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Re: Mozart, Bach and time signatures

Author: brycon
Date: 2019-08-31 00:59

Quote:

It is pretty commonplace in masterclasses for the instructors to suggest feeling 4/4 in 2 to the bar as an example.

I frequently make this suggestion, primarily because in a measure of 4/4, beats 1 and 3 are strong. If a student feels all the beats equally and plays them this way, the music isn't going to sound like Mozart (it probably isn't going to sound like much of anything). But I've also asked for a student to feel the music in 2/2 when he or she is dragging, playing mini-phrases on each note, and for a variety of other reasons.

Back to 1 and 3 being strong... Theoretically speaking, the invention of metered music and the bar line created a hierarchy, with beat one being the strongest (though our sense of strong and weak can be negated in interesting and expressive ways by a slur). Moreover, this hierarchy extends to the level of the bars themselves, with measure one being strong, measure two weak, and so forth--what theorists call hypermeter. You could therefore feel a 4/4 Mozart piece in 2/2, 1/1, or even one beat every two bars. And all these hierarchies are present regardless of what we think: it's just the way metered music--tonal music, in particular--unfolds.

A sort of metrical dissonance, then, arises when Mozart or any composer breaks this pattern; it famously happens, for example, in the first movement of Mozart's g minor symphony--that is, there are either two weak bars or two strong bars in a row. Theorists from at least as far back as Schoenberg have written about unusual hypermetric groupings in Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and so on (the first movement of Brahms's second sonata has some absolutely beautiful use of metric dissonance--or what one of my teachers called "expressive rhythm").

So although the comment "feel the music in 2" extends into the realm of performance practice (Tony Pay, for instance, has posted here about it), it's more of a comment on how we as performers and listeners experience tonal music itself.

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