Today’s topic is the second classification of regular meters: compound meters.
We will be using the terminology from the previous topic, so if you are unfamiliar with basic rhythmic terminology, please review Topic 4a first.
And always remember that meter is somewhat subjective and can be greatly altered by many factors, especially tempo. We will discuss this in the next topic, but 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.
Using the following examples, determine:
Use the MIDI player to listen to the following two examples. Even though they are identical excerpts, one thing has been altered in the second example. What was altered, and does it change your perception of whether the tune is simple or compound? Provide your final classifications for both examples.
The common characteristic of compound meters is easy to find after having discussed simple meters.
Compound meter is a regular meter in which the beat is divided into three equal parts.
Differentiating regular and irregular meters may be a new concept, but you needn’t worry about this too much right now because we will not be covering irregular meters until later in the course. For now, know that the subjective nature of meters will be discussed in the next topic, 4c - Metric Perception. After that discussion, we will see if this concept makes more sense.
For a compound time signature:
These definitions may take quite a few tries for you to reach on your own, because students often focus on making compound time signatures fit the same mold as simple time signatures. It is easy to be careless with your use of the terms beat, division, and subdivision, but these three terms are the keys to separating compound from simple meters and their time signatures. In a simple meter time signature, the top number represents the number of beats in the measure, and the bottom number is the note value of the beat. Contrast that with compound meter time signatures. The top and bottom numbers represent entirely different concepts, and for compound meters, this requires a slight bit of math to find the actual number of beats.
This highlights a fundamental issue in teaching our time signature system. It requires the musician to already understand the system by being able to differentiate between simple and compound meters, because the system is not uniform across all meters. This is why the pedagogical method of grouping meters by simple vs compound and then attaching a word to denote the number of beats (i.e. single, duple, triple, quadruple, etc.) is useful.
The terms duple, triple, and quadruple refer to the number of beats in the measure. In compound time:
Within a given meter classification, there are many different time signatures. For example, in compound duple, there is 6/8, 6/16, 6/4, and many others.
The simplest and most accurate method for differentiating the various meters is to memorize the standard groupings of all meters. That being said it is fairly easy to remember that if the top number of the time signature is a multiple of three, then that is a compound meter, assuming that the tempo does not become slow or fast enough that that the listener hears a different grouping of the beat.
Like simple time, theoretically ideal rhythmic notation in compound time does not obscure beats. Unlike simple time, compound time is written this way in common practice with few exceptions.
The most notable exception, though, occurs regularly enough that we should expect it. Occasionally a compound meter will create hemiola–a feel of two against three–by having three consecutive groups of two divisions over two compound beats. The most common notation of this occurs in 6/8 when three quarter notes are placed in a row. If written using quarter notes rather than tying two eighth notes together, this will obscure the second beat. The tune “America” from West Side Story highlights this rhythm as its primary melodic motif.
As with simple meters, there are various systems for counting beats and their divisions. One of the most common systems condenses the method for counting beats in simple time to 1-&-a. The other most common counting method uses 1-la-li. For this course, we will use the -la-li method to help differentiate the counting from a simple meter.
The problem with both of these systems is that there is not a unique syllable for each subdivsion. Generally speaking, students are asked to insert “ta” between each of the division syllables creating 1-ta-la-ta-li-ta. This is adequate for practice aloud, but it is poor for specificity because there are three ‘ta’ syllables in each beat. For our class, we use: 1-to-la-ta-li-ti
After listening the two examples in 3/4, it is easy to identify that the two examples were identical except for the tempo. In the slower example, you will likely hear it in a simple triple meter with the quarter note as the beat. For the faster example, most instead hear this as a fast compound single meter with the dotted half note as the beat. Meters such as 3/8, 3/4, and 3/2 are all dependent on tempo as to whether they are a compound or simple meter. While a good rule of thumb is to consider these meters as simple until you have listened to the piece at tempo, 3/8 meters are commonly fast and conducted in one. Make sure to look at the tempo if determining a meter’s classification when only looking at the score.