Hello there, I'm Peter Schickele, and this is Schickele Mix, a program dedicated to the proposition that all musics are created equal, or as Duke Ellington put it, if it sounds good, it is good. The bills for this cornucopia of good music are paid by the American Public Radio Program Fund, whose contributors include the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and also by this good radio station right here.
Today's show is called Leave the Meter Running. Now meters, of course, measure. That's their job. Whether they're on a taxi, a gas line, or a yardstick, what meters do is divide something into equal units and count them. Back in Rossini's day, in the early 19th century, opera singers were so jealous of each other that one apparently came up to him once and complained that she had counted up the number of measures in her aria, and the number of measures in the tenor's aria, and the tenor's aria had more than hers. Rossini said we need to develop some kind of ariometer to handle such situations.
Rhythmically speaking, music, at least the kinds we're dealing with today, is divided into measures, or bars, which are separated visually by vertical lines through the staff called bar lines. Bar lines are completely a matter of convenience. They make it easier to keep your place, especially when the rhythmic going gets tough. With very few exceptions, the music would sound the same without bar lines, and in fact they weren't used during the Renaissance, for instance.
The meter of a piece is indicated by the time signature, which these days is shown by a pair of numbers written rather like a fraction, one number over the other, but without any line between them. The meter defines two things, the number of beats in a measure and the number of subdivisions within the beat. A good vernacular definition of beat is the unit that corresponds to how you'd tap your foot during a piece.
In France, at the end of the 17th century, they would literally beat a stick on the floor to define the beat. This is a very fine sounding table. Now the beat can shift within a section, but something has to be constant for the notation to be of any value. Sometimes what's constant is too fast to tap your foot to. Here's a great piece that is interesting in this context.
You can tap your foot throughout most of this work, but every once in a while the composer throws a curve, shifts the beat half a beat. It's really the half a beat that's constant here, and lets you tap away for a while again before he trips you up. But it's so much fun being tripped up by this guy of
[music: Stravinsky, Symphony in Three Movements, 3rd Mvt.; Columbia Symphony Orchestra/ Stravinsky]
Igor Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements, the composer conducting the Columbia Symphony Orchestra. There were several sections in that movement, as you heard, with different tempos. For instance, the obvious beat in the opening is that,
but if you were to beat twice as fast You could tap throughout that section without being tripped. But the important thing is that the beat is a regular unit. It's a theoretical unit that keeps going no matter what the rhythms of the various parts are. The meter keeps ticking. It has to, otherwise it wouldn't be a meter.
Okay now, Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques, Dormez-vous, Dormez-vous, Now the meter doesn't stop.
The top notes for a while is a beat long, right? It corresponds with the beat. But when you get to vu, do-re-me-vu, do-re-me-vu, the beat doesn't stop the way I did it then. The beat keeps going. Do-re-me-vu, do-re-me-vu, which is how you know that that top note has two beats.
There's a wonderful story, I don't know whether it's true or not, that when Martha Graham and Aaron Copland were working on Appalachian Spring, she said this next section is in a sort of a slow three, so Aaron Copland went home and wrote a bit of slow music in a triple meter, and he came back, and she said, oh no, no, that's all wrong, it's like this, one, two, three, one, two, three, 3, 1, 2, 3. Well, she was turning the meter off and you can't do that. Now, one caveat if you're trying to tap your toe to a Chopin ballade. In terms of music notation, the beat is regular, but especially in classical music and cocktail piano, the performers often slow the beat down and speed it up, sometimes a lot. This is perfectly normal and nothing to be worried about.
Now, in the third phrase of Frere Jacques, the melody divides the beat, two even notes per beat, but the third phrase of Row, Row, Row Your Boat, for instance, subdivides the beat into three even notes, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, one two three, one two three, one two three, one two three, so that's a triple subdivision. I'm just mentioning subdivision for the sake of encyclopedic completeness.
We're going to be concerned today with the other aspect of meter, the number of beats in a measure, and where the measure starts. So how do you figure out how many beats there are in a measure? Well, we could start with the oomph technique. Let's just start with a tune here.
[music: keyboard demonstration, "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star"]
Oomphs are the first beat, or downbeat. That's my authentic instrument, by the way. This studio comes equipped with it. Not a copy. An original, early 1990s Casio Tone Bank. Now the oomphs are on the first beat or downbeat. Just go with the force.
[music: keyboard demonstration, "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star"]
So Twinkle Twinkle was oomph.
Or you could go oomph if you're a slower oomph-er.
[music: keyboard demonstration, "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star"]
We're only concerned here with whether it's in a duple or a triple meter. I don't care if you want to notate Twinkle Twinkle Little Star in four, oomph,
[music: keyboard demonstration, "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star"]
or in two, one, two.
They're both duple meters, and composers are pretty much free to call that as they wish without seriously confusing anyone. But to try to notate Twinkle Twinkle Little Star in three would be so awkward as to merit the designation wrong.
[music: keyboard demonstration, "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star"]
Actually, sounds pretty good, doesn't it? Very interesting. But that's because it sounds like what it is, two different meters superimposed. Writing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star in 3 beats per measure would not be helpful. But of course the oomph technique is intuitive. And since you're all sitting there with blue books, I feel as if I ought to tell you something to write down. Intuition is, after all, simply knowledge we didn't know we had. So what is that knowledge?
Okay, one of the ways we figure out meter is by pattern. Sometimes the accompaniment gives you a pattern. In a waltz, one, two, three, one, the way the pattern repeats gives you a feeling of the meter. Or a polka, one, two, one, two, or one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one.
But what if there's no accompaniment? Here's the beginning of the second movement of Beethoven's String Quartet Opus 59 Number 1. This unaccompanied phrase consists of nothing but one note played 15 times.
But the first four notes use a rhythmic pattern There's a pattern that is identical to that of the next four notes. So the pattern sets up the meter.
[sung: Schickele hums the Beethoven quartet phrase]
The fact that the last note is longer than the others helps too, but we'll get back to that in a minute. Then there's defining the meter by harmonic change. If I play even notes like this, you
have no idea whether I mean them to be grouped in twos or threes. But if I change harmony every two beats,
[music: keyboard demonstration]
Then you know that it's in doo-wah-diddy time, technically known as duple meter. Here's a little suitelet, two pieces that use melodic pattern and harmonic change to define the meter. In the first one, the melodic pattern repeats every two beats and the harmony changes every four beats throughout most of the piece. In the second, the meter changes regularly, and the reason you know it is because of when the chords change and how the melodic pattern expands and contracts.
See you in six minutes.
[music: J. S. Bach, “The Well-Tempered Clavier,” 1st Prelude; Davitt Moroney]
[music: Glass, "Are Years What?" (North Star); Philip Glass]
First prelude from Johann Sebastian Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, Book One. That was Davitt Moroney playing the clavecin. And then we heard from Philip Glass' album, North Star, a piece called Are Years What?, dedicated to Marianne Moore. And one of the interesting similarities between those two pieces is that in both cases the melodies are merely chord outlines.
My name is Peter Schickele and the program is Schickele Mix on APR. Another way of defining rhythmic groups is by accenting the beginning of each group volumically. Don't try that word at home, kids. Simply play each downbeat louder. Here are 12 equal notes.
[music: keyboard demonstration]
I can present them as three groups of four.
Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom Or four groups of three Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom Isn't this fun? Interestingly enough, volume accents, which is usually what you mean when you use the word accent, are used more often to confuse the meter than to define it. Here's part of a German dance by Schubert.
It's in a triple meter, but he writes accents every two beats for several measures, just to kick up some dust.
But one of the most basic techniques for defining meter is one that doesn't get talked about much, at least not at the cocktail parties I go to. And that is the agogic accent. That's agogic, A-G-O-G-I-C. Sorry about the $10 word, folks. As you know, my policy ordinarily is to eschew fancy words. But in this case, I know of no substitute.
An agogic accent simply means that a note is longer than the note immediately preceding it. Very simple, but very basic. Here's a beautiful example of agogic accents. The accompaniment is straight eighth notes on one chord for a long time, no help in defining the meter. But the melody starts with four equal notes and then a longer one, so you assume the longer one is the beginning of the second bar, and it's in 4-4 time.
And you're right, because the next pair of bars also has shorter notes followed on the downbeat by a longer note. Agogic accents in action.
Beethoven, Op. 59, No. 1 again. Now the long note doesn't literally have to be held out. A short note followed by rests, that is silence, has the effect, agogically wise speaking, of a long note. This little excerpt starts with four notes of equal length, but the fourth one is followed by rests, which makes it feel longer and therefore like the downbeat. And the oomph computer in our brain tells us it's in triple time.
[music excerpt: P. D. Q. Bach, “Oedipus Tex,” Aria: “You murdered your father”; Dana Krueger/The Greater Hoople Area Off-Season Philharmonic/ Wayland]
That was the beginning of Billie Jo Casta's aria from P. D. Q. Bach's Oedipus Tex. When it comes to determining the meter, nine times out of ten you can trust your oomph reflexes instead of consciously analyzing the music. It's sort of like how in Euclidean geometry you sometimes have to resort to superimposition. You know, look, just put triangle ABC on top of triangle DEF and they're identical, right?
No, I can't prove it, but look, there's nothing sticking out, they're both the same. But you can't tell the meter if you can't find the beat, and one of the inexorable trends in certain kinds of music during the 19th and 20th centuries has been the disappearance of the beat. Check it out. In this number, you can feel the beat and the meter. The melody moves in equal notes and has repeated patterns some of the time, but it's so slow and the accompaniment is so wambly rhythmically, I love this piece by the way, that you almost have the feeling of floating without a beat.
[music excerpt: Brahms, Clarinet Quintet in B minor, Op. 115, 2nd mvt.; Karl Leister, clarinet; Amadeus Quartet]
The slow movement of the Brahms Clarinet Quintet, written towards the end of the 19th century. Now here's a piece actually written before the Brahms in which you cannot tell where the beat is for quite a while.
[music excerpt: Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, Prelude to Act 1; Vienna Philharmonic, Karajan]
Now you begin to feel a pulse.
[No speech for 23 s.]
It's in a triple meter. You finally find out it's actually written in six, two times three, but it's a triple meter. Wagner, Prelude to Tristan and Isolde. It may be true that most people like music you can tap your foot to, but here's another very popular work without any feeling of beat or meter for a very long time.
[music excerpt: Debussy, "Prelude a l’apres-midi d’un faune"; Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra/Slatkin]
Finally there you get a very strong feeling of a triple meter because of that phrase repeated over and over again, three beats long. The Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun by Debussy. Well, one thing leads to another, and before you know it, you've got music with no sense of beat or meter at all.
[music excerpt: Feldman, "The Viola In My Life"; Chamber ensemble/Feldman]
The beginning of Morton Feldman's The Viola in My Life, written in 1970. The piece is conventionally notated, but only for the sake of convenience. That is, in order to define the lengths of the notes and the rests in a way that musicians can deal with. If this were an electronic piece done on a computer, one could simply define the lengths of notes in absolute terms, 3.76 seconds, etc.
I've always felt that a conductor, when doing this kind of music, should make his or her beat-keeping motions as hidden from the audience as possible, since the beat has no kinetic function, no visceral function, only an accounting function. Most of this eroding of the feeling of a beat took place in slow music. When Wagner wrote the fast parts of Tristan, the beat is perfectly clear.
But music doesn't have to be slow to be ambiguous metrically, that's for sure. Here's an up-tempo horn tune that's famously difficult to tap your toe to. Only at the end of the theme does the beat get spelled out.
[music excerpt: Strauss, Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche; Staatskapelle Dresden, Blomstedt]
Now we got a nice 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3 kind of meter. You know, by this time, by the end of the 19th century, the beginning of the 20th century, definiteness is just not in. I mean, a Mozart symphony that begins
[sung: Schickele sings the opening of a Mozart symphony]
It's just too definite. Did you notice the Strauss piece, it begins as if it were in the middle. And both harmonically and formally, composers sought out the indefinite. Finally, here's some fast music written in 1974. The notation is exact, but the best musician in the world could not figure out the meter or meters.
[music excerpt: Carter, Brass Quintet (1974); The American Brass Quintet]
Elliott Carter's Brass Quintet. It's really electric, isn't it? It has a sort of a freaky jazz feel to it. Now we'll hear a work that not only changes meter several times, but also tempo. The two tempos are related in quite a complex way. Four notes in the faster tempo last the same amount of time as three notes in the slower tempo. This is another product of the 1970s. This piece was written somewhat later than the Carter.
Waylon Jennings, singing that monument to metrical complexity, Lucille. Not the other Lucille. "Lucille, you don't do your daddy's will." But this Lucille. And the guy saying these words is Peter Schickele on a program called Schickele Mix on APR.
Well, the clock up there on the wall is one meter that never stops. But we do have a hunk of time left, and I've said all I'm gonna say about beats, so let's go back to accents. I don't mean agogic, I mean the regular garden-variety accents where you play certain notes louder than their neighbors. I mentioned before that they're most often used to contradict the meter rather than define or corroborate it. Here's one of the most famous uses of irregular accents.
[music excerpt: Stravinsky, "The Rite of Spring"; Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal/Dutoit]
Uncle Igor, The Rite of Spring. Now I'd like to go out with a couple of interesting uses of accent. One of the many differences between a piano and a harpsichord is that if you hit a piano key harder, you get a louder note. But with a harpsichord, that's not true. No matter how strongly or weakly you strike the key, the note will sound the same. You can hit that sucker with a sledgehammer, it won't be any louder. The same is true of an organ, so what you have to do if you want something louder is to add more simultaneous notes.
On the harpsichord, a chord with eight strings sounding will automatically be louder than a chord with three strings sounding. It's that simple. In our last suitelet, notice how the harpsichord piece starts out with just a two-part texture, right hand and left hand, each playing lines with just one note at a time. And then after a bit of a pause, it suddenly gets louder because the left hand starts playing thick chords with lots of notes in them.
The second and last number of this suitelet features an unusually great contrast between the accented notes, which are quite loud, and the unaccented ones, some of which you can hardly hear at all. I'll be back in a few.
[music: Scarlatti, Sonata (K 209); Scott Ross]
[music: Ellington/James/Hodges, "I’m Beginning To See the Light"; Gerry Mulligan Quartet with Chet Baker]
That suitelet could perhaps be called "The Loud and Soft of It." The first number was Domenico Scarlatti's Sonata K. 209 in A, played by Scott Ross. Scott Ross has recorded all of the Scarlatti harpsichord sonatas. We're talking about, I think it's over 600 sonatas. And it's quite an addition too, because he's got a booklet there that not only has a little comment on each sonata, but prints out the first few bars of each sonata, the music.
And let me tell you, that is wonderful, because when you're talking about over 600 sonatas, it's not like symphonies. I mean, even if you know the key, that's not much of a help. Hey, it's in D major, great, there's 300 sonatas in D major. It's a wonderful idea, I'm glad somebody did it. And then we had Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker, the old quartet from the early 50s, doing I'm Beginning to See the Light. Here's a nice little thing in duple meter. That's
[theme: Mozart, Symphony No. 24]
Schickele Mix for this week Our program is made possible with funds provided by the American Public Radio Program Fund, whose contributors include the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and also by this radio station and its members. We'll tell you in a moment how you can get an official playlist of all the music on today's program with record numbers and everything. Just refer to the program number. This is program number 44.
And this is Peter Schickele saying goodbye and reminding you that it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that certain je ne sais quoi. You're looking good. See you next week.