Music theory question

Cafe Society
1

Okay, so I’m a musician, and I can read music, but I can’t sight-read…haven’t had a formal course in music theory, but I can look at sheet music, tell what notes are what, and I can even hear the tune in my head as I read it sometimes (one benefit of having perfect pitch)…but I don’t know a lot of the rules for notation and stuff…

Having said that, I was looking at some basic sheet music (piano/vocal/guitar) last night that had selections from the show Hair. I noticed that in the bass line for “Walking In Space,” there’s something peculiar…there’s a B-flat that’s played as a quarter note, but for some reason it’s notated as two individual eighth notes tied together. I could understand the reasoning for this if that note ran over into the next measure, but it doesn’t; it’s just a beat and a half in…

So…why notate it as two separate-but-tied eighth notes instead of a single quarter note?

2

This is the clue. If the first note occurred on the beat they would have been a quarter note. But it sounds like they’re syncopated; one note is completing a beat, and the next one is beginning a new beat. It sort of straddles the two beats.

3

It’s not absolutely necessary to do so, but the convention generally is to indicate longer note durations that cross a beat with a tie. It’s considered easier to read (and I do find it much easier to read, usually.)

4

Sounds like you’re talking about something like this -

C | ♩ ♫‿♫ ♩ |

which would be easier to sight read than

C | ♩ ♪ ♩ ♪ ♩ |

Looking at the top one, I know exactly where the third beat is. Looking casually at the second one, I’m less certain. Not to say you’ll never see it done the second way, mind you…

5

Legible to me (latest version of Firefox on OSX 10.4), and I didn’t even know you could do that.

6

It shows up correctly in Safari, but in Explorer only the 8th notes appear, while the quarter notes are replaced by squares.

And yeah, that’s the situation I figured the OP was seeing. Unless you’re writing whole notes or dotted halves, it’s good form to always have a note show on beat 3 in 4/4.

7

Thanks – I kinda figured the explanation would be something like that. (And FWIW, on the latest Firefox on Mac OSX 10.6.3, all notes appeared properly!)

8

Yip. While it’s okay to skip beats 2 or 4, beat 3 is rarely skipped. It’s the second most important beat, as it clearly divides the measure into two parts. The metrics of music is all about subdivision.

9

I’ve got it all with Explorer.

10

It has more to do with what fonts you have installed. If you have IE8, it should automatically try to use a font that it will work on.

The biggest problem is the difference between OSes, as Windows XP doesn’t by default have many of the more complete fonts.