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Author: Garth Libre
Date: 2013-06-30 19:20
I'm reading a jazz version of Claire De Lune written as a latin/jazz arrangement and the music is written in 3/2 time. It seems that there is no advantage to this bizarre timing. I plan to just learn the piece by ear anyway, but I'm also tempted to write the whole thing in a easier to understand 3/4 time. Other than making an adjustment to tempo, would anything change?
Garth, 305-981-4705. garthlibre@yahoo.com
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Author: Chris P
Date: 2013-06-30 19:45
I don't think it'll change anything as it's still three beats to the bar.
I recently played in the pit band for a production of 'Goodnight Mr.Tom' and several numbers were in 3/2 and 4/2 - I couldn't see any reason why the composer/arranger didn't just use 3/4 and 4/4.
Former oboe finisher
Howarth of London
1998 - 2010
The opinions I express are my own.
Post Edited (2013-06-30 19:46)
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Author: kdk
Date: 2013-06-30 20:05
I don't know why a jazz version would have been written in a half-note meter - the original is in 9/8, also three beats in a bar but with the triplet feel. Maybe to avoid the triplets because it's a latin-style arrangement where the subdivisions aren't supposed to be "swung." Maybe 3/2 with quarter-notes as the subdivision guards against swinging them as some people might be tempted to do with eighth-notes in 3/4. Just a guess.
I've always felt as though half-note meters were used because composers consider them less cluttered and busy looking than the equivalent quarter-note meter. Fewer beams, fewer flags, just less inky-looking, maybe to give a more linear, less mechanistic sense to the performer who reads it. To the ear, they sound alike.
Karl
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Author: Ken Shaw ★2017
Date: 2013-06-30 20:05
In general, 3/2 moves faster than 3/4. You should be able (although not required) to play in one beat per measure.
Music in 3/4 is by default a waltz. Not in 3/2, which has a different affect. Hitch up your pants and learn to swing along in 3/2. It's not that hard.
Garth, it's time for some (slightly) tough love. You want to play alone and ask questions remotely. But music is about playing together, in a group, with other people.
Learning to play the clarinet means putting in significant effort every day, for years and years. The great part about music is that is that it pays you back for the rest of your life.
Everyone here wishes you well, but you must do your part. Explaining the ABCs remotely wastes our time and effort, particularly where a teacher with you face-to-face can do in seconds what takes us hours. Get out of your door and take some lessons, or have a private teacher come in. Nobody else can do it for you. No explanations. No excuses. Just DO it.
Ken Shaw
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Author: gkern
Date: 2013-06-30 21:01
Ken, I have to agree 100%; when I started playing again after a 53 year sabbatical, being self taught and playing along with cds and midi files did provide enjoyment and some improvement, but it was not until I joined a community band and took some private lessons that I began to improve noticeably.
I will never be a first chair clarinet, but, if I can play the third parts flawlessly I will be one happy camper. And then, when that happens, and it will, try to improve even more!
Gary K
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Author: Barry Vincent
Date: 2013-06-30 21:28
Ken said "In general, 3/2 moves faster than 3/4. You should be able (although not required) to play in one beat per measure."
"Music in 3/4 is by default a waltz. Not in 3/2, which has a different affect. Hitch up your pants and learn to swing along in 3/2. It's not that hard."
The real problem right from the beginning when a lot of us learn our basic theory is that we're told that the crotchet is a one beat note. This is only correct if the lower number of the time signature is 4.
If the lower number of the time signature is 2 or 8, the minum , quaver or the dotted crotchet is the one beat note
It is therefore of no surprise that those who are taught this , when they're confronted with 2:2 /3:2 / 4:2 and even 6:2. that they are completely befuddled.
And likewise with the dotted rhythm time signatures of 6:8/9:8 and 12:8.
Like the time signatures that have 4 as the lower number, these are all normal time signatures.
Skyfacer
Post Edited (2013-06-30 21:37)
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Author: Garth Libre
Date: 2013-06-30 22:21
I keep meaning to get to a teacher, but as you can see I have put it off - but with some logic behind me. If I'm not too boring, indulge me and let me tell a short story. In my 20's I had put in a bunch of years in various ballet classes, and had already joined a second company. Fortunately, I was dancing for Eglevsky Ballet in NYC, so right after morning company class, I could take a class at one of my favorite NYC open classes. For the next couple of years, I would hear the teacher's critique of certain dancers who were talented but somehow not making solid progress. The amazing thing is month after month these dancers were continuously being told the same thing (for example -lead from your core and hips, then relax the upper body on top of it all to complete the picture). I kept thinking, "What is the point of going to class, if you don't make the corrections that are essential to getting out of the corps and into a decent soloist position?"
I determined I would take my own advise and took a four or five month hiatus in which I took no class, and worked in no company. For those months I would essentially only work on the basics in my own apartment. Some of the things I did were bordering on obsessive but mostly it was just a painful and incremental crawl towards correcting my own lingering problems and I would devote the entire day in earnest to accomplishing this. When I came back, I knew I had done the work I had needed to, and I had left one class of overworked and overlooked performers and become a real artist. I knew this, and instantly - everyone else did. When people asked me how I did it, I told them that I had just done what everyone is told to do from day one.
I still believe that the teacher can do very little to create an artist, and the weight falls on the shoulders of anyone who intends to make changes. Now of course, the ballet world is a bit different than music because if you show up at any ballet audition with good technique but sloppy musicality, they will still give you the job being convinced that they can somehow get you to do the rest. If you can do certain steps with good form, the prior steps that introduce these steps is usually so simple that anyone can do them.
The usual clarinet stumbling blocks seem to be intonation, tone, and fluidity. I've heard quite a few clarinetists whose rhythmic ability, fingering speed and musical knowledge far exceeds the actual sound that comes out of them in any one note. I'm very much concerned with basics now and I wouldn't want to torture a teacher, when there are so many things that I already know I must do, but haven't yet managed to.
Garth, 305-981-4705. garthlibre@yahoo.com
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Author: kdk
Date: 2013-06-30 22:51
Garth, your experience as a dancer is entirely different from what you're going through right now as a clarinetist and, perhaps, as a musician. At the point when you left the class and worked on your own you were already to some degree an accomplished dancer. You were working in a ballet company. You weren't working at nearly as basic a level as you are now with a clarinet.
It's true that a teacher can't create an artist. But a teacher can teach enough of the needed craft to enable the student to strive for whatever artistic level he is capable of achieving.
Karl
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Author: Tony F
Date: 2013-06-30 23:38
Working too long in isolation can allow bad habits to develop to the point that they become difficult to eradicate. This is more likely to happen to a developing player than to a fully developed player. This corresponds to your experience as a dancer.
Tony F.
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Author: jonok
Date: 2013-06-30 23:56
Yes, get a (good) teacher. The clarinet is a weird and subtle beast: as I'm discovering the problem is never what you think. Some of the things you have to do to fix a problem, you'd NEVER think of in a million years. For example, my problem with upper clarion articulation - solution? Learn to blow the alternate clarion G# fingering without squeaking or the undertone. huh? Go figure. After that one lesson I reckon my playing as a whole, and not just my articulation, is better by 3/2.
And that was a lesson with someone on the otherside of the world.
-------------------
aspiring fanatic
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Author: kdk
Date: 2013-07-01 00:41
Ken Shaw wrote:
> In general, 3/2 moves faster than 3/4. You should be able
> (although not required) to play in one beat per measure.
>
> Music in 3/4 is by default a waltz. Not in 3/2, which has a
> different affect. Hitch up your pants and learn to swing along
> in 3/2. It's not that hard.
>
Ken, apart from the tangential issue you raised about studying with a live teacher (which I agree is a the most effective way to learn basic technique), you can't mean that the preponderance of music in 3/4 meter is waltz or even waltz-like music. Your use of the word "default" confuses me. Apart from all the minuets that were composed in 3/4 before the waltz was even thought of and the laendlers in the music of composers like Mahler, it's too easy to find other examples of music in 3/4 that isn't waltz-like - think of the introduction to the Weber Concertino or the finale to Tchaikovsky's 6th. It would take me perhaps five or six more minutes to come up with others and I could probably fill several pages given enough time to pore over just the scores I have readily available. Waltzes are nearly always in 3/4 meter, but 3/4 doesn't always or even nearly always imply a waltz.
My experience doesn't support your other point about 3/2 moving faster than 3/4, either, but what did you really mean to say when you wrote "Music in 3/4 is by default a waltz?"
Karl
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Author: Garth Libre
Date: 2013-07-01 01:06
The Mazurka is in 3/4 time but also is very different from the waltz. Does anyone know a good teacher in Miami Fl?
Garth, 305-981-4705. garthlibre@yahoo.com
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Author: Gordon (NZ)
Date: 2013-07-01 02:29
kdk, you expressed my reaction very well.
I think Barry Vincent hit the nail on the head.
3/2 is just another way of writing 3/4, but with a lot less black on the page, which makes a huge difference in speed of transcribing if you are doing it by hand, as many old scores were done.
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Author: Ken Shaw ★2017
Date: 2013-07-01 02:30
Karl -
My fault. I assumed everyone would know about my personal understanding of the word "default."
During my first couple of years of study (beginning and intermediate band), nobody mentioned a mazurka to me. If the music was in 3/4, we were taught to think "waltz," swinging in triple time, three beats per measure.
It takes an effort to break away from that "default" (i.e., automatic response). For me, that came the first time the band played something in 3/2, one beat per measure and without the swing and rhythmic alterations essential to the Viennese waltz or, even more, the Polish mazurka (assuming I had even heard of it).
For me, 3/4 and 3/2 are for different kinds of music. Garth can certainly tell us, from his experience, about the difference between dancing in three beats per measure and dancing in one. Garth, on this topic, you're the expert, and we're your pupils.
Ken Shaw
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Author: kdk
Date: 2013-07-01 03:17
3/4 is counted in one as often as is 3/2. Think of the finale to Firebird, which begins in 3/2 (in a quite slow 3) before ending in 7/4 which is barred in 3 groupings per bar (3/2 with an extra quarter in one of the large beats). Again, I could come up with many more given a little time to think and to look. Think of the scherzo movements in the Beethoven symphonies, which are in 3/4 and definitely in one beat per measure.
Garth didn't ask about all the music written in 3/8 that also could as easily have been written in 3/4 or (leaving triples) even 2/2, which sounds just like 2/4 if the tempo of the pulse note is the same. These different metric notations have eye value for the composers or they wouldn't have evolved. The ear hears a three-beat metric grouping the same whether eighth, quarter, half or whole notes are used to represent a beat. The rest is augenmusik.
Dancing in one or three really hasn't much to do with the composer's notational choice - it depends on the aural meter of the music.
Karl
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Author: William
Date: 2013-07-01 14:51
Writing in 3/2--or 2/2, 5/2, any/2--does not require as many flags and bar lines as writing in a 4 based time signature. So why use it?? It's easier for the composer, that's all............. There is no other musical justification--ex. a march in 2/4 plays the same as a march in 2/2, a waltz in 3/2 is the same a one in 3/4.....a rose is still a rose, etc, etc etc etc.
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Author: Chris P
Date: 2013-07-01 15:27
Normally you'd encounter 3/2 and 4/2 in Renaissance music as well as 6/4 and many others.
Going the other way round, the 2nd movement of Bach's Concerto for Violin and Oboe (BWV 1060) is in 12/8, but it's not a fast 12/8 (with a dotted crotchet for every beat) but a very slow 12/8 in where a bar is pretty much the equivalent of four bars of a slow 3/8 - where it gets fun is when you go into note durations with 3, 4 and 5 tails on them and the page can look completely black. Likewise with the solo violin part in the aria 'Erbarme Dich' from St. Matthew's Passion and many more besides - that takes some subdividing!
Former oboe finisher
Howarth of London
1998 - 2010
The opinions I express are my own.
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Author: clarinetguy ★2017
Date: 2013-07-01 18:24
As I read through this discussion, I thought about the Copland concerto. Although much of it is in cut time, Copland could have written it in 2/4 with lots of sixteenths. I'm not sure I can explain why, but it just seems to work better, flow better, or look better the way Copland did it.
To get back to the question about 3/2 . . . Copland did something interesting in his clarinet sonata, and to be honest, I'm not sure why. The first 22 bars of the first movement are marked Andante semplice (it begins at quarter note=72, and goes up to 80 in bar 8), and for a while, the music goes back and forth between 3/4 and 4/4 with a measure of 5/4 thrown in. In measures 16, 17, and 22, the meter changes to 3/2, but the quarter note still receives one beat. I wonder why Copland didn't write 6/4 instead because it would seem to make more sense, but he probably had his reasons.
Time signatures can be a very confusing topic, and sometimes, there is disagreement among theorists. In college, I was taught that 2/4, 3/4, 4/4, 5/4, 2/2, 3/2, and 4/2 are simple meters, and that 6/8, 9/8, and 12/8 are compound meters. I don't think there is much disagreement--so far.
Now, it gets tricky. What about 6/4? I was taught that it was a compound meter since the top number is a "6." It could be played slowly, with the quarter note receiving the beat, but it could also be played quickly with the quarters being grouped in threes (the way compound meters are) and the dotted half note getting the beat. I will say that I've played a lot of music over the years (although probably not as much as many of you), and I can't recall many pieces marked in fast 6/4. When I've seen 6/4, it's usually treated as a simple meter with the quarter note getting the beat.
What about 3/8? I think of it as a compound meter because it's frequently marked one beat to the measure and follows the same rules as 6/8, 9/8, and 12/8. However, there are sources that say it isn't. http://www.musictheory.net/lessons/15
There is also confusion about 3/4. I generally don't think of it as a compound meter, and many theorists (such as the one from musictheory.net) would agree. However, if it is played quickly (one beat to the bar) with the dotted half getting the beat (as Ken mentioned), it could be thought of as a compound meter.
Garth, do you see what you started? Now, I'm going to explain some of those seldom-seen time signatures like 4/1 and 5/16--please relax everyone, I'm joking!
Post Edited (2013-07-01 18:25)
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Author: kdk
Date: 2013-07-01 20:02
clarinetguy wrote:
>
> Now, it gets tricky. What about 6/4? I was taught that it was
> a compound meter since the top number is a "6." It could be
> played slowly, with the quarter note receiving the beat, but it
> could also be played quickly with the quarters being grouped in
> threes (the way compound meters are) and the dotted half note
> getting the beat.
My understanding has always been that, like the difference between 3/4 and 6/8, 3/2 is 3 half-note beats and 6/4 is 2 dotted-half-note beats. But there are probably innumerable examples of composers treating 6/4 as 3 half-notes. I noticed several such places in The Rite of Spring when I started looking for slow 3/2 earlier in this thread. I knew by remembered sound that the division was into three beats, but it turned out Stravinsky used a 6/4 signature.
> There is also confusion about 3/4. I generally don't think of
> it as a compound meter, and many theorists (such as the one
> from musictheory.net) would agree. However, if it is played
> quickly (one beat to the bar) with the dotted half getting the
> beat (as Ken mentioned), it could be thought of as a compound
> meter.
But, of course, all the terminology is basically of interest to theory teachers, not so much composers and other music practitioners. In the end it doesn't really matter much if it's compound, simple, duple or triple. Once you figure out what a piece sounds like, it is what it is (to use a currently overused popular idiom).
I had always been taught in school that 3/4 was a triple meter - it has three beats in a measure, after all - and that 6/8 was duple because there were two major beats in a measure. When I got into a graduate program many years ago at Temple University, the principal professor, Edwin Gordon, insisted instead that duple and triple depended not on the major pulses, but on the subdivisions. Thus, 6/8 (and by extension 6/4 and 6/16 and anything else with a 6 at the top), which is most often counted 1'23 4'56, is triple because each beat is subdivided into 3s. Similarly, he taught, 3/4 (and others with 3 on top), which is most often counted 1-and-2-and-3-and, is _duple_ because the eighth-note subdivisions are twos. Unless the meter is felt in 1 beat per measure, in which case it's triple because the beats are subdivided into 3 notes.
Funny thing is, the music sounds the same no matter what I call its meter.
Karl
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Author: Ken Shaw ★2017
Date: 2013-07-01 21:18
In his Gulliver's Travels Suite http://imslp.org/wiki/Intrada-Suite_for_2_Violins_%27Gulliver%27s_Travels%27,_TWV_40:108_%28Telemann,_Georg_Philipp%29, Telemann plays astonishing twin musical jokes.
The tiny people get a Lilliputsche Chaconne, a slow movement in 3/32, with the longest notes, 32nds, getting the beat.
The giants get a Brobdingnagische Gigue, a quick movement in 24/1, with the whole note as the shortest note, played in a moving, swinging tempo, three whole notes to the beat.
It's terrific music that goes really well as a clarinet duo, preferably down a step. On your next recital, bring out a friend and play it as your final encore. Put a blowup of the score up on a music stand facing the audience. You'll leave 'em rolling in the aisles, yelling for more.
Ken Shaw
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Author: gkern
Date: 2013-07-01 22:21
Ken, I am listening to it now on YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGFHkD7nbUQ - it really would make a great clarinet duet.
Thanks for the tip!
Gary K
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Author: Ken Shaw ★2017
Date: 2013-07-02 02:25
The Manze performance on YouTube is terrific, but for me it misses the dance affects.
The 3/32 movement is a SERIOUS pavan, maybe half the Manze performance tempo, with the tiny people gliding about as if in a dream.
The 24/1 movement is light as a feather, with the monsters like soap bubbles, swinging around weightlessly.
That's what the jokes are about. The notes are appropriate, but the dances characters are upside down.
Ken Shaw
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Author: alto gether
Date: 2013-07-02 21:19
My answer will be a bit different from the others, because I started as a folkie and there are lots of old hornpipes in six-beat measures. Musical pieces are subdivided at several levels, so I read 6/4 as "like 2/4, but with bars grouped in sets of 3". 3/2 would be like a cut-time variation of that. You could write either of them (or anything in 6/8 or 9/8, for that matter) in 3/4, but you'd be obscuring part of the groove. If you google Eagle's Whistle, the first two or three videos are pretty explicit about the rhythm I'm trying to describe.
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