Metre (music)

Western music inherited the concept of metre from poetry,[1][2] where it denotes the number of lines in a verse, the number of syllables in each line, and the arrangement of those syllables as long or short, accented or unaccented.

[1][2] The first coherent system of rhythmic notation in modern Western music was based on rhythmic modes derived from the basic types of metrical unit in the quantitative metre of classical ancient Greek and Latin poetry.

The English word "measure", originally an exact or just amount of time, came to denote either a poetic rhythm, a bar of music, or else an entire melodic verse or dance[4] involving sequences of notes, words, or movements that may last four, eight or sixteen bars.

[8] This "perception" and "abstraction" of rhythmic bar is the foundation of human instinctive musical participation, as when we divide a series of identical clock-ticks into "tick–tock–tick–tock".

[1] "Rhythms of recurrence" arise from the interaction of two levels of motion, the faster providing the pulse and the slower organizing the beats into repetitive groups.

[9] In his book The Rhythms of Tonal Music, Joel Lester notes that, "[o]nce a metric hierarchy has been established, we, as listeners, will maintain that organization as long as minimal evidence is present".

[11] A definition of musical metre requires the possibility of identifying a repeating pattern of accented pulses – a "pulse-group" – which corresponds to the foot in poetry.

[16][page needed] Metric structure includes metre, tempo, and all rhythmic aspects that produce temporal regularity or structure, against which the foreground details or durational patterns of any piece of music are projected.

The concept of metre in music derives in large part from the poetic metre of song and includes not only the basic rhythm of the foot, pulse-group or figure used but also the rhythmic or formal arrangement of such figures into musical phrases (lines, couplets) and of such phrases into melodies, passages or sections (stanzas, verses) to give what Holst (1963) calls "the time pattern of any song".

[19] Traditional and popular songs may draw heavily upon a limited range of metres, leading to interchangeability of melodies.

Early hymnals commonly did not include musical notation but simply texts that could be sung to any tune known by the singers that had a matching metre.

For example, The Blind Boys of Alabama rendered the hymn "Amazing Grace" to the setting of The Animals' version of the folk song "The House of the Rising Sun".

This is possible because the texts share a popular basic four-line (quatrain) verse-form called ballad metre or, in hymnals, common metre, the four lines having a syllable-count of 8–6–8–6 (Hymns Ancient and Modern Revised), the rhyme-scheme usually following suit: ABAB.

Metre is often essential to any style of dance music, such as the waltz or tango, that has instantly recognizable patterns of beats built upon a characteristic tempo and bar.

Such figures may then be "amalgamated" to create a series of movements that may synchronise to an entire musical section or piece.

Any other division is considered additively, as a bar of five beats may be broken into duple+triple (12123) or triple+duple (12312) depending on accent.

In 20th-century concert music, it became more common to switch metre—the end of Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring (shown below) is an example.

[25] "Hypermeter is metre, with all its inherent characteristics, at the level where bars act as beats".

[citation needed] The term was coined, together with "hypermeasures", by Edward T. Cone (1968), who regarded it as applying to a relatively small scale, conceiving of a still larger kind of gestural "rhythm" imparting a sense of "an extended upbeat followed by its downbeat"[27] London (2012) contends that in terms of multiple and simultaneous levels of metrical "entrainment" (evenly spaced temporal events "that we internalize and come to expect", p. 9), there is no in-principle distinction between metre and hypermetre; instead, they are the same phenomenon occurring at different levels.

An example is the second moment, titled "Scherzo polimetrico", of Edmund Rubbra's Second String Quartet (1951), in which a constant triplet texture holds together overlapping bars of 98, 128, and 218, and barlines rarely coincide in all four instruments.

[citation needed] Research into the perception of polymetre shows that listeners often either extract a composite pattern that is fitted to a metric framework, or focus on one rhythmic stream while treating others as "noise".

[33] "Touch And Go", a hit single by The Cars, has polymetric verses, with the drums and bass playing in 54, while the guitar, synthesizer, and vocals are in 44 (the choruses are entirely in 44).

[citation needed] Polymetres are a defining characteristic of the music of Meshuggah, whose compositions often feature unconventionally timed rhythm figures cycling over a 44 base.