating easier with higher specificity. For example, you can refer to “the ‘ee’ of beat 4 of the bass line” without requiring further clarifcation.
Finally, we need to discuss the variations in which note values are used in simple meters, mostly stemming from centuries of published music. Most importantly, we want to distinguish between what will make music easier to read versus the accepted shortcuts that we often make in writing rhythms.
Use the following example to determine:
The two examples above demonstrate something I term “theoretically ideal” rhythmic notation by comparing them to two counterparts of the same rhythm beamed in a more commonly used manner. For these:
Of course, this level of restrictive notation would never be used solely in published music. For example, half notes and whole notes are often used in 4/4, even though they technically obscure the beat. In less common meters that have smaller beat values such as 4/16 however, ideal beaming is more commonly employed to help readers deal with their unfamiliarity. A mental shortcut could therefore be to consider using ideal beaming in any meter in which the beats can be connected by beams–eighth notes, sixteenth notes, and so on.
This is very much inline with with this text’s general intention, because theoretically ideal rhythmic notation would never obscure a beat in order to provide the easiest reading of harmony within a score. However, music is an performance art, so the ultimate decision of how we notate our music should always take performance practice as a primary consideration. Well-engraved music is meant to look pleasing while also easy for a performer to read. Because of this, no musician will ever use theoretically ideal beaming in its purest form because it creates unnecessary pedantry in many situations–imagine not using a whole note in 4/4 time and instead using four tied quarter notes. Adding further confusion to this concept is that there are many factors outside of the rhythm that may lead a composer or publisher to group rhythmic patterns according to non-rhythmic ideas: lyrics, spacing measures across the page, phrasing, a limited number of systems, etc.
Regardless of where you choose to draw this line, it is important for students of music to begin trying to understand how grouping and beaming decisions are made, because in harmonic analysis, it is easy to miss voices and lines due to obscured beats. It is also an excellent thought exercise to help students begin demonstrating mastery of meters and rhythmic values.