This text assumes that you are already familiar with the basics of rhythmic notation, so we will be skipping most of the basic rhythmic terminology. If you would like to learn about these terms (or 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 how we divide the measure. Beats are then divided into divisions, and divisions can be further divided into subdivisions.
Finally, please note that 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 the beat in a slow two 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:
While this is correct for the meters above, it does not provide a definition of what these numbers mean. These words–simple, triple, quadruple, and so on–are used to signify how many beats are in a measure.
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, I tell students to imagine that the bottom note becomes the denominator (lower number) of a fraction under a numerator of 1. A bottom number of 4 becomes 1/4–a quarter. A bottom number of 2 becomes 1/2–a half.
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, it is specific to ask, “Is the G4 on the ‘e’ of beat four a non-chord tone?”, and this does not require further information.
The two examples above demonstrate something I term “theoretically ideal” rhythmic notation versus two counterparts of the same rhythm beamed in a more commonly used manner. For these:
This is very much inline with with this text’s general intention. Well-engraved music is meant to look pleasing, but it also should be easy for a performer to read. This often leads to grouping rhythmic patterns according to non-rhythmic ideas: lyrics, spacing measures across the page, phrasing, a limited number of systems, etc. Theoretically ideal rhythmic notation would never obscure a beat in order to provide the easiest reading of harmony within a score. Of course, no musician will ever use this in its strictest form because it would become difficult to read in many situations; imagine not using a whole note in 4/4 time and instead using four tied quarter notes.
That being said, 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 sometimes miss voices because of obscured beats. It is also an excellent thought exercise to help students begin demonstrating mastery of meters and rhythmic values.