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TEN MINUTE MASTER No6: TIME SIGNATURES

TEN MINUTE MASTER No6

Time signatures
Ever wondered what the numbers mean at the start of a piece of music? Ian Waugh takes a look at time signatures and how they describe the beat and pulse of music.

t isnt absolutely imperative that youre able to read and write notation in order to make music, but it certainly wouldnt harm your cause. And one of the most important concepts to understand in notation is the time signature. The time signature of a piece defines its rhythm. You can probably enjoy a lucrative career as a rock star without knowing anything other than 4/4 time. But if youre interested in music, its useful to understand what other possibilities exist and how and where theyre applied. So here, were going to explore what time signatures mean and take a look at some of the less commonly used examples.

exact information about the beats, as you can see in the examples that follow:

to avoid possible confusion, the modern preference has become to write these figures out in full. The vast majority of Western music is written in 4/4 time and an even larger proportion of rock and pop!

The numbers racket

A time signature consists of two numbers, one above the other. However, theyre not fractions and to think of them as such will be confusing. The top number tells us the number of beats in a bar, while the lower number tells us the type or value of the beat. There are four beat values in common use:

Telling the time

The time signature tells us where the pulse or accent falls within a bar. The accents are identical for all time signatures with the same upper figure.

On the beat
Most music has a regular beat or pulse. And we can generally hear this beat because the musician will accent or emphasise particular notes more than others. If a musician were merely presented with a string of notes like this:

it would not be at all clear how they should be played. However, if the notes were accented as in these examples below:

The US preference for naming notes as a fraction of a whole note or semibreve is more intuitive than English nomenclature, and many modern musicians tend to use that system. The upper number the beats in a bar can technically be any value from 1 upwards (depending on how controversial or avant garde the composer wants to be), but its unusual to find values above 12. There are two types of time signature called simple and compound.

Simple time signatures

then you would play the first example with a three-beat and the second with a four-beat. Instead of accenting notes in this way throughout an entire piece, we place a bar line in front of the most heavily accented notes. Time signatures are added to give us more Simple time signatures have 2, 3 or 4 as their upper number. The lower number of a simple time signature is a simple representation of the beat. Here are the most common examples:

The accents in 4/4 time could be sub-divided even further: strong, weak, less-strong, weaker. The main thing to note in all time signatures is that the first beat is always the strongest. In 4/4 time, the third beat is the second strongest and beats two and four are weaker.

Compound time signatures

In compound time, the beat or main pulse (the upper number of the signature) is always a multiple of three, so the basic beat is, therefore, always dotted note: 4/4 is sometimes called Common Time and is also sometimes written as

The big O
The alternative method of representing 4/4 time is the capital letter C, but it doesnt stand for Common. In days gone by, the letter O was used for 3-time as it was believed to represent the holy trinity and the circle was held to be the symbol of perfection. Music in 2-time or 4-time was represented by a broken C, supposedly representing an imperfect or incomplete circle.

2/2 is sometimes written as In simple time, the rhythm or pulse is essentially the upper figure. In 2/4 time there are two pulses to the bar, in 3/4 there are three pulses and in 4/4 there are four. In

and referred to as Alla Breve or Cut Time. But

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compound time, divide the upper number by three to find the main beat. A time signature with a 6 on top has a two-feel, one with a 9 on the top has a three-feel and one with 12 on the top has a four-feel. This is made easier to see by the way the notes in a bar are beamed together. Lets compare 3/4 and 6/8 time. Both contain the equivalent of six 1/8th notes, but theyre grouped and accented differently:

The notes in the 3/4 piece are grouped in three lots of 1/8th notes, while those in the 6/8 piece are grouped in two lots of 1/8th notes, equivalent to a dotted quarter note. There are various notation rules and conventions to ensure that notes are grouped to make the accent and rhythm easy to read and understand. 6/8 is very common for Irish jigs and marches, including Sousas Liberty Bell March (otherwise known as the Monty Python theme). Wagners Ride of the Valkyries is in 9/8 time. The music seems quite fast because of the pulsating melody line, but the underlying three-beat isnt fast at all.

Left: This arrangement for brass from the Cubase VST score library includes odd time signatures and time signature changes in virtually every other bar. Note that the change of time signature to 4/4 at the start of the second stave is heralded by the insertion of 4/4 at the end of the first stave. Below: The time signature dialogue box in Cubase VST enables you to enter up to four note groupings to create oddly-divided time signatures. This one is set up to create a 6/4 bar grouped into 4/4 and 2/4.

Good timing
When you start to analyse time signatures in this way, it can seem rather mechanical and decidedly unmusical, but most musicians soon pick up the feel of a time signature once theyve played it or heard it a few times. And theres more good news; even though weve listed all the popular time signatures, some are far more popular than others, and in practice youre most likely to come across just a handful: 4/4, 3/4, 6/8, 12/8 and 2/2.

To indicate a change of time signature in a piece of music, you simply write the new time signature at the beginning of a bar. Once a time signature has been written, its assumed that all following bars have that time signature. When a time change occurs at the beginning of a new line (or stave), its also written at the end of the previous stave. You can see an example in the Brassed Off! piece above.

Odd couples
However, many composers write music in what we call odd time signatures, the most common of which are 5/4 and 7/4. A handful of pop hits have taken up the challenge, including Peter Gabriels Solsbury Hill in 7/4, and Jethro Tulls Living in the Past in 5/4. The piece of music that popularised 5/4 in more recent times was Dave Brubecks Take Five back in 1959, but even before that Mars from Gustav Holsts Planets suite brought 5/4 time to widespread public attention. These time signatures are not as difficult to read as they may appear because they can all be broken down into simple time signatures. Take Five and Living in the Past, for example, combine 3/4 and 2/4. Brubeck took the art of odd time signatures even further with his Blue Rondo a la Turk in 9/8 time. However, this wasnt the traditional grouping of 3/8, 3/8 and 3/8, but a rather more inventive 2/8, 2/8, 2/8 and 3/8. rhythms. If youre thinking of composing outside of 4/4 time, be aware that although it might end up giving your music somthing of an edge, it might also end being up less accessible. MTM
America (C) Copyright 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959 by The Estate of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim. Copyright renewed. Leonard Bernstein Music Publishing Company LLC, Publisher. Boosey & Hawkes, Inc., Sole Agent. International Copyright secured. Reproduced by kind permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd.

The times they are a-changing

Some pieces of music change time signatures at various places throughout the piece. This is not a new idea, although we see more of it in music that came from 1900s classical composers than in early classical music. In popular music it hit its peak during the progressive rock phenomena of the mid-1960s to mid-1970s when bands such as Rush experimented with time signature changes and odd time signatures. The rule at the time was if it has a beat but you cant dance to it, its progressive rock. Even The Beatles indulged with songs like All You Need is Love. Two of the most most popular and well known pieces with changing time signatures are Leonard Bernsteins America from West Side Story, and Ron Goodwins theme from 633 Squadron. They both use alternating bars of 6/8 and 3/4 to create the well-known, pulsating rhythm. And even though this is a combination of two time signatures, its a very easy and natural rhythm to sing. Here are the first couple of bars of Bernsteins America:

For more information

Any good book on notation or the rudiments of music will carry copious information about time signatures. Standard texts to have a look at include the Oxford Dictionary of Music and the AB Guide to Music Theory. Also check the Publications section of www.abrsm.ac.uk On the web, the following sites offer information about time signatures: www.music.vt.edu/musicdictionary/ appendix/meter/Meterbasics.html and http://ourworld.compuserve.com/ homepages/Neil_Hawes/theory10.htm The following site lists classical music titles in various time signatures www.pitt.edu/~deben/meters.html

The piece was later recorded by The Nice with Keith Emerson on keyboards in 1968, and converted into triplets for a rock audience. Even though most music is written in 4/4, becoming comfortable and proficient in other time signatures will increase your versatility and give you ideas for creating different

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