RHYTHM. Rhythm, like pitch, is anthropological, an all-pervasive aspect of life. In its most general use, rhythm describes what the French composer Berlioz called the “vast and fertile“” world of time and motion in music. Rhythm proceeds from the notion of beat, the pulse that divides the passage of time into set increments. You fix the speed of the beat with a clock tick or the pat of a foot or a visual gesture like the conductor’s stroke or the nod of a violinist’s head.
With a beat established. one can describe the lengths of sounds, their duration or rhythmic value, in terms of the number of beats they last.
A particular sound lasts a beat, for example, or two beats, or a beat and a half.
Rhythm is notated according to a system of changing note heads and flags or beams, where each successive note value is twice as long as the one before it. (A complete treatment of rhythmic values, with notated examples, appears in a tutorial presentation on the SmartSite.) Dots add half a note value; triplets, and similar note fractions force the given number of values into a space generally occupied by another number, for instance, three into the space of two.
The speed of the beat is its tempo. You can establish this using clock time, say 120 beats per minute, or with some vaguer verbal
description. In music terminology we use the Italian language for these general descriptions. Allegro is a fast beat, adagio a slow beat. A tempo of 120 beats per minute represents an ordinary sort of allegro.
This is about the speed at which American military units parade (120 paces per minute) and thus the speed of a Sousa march. A football band, at that rate, can cover 75 yards of the field in one minute of play. We use a metronome to set tempo exactly: M.M. =120 calls for♩ 120 quarter note beats per minute, and if you set your metronome to 120 you would hear it tick at that speed. M.M. stands for “Metronome de Maelzel,” Monsieur Maelzel having been the reputed inventor of the machine.
Meter organizes the passage of these beats into regularly recurring units marked by a strong pulse at the beginning of each unit. The simplest possibilities are duple and triple:
ONE two ONE two ONE two ONE two
ONE two three ONE two three ONE two three
Meter is thus a simple matter of establishing hierarchy in the beats.
Once meter is established, you can talk of strong beats and weak beats, downbeats and upbeats, or even crusis and anacrusis; all are ways of distinguishing between the strong pulse at the beginning of the metric unit and the other, lesser pulses. We separate the units with bar lines and call each unit a measure (colloquially, bar).
Meters are identified by fraction-like symbols showing, on top, how many beats there are in the measure and, on the bottom, the rhythmic value of the beat; the c and ¢ (for 4/4 and 2/2, respectively) are vestiges of medieval notational practice. The meter signature comes at the front of the score just after the clef. Just as pitch symbols mean little without a clef to show what pitches they are, the passage of time means little without an established meter.
Simple duple and triple meters can be combined in compound meters, which have the usual strong downbeat as well as internal hierarchies of beat. The easiest is 4/4: two groups of two, with heavy downbeat and semistressed third beat; 3/4 consists of two groups of
three; 9/8 three groups of three; and so on. Note that 6/8 and 3/4 both have six eighth-note beats per measure, but the effect is quite different: 6/8 is two groups of three with two beats to the bar; 3/4 is three groups of two with three beats to the bar.
A meter need not be regular. In modern works you might see 5/8, 7/16, and the like. Tchaikovsky composed a lovely movement in 5/4, where each measure consists of unequal halves of two beats plus three beats.
Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 6 (“Pathétique“), movt. II.
Sample meters
Meter can even change every bar or so, and compositions occasionally try to survive without any meter at all.
The ebb and flow of time in music intrigues musicians of all periods and all cultures. Medieval composers dealt in overlapping rhythmic and melodic loops and in mathematical puzzles with rhythm and meter. African and Polynesian drum bands deal in metric effects of immense technical complexity. Modern multitracking and sequencing allows rhythmic patterns that would be impossible for live performers to accomplish. Train your ear to notice rhythmic device as acutely as it notices melody or form, for therein lies one of the secrets of expectation and fulfillment.
Now that you know pitch notation and the elements of rhythm and meter, you can read and perhaps write simple tunes, like the two below, without too much difficulty. Note that “Row, Row, Row,” as a round, requires three lines to notate properly, one for each voice.
MELODY AND HARMONY. The concepts of melody and harmony are probably second nature to you. Melody is the horizontal component of a piece of music, and harmony the vertical. Melody is the tune and harmony the chords. Melody concerns the left-to-right progress of a musical line; harmony, that which sounds simultaneously at any given musical moment.
Composers tell us of the thrill of discovering the melodic germ of a new piece, how it dominates their thoughts and haunts their dreams, how they sense it taking shape and growing outward in multiple directions. Their palpable excitement at having come up with a good new melody is something you may have felt if you’ve ever tried to compose a song.
Melodies come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, but whatever their structure, they survive best if well proportioned and singable. Some of the most memorable melodies simply follow scales and outline simple chords, fashioning a coherent whole from almost naive successions of subphrases and phrases. “Twinkle, Twinkle,” for example, consists of three elementary phrases arranged in the scheme a-b-a. The famous melody from Haydn’s “Surprise” Symphony, of similar contour and pulse, seems to propose an idea and then respond to it, in the scheme a-a’.
We call the principal melodies in a larger work its themes.
Harmony supports and enriches melody in a succession of chords, which lend weight and meaning to the structure of the melody. Most chords are three-part sonorities called triads, built on the various scale degrees. The triads, properly ordered, contribute to the progress of a work of music by establishing sensations of repose and tension at appropriate places. Put another way, a melody properly harmonized can have a much more exciting musical effect than the same melody standing alone.
We call intervals and chords that sound pleasing to the ear (octaves, for example) consonant and those that are jarring or disruptive dissonant. It is the interplay between consonance and dissonance that makes harmony function the way it does and tonality happen.
TEXTURE. Only the simplest kinds of music consist merely of a tune and supporting chords. “Silent Night” with its original guitar accompaniment is an example. More common is music of many constituent parts, relying for some of its effect on the various levels of interplay among the lines, or voices. Vocabulary describing how the voices work together is that of musical texture.
Start by distinguishing between monophonic and polyphonic, that is, between single and multiple voices. “Twinkle, Twinkle” without any accompaniment is monophonic, as is the old Gregorian chant of the Catholic church. “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” is monophonic when you sing it by yourself, polyphonic when others join you in a round. The term homophonic suggests textures where all the voice parts change pitches simultaneously, as in the first part of “Angels We Have Heard on High.” Anything much more complex by way of polyphony gets into the realm of counterpoint, the technique of com-bining multiple voice lines in a manner pleasing to the ear.
“Angels We Have Heard on High,” a strophic carol, is thus homophonic through the verse, then turns highly contrapuntal at the
Glorias. The interplay of the horizontal lines is complex both at the two-voice and at the four-voice level. In the two upper parts, for example, it fills in beautifully everywhere you look.
Writing good counterpoint is a skill sought after by all fine composers. The subgroupings of counterpoint are many and sophis-ticated. One of these is imitative polyphony, where one voice imitates another that went before it, often duplicating the first several intervals at a different pitch level.
English text: “Lord, have mercy upon us.”
“Angels We Have Heard on High”—good counterpoint.
William Byrd: Kyrie eleison, from Mass in 4 Parts
A canon is a stricter kind of imitative polyphony where one voice leads and the other follows exactly. Rounds like “Row, Row, Row”
and “Three Blind Mice” are more subtle structures still, for they can cycle on and on indefinitely. We’ll learn about the fugue, with its subjects and answers, as we go along.
Imitative polyphony is at the root of much music of the Renaissance, whereas fugal writing is a major preoccupation of Baroque composers, and of most later composers whenever they wish to prove their mastery of the great musical traditions. But good counterpoint is a requirement of all multivoiced music. In a Bach chorale, for example, you can hear how each individual voice part works pleasingly against the others, although the prevailing texture is homophonic.
NUANCE. Melody, harmony, and rhythm, then, are the essentials of notated music. Until relatively recently in the musical past, most of the rest—changes in volume, manner of attack, ornamentation, and even instrumentation—was supplied by the performers. What the composer specifies in a work varies by individual, era, and genre, although generally the closer to the present you get, the more the composer tries to specify every detail with precision.
Dynamic level is specified by abbreviations based on the Italian words piano (“soft”) and forte (“loud”). The manner of attack is indicated by markings attached to the note or by Italian words that describe the effect, for example, staccato (short, detached), legato (smooth), or marcato (marked). Various kinds of ornamentation, the wiggles and curlicues that indicate the decoration of a pitch, can be specified by the composer, supplied by the performer, or a combination of both.
One of the most common indications of musical nuance is the curved line, or slur. Slurs are used for a variety of related purposes, such as to mark a phrase (a musical idea that belongs altogether), to show a player to connect all the slurred notes in a single breath uninterrupted by the tongue, or to imply changes of direction in the
bow stroke to a strings player. You determine the precise meaning by the context of the slur.