My drum machine allows me to put in all sorts of weird time signatures. I’ve noticed that this results in alternating time signatures where the pulse of the beat changes increments, such as 2/4+1/16. This made sense when I tried to determine what a 6th of a note would represent. Basically, you would have to group 6 equal increments together, which results in 11 groups of 64th notes. To reduce it further, you would have one measure grouped with five 32nd notes and one 64th note, and this is without considering the number of beats per measure.
Dammit… :smack: That’s not right, because because the next equal subdivision is 138th notes… not 132nd.
Oh well, you get the idea.
The important feature is that you can have any x/10 bars…such as 2/10
So you can have a 4/8 bar, followed by a 2/10 bar, followed by a 3/8 bar:
/ 1 2 3 4 5 2 2 3 4 5 3 2 3 4 5 4 2 3 4 5 / 1 2 3 4 2 2 3 4 / 1 2 3 4 5 2 2 3 4 5 3 2 3 4 5 /
Err… One can have 5-lets, 7-lets, 11-lets, theoretically 3248734-lets. And the rhythm you post is intriguing, if not easy by my (even less by disco) standards. But the “denominator” must always be a unit of some recognizable standard, whether a quarter note, eighth, sixteenth, a cow, a pig, 10 minutes, or half of a dug hole. Something.
You got a printable cite on the sheet music for this? I’ve no doubt that you’ve heard this music, but I need to see the sheet music to believe it (and I challenge any musician I know to understand it).
[QUOTE=GorillaMan]
The important feature is that you can have any x/10 bars…such as 2/10
You will NEVER see 2/10 written as a time signature. Yes, you may divide a bar into sets of quintuplets, but the second half of a time signature can ALWAYS!!! be expressed as a power of 2. Look: /2 /4 /8 /16 /32 /64 /128 etc. If you can cite a piece of music in 2/10, published or recorded by an actually company that would sell me a copy, I want to know.
Yes, Firebird was a ballet, so people danced to it. No, no one dances to the suite. Yes, EVERY theme in the suite is in the ballet. That is why they both have the same name. There was no riot after Firebird; if I remember correctly it was rather well received. There were riots after the Rite of Spring, Bolero (Ravel) and other pieces, but NOT after Firebird.
IANA music historian, but I’d agree that 2/4, 4/4, 2/2 and 6/8 predominate because 2’s are more common in secular dance music. After the Baroque era, secular dance secular art music became far more common than the sacred forms found from Chant up to Josquin.
Why is this relevant? Chant and its progeny were written by (mostly) religious composers seeking companionship with God. Since the Trinity is a group of 3, this was thought to be the most sacred basis for composition. Among other elements, 9/8 meter was very common. (three groups of three…) The number of groups was called time. The number of beats in a group was called prolation.
Here’s how they notated it.
9/8=perfect time, perfect prolation and notated as O with a . in the middle.
3/4=perfect time, imperfect prolation looks like this: O
6/8=imperfect time, perfect prolation-- C with a . in the middle.
4/4=imperfect time, imperfect prolation=C
The modern symbols for common time and cut time (4/4 and 2/2) descend from this notation, rather than being an abbreviation of the words common and cut.
I know this sounds like I’m full of it, but it’s factual and well documented.
Finally, the performer in me has a few words to say–he only speaks in all caps, sorry:
YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED TO HAVE A FAVORITE METER!!! IF IT CAN BE WRITTEN USING WESTERN NOTATION YOU MUST BE ABLE TO PLAY IT!!! FURTHERMORE, YOU MUST BE ABLE TO PLAY IT CORRECTLY!!! YOU WILL DO THIS THE FIRST TIME YOU SEE THE MUSIC!!! IT DOES NOT MATTER IF THERE ARE POLYRHYTHMS, SYNCOPATIONS, ODD METERS OR METER CHANGES!!! IF YOU CAN’T COPE WITH THIS, I WILL NOT PLAY WITH YOU/HIRE YOU/GIVE YOU GIGS/BE SEEN IN YOUR PRESENCE!!!
Sorry, he gets a little unreasonable, especially after two hours of hearing a bad orchestra sightread the Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. (they don’t let him wear his ‘tune it or die’ t shirt to rehearsal anymore.) It’s perfectly understandable for nonprofessionals to prefer 4/4.
If any of this seems a little hypercritical etc. it’s because these are things I’m used to taking for granted and reading misinformation about music is like being stabbed in the kidneys.
Similarly, in pipe tunes, 9/8 isn’t a fast piece-they’re typically slower tunes, like retreats. I tend to think of them as 3+3+3.
Here’s a link to one of my favourite 9/8s, The Battle of the Somme.
By way of digression…
I recently came across a reproduction of an old book of piobaireachd for the pipes. (Piobaireachd, or ceol mor, is the “great music”, the classic bagpipe music.) The piobaireachds in this book were written on a 3-bar stave, instead of the standard 5-bar stave, and entirely without time signatures. Piobaireachd tends to be heavily ornamented, and the emphasis is more on the phrasing and expression than strict adherence to timing, so I wasn’t that surprised by the absence of a time signature.
Are there any other instruments that have their own notation systems?
Can’t find anything online…but the very first bar of Ferneyhough’s Etudes Trancendantales (Edition Peters) is 2/10, and x/10 and x/12 are used throughout the piece.
The example I gave couldn’t be created using 5-lets or anything-lets, not without repositioning the barlines, which is something composers will often want to avoid at all costs.
x/10 bars are a recognisable standard, and it’s actually fairly easy to get the ‘feel’ for switching between x/10, x/8 and x/12. Once you’ve done that, it gives you a fantastic flexibility to shift between subtley different rhythms.
Aha…Here’s an example, with it’s own explanation: http://www.bmic.co.uk/collection/pdfs/6620w.pdf
Around 1500 (ie Josquin’s period), there was a major shift away from triple-metered sacred music to two- and four-beat rhythms. Nothing to do with the secularisation of music, it seems to have just been a change in fashion.
Ouch.
OK, I can see the logic, but there are not enough complimentary drinks in the free world to entice any musician I know to seriously attempt this. I also note that the composer invented this notation, and had to include a lengthy explanation for it so that any other conductor insane enough to try it could at least have something to start with.
At any rate, this is certainly not standard notation, and without the accompanying explanation, it is meaningless.
But I’d love to hear it sometime.
He didn’t invent the notation…IIRC that was Henry Cowell, but I’m probably wrong on that. It’s not mainstream notation, granted, but (as I said above) it’s (1) the only way to notate what he wants, and (2) honestly not that difficult to play, once you think about it for a minute.
Ferneyhough can kiss my ass.
3 against 2 inside of a bar of 3/12? Someone needs a time-out.
The man is an utterly contemptible fool. And even though I have seen with my own
eyes what he has written, I still don’t believe it.
Venturing into IMHO territory: This is not music. It has no value.
Honestly, I can’t fathom what kind of perverted inspiration would generate this
kind of crap.
One triple rhythm inside another, within a 3/8 structure? Nothing different to what you’ll find in Beethoven piano sonatas.
Pardon my previous vitriol. That’s what too much coffee and offended delicate artisitic sensibilities will do to a guy.
But, PUHLEEEEEEZ. Are you comparing Ferneyhough’s schizophrenic notation to anything classical? The difference with your hypothetical Beethoven example is that you could actually feel the triplets. Ferneyhough writes nothing that can be felt as a recognizable rhythm. Yes, it uses the little black dots with stems and flags on them, but any sense of tempo or meter is totally unintelligible to the listener.
The point I’m making is, what if you heard a recording of this Ferneyhough piece and had to make a transcription of it, score unseen? I guarantee it would look nothing like the way it’s notated. There’s no music to it, if you get my meaning. My philosophy dictates that the music should look like it sounds. It should also be reproducible by a listener.
And, more importantly, it shouldn’t suck donkey balls.
Ferneyhough and his perverted ilk can still, politely, kiss my ass.
I don’t know…I’ve never listened to Ferneyhough, but some of Chopin’s “easier” nocturnes (for example, Op 9 No 1) contain passages of 11 over 8. Granted, all the performances I’ve heard have liberal rubato in these sorts of passages, but if you’ve ever looked at Brahms’s 51 Exercises for Piano, which were meant to be played strictly in time, they START with 3s over 4, then go 4 over 5 and end up somewhere like 7s over 8 or worse (it’s been awhile.) Granted, these are exercises, but they’re meant for real situations that await the player of Romantic-era and more recent music.
I’m still stuggling to understand why conventional notation can’t notate Farneyhough’s rhythm – I’m obviously not understanding something correctly. I think it can be done; it’ll just look very sloppy, like writing 12/8 in 4/4 time.
I haven’t heard or played Ferneyhough, or even seen the score, but it doesn’t seem like he’s doing any more to current rhythmic conventions than Stravinsky was doing in 1913.
Thing is, though, it looks like this stuff could still be written in conventional notation. It’d be a pain in the behind, sure. But composers can and do use conventional notation to write polyrhythms, etc., simply because we performers see it more often; it’s just the way it’s done. In a way, reminds me of the movement to drop silent e’s from the English language, since we don’t pronounce them.
JPEG, while I completely sympathize with your dislike of certain trends in modern music, Schoenberg, Stockhausen, and possibly in the future, Ferneyhough, are going to stay in the concert halls for a while. You might not think it’s art, but someone probably does if he’s getting commissions from the London Sinfonietta.
What Ferneyhough is saying by using this notation is that notation is insufficient to express his musical ideas. That’s nothing new–notation has evolved lots over the centuries, and there are lots of idiosyncrasies like Couperin’s inegale that are impossible to notate. That’s possible, but the notation he uses is very close to not being notation at all–it’s not a good system if you need to read two pages before playing the piece.
Just as an example, 4/8 followed by 4/10 could be expressed by:
20/32
Four groups of 5 32’s
followed by
16/32
Four groups of four 32’s
Alright, this is ugly. And complicated. Here’s another way:
4/8 at 100bpm followed by 4/8 at 120bpm. (It’s late–the math might be wrong; but it’s possible to work it out.)
Both of these are common and accepted ways of notating such things. Look at Le Sacre, or Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe. Musicians have seen these things before, and can relate them to previous experience. If you take a professional musician from anywhere in the world, even without knowing the Rite of Spring (which wouldn’t happen…hypothetical) then he should be able to play it. It might not be easy sightreading, but to quote a member of the Boston Symphony,
“If climbing off a plane with most of a day’s worth of jet lag and only a few hours of sleep, warming up for half an hour, and then opening a tour of Japan with the Rite of Spring doesn’t sound like fun to you, then don’t audition for a major symphony orchestra.” The point? Musicians understand the two types of notation I show above. They probably wouldn’t understand /10 meters. Hence, /10 is outside of current conventions for notation. Thanks for coming up with a cite, but I’m not going to reprogram Dr. Beat to teach me 2/10.
That’s true (except that the second one should be 125pbm). However, it wouldn’t be possible to do what Ferneyhough sometimes does, which is have switches between x/10 and x/8 within an overall accelerando.
I doubt I’d do a good job of transcribing Wagner, either. Should all music be easily transcribable? Surely the important thing is how it sounds, with the score being an intermediate stage towards this?
What about just writing in odd meters like I mentioned? Composers do that all the time. The score already looks a mess as it is, even with 2/10 etc., which is hard enough to figure anyway. Especially for 11+ people playing in an ensemble. Are there any other pieces written this way? I probably don’t need a web address; my school library has a pretty extensive library. Just the name of the piece and the composer should be enough.
This would make every single x/8 and x/16 bar into a syncopated 5-against-4. Far more difficult to play, less clear correspondence between the notation and the rhythm, and far more complicated on paper. I maintain that in these cases, using 4/10 IS the simplest solution. And is NOT that complicated. The most that would be needed would be to explain the notation to the players.
There’s plenty of other Ferneyhough pieces that use this notation, but I can’t think of another composer that uses it as systematically, at least that would be in a library. As you’ve got library access, and I don’t, perhaps you could check out whether I’m remembering correctly that it was Henry Cowell who created this system?
And as an aside, there’s no fundamental difference between these time signatures and the system of proportions found in fifteenth century music - 4/10 would correspond to proportio quintupla sesquiquarta, IIRC.