The stress pattern can be 2 + 2 + 3, 3 + 2 + 2, or occasionally 2 + 3 + 2, although a survey of certain forms of mostly American popular music suggests that 2+2+3 is the most common among these three in these styles.
Each of these is built from three types of component durations: the one-beat anudruta, the two-beat druta, and the variable laghu, which may have three (tisra), four (caturaśra), five (khaṇḍa), seven (miśra), or nine (saṅkīrṇa) beats, and accounts for the five temporal species of each tāla.
Miśra Cāpu is one of the most characteristic rhythms in the music of southern India, accounting for well over half of the padam compositions by the 17th-century composer Kshetrayya, and occurs in some of the best-known kīrtanam works by Tyagaraja (1767–1847).
The tālas Ādā-cautāl and Dhamār are also fourteen beats long, but the former is divided asymmetrically, and the latter is only partially symmetrical: It has several different patterns, the most common of which falls into two seven-beat halves, but with different internal divisions: 5 + 2 and 3 + 4, where the khālī (empty) beat marks the division of the cycle into two halves.
For example, in Epirus, a district bordering Albania, there is a style of singing in imitation of the sound of Byzantine bells, that employs microtonal intervals and is described by the singers themselves as "Albanian" or "pastoral Vlach".
[12] The last movement of Joseph Haydn's Piano Sonata XVI:12, written as early as the 1750s, has been claimed to use exclusively seven-measure units in its background, if not in its foreground.
Performers typically choose a tempo such that the notated 38 measure sounds like a single beat, projecting a perception of 218 septuple meter.
24, from 36 Fugues for Piano by Anton Reicha (notated in regularly alternating and 34 bars),[14] and the Impromptu, Op.
2 by Johannes Brahms is in septuple time, notated as regular alternations of 34 and , though various accenting factors often obscure the perceived metre.
[17] Symphonic and choral works containing occasional septuple bars include the conjuration of soothsayers in L'enfance du Christ, Op.
[19] In operetta, parts of "Here's a man of jollity" in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Yeomen of the Guard (1888) is in 74, notated as alternating bars of 44 and 34.
[22] Much more characteristically, septuple bars in Stravinsky's scores are found in a context of constantly changing meters, as for example in his ballet The Rite of Spring (1911–13), where the object appears to be the combination of two- and three-note subdivisions in irregular groupings.
[25] So many other composers followed Stravinsky's example in the use of irregular meters that the occasional occurrence of septuple-time bars becomes unremarkable from the 1920s onward.
[28] Some of Maurice Ravel's music incorporated septuple meter: for example, the brief "Danse générale" from Part I of Daphnis et Chloé is in 74 (subdivided as 3 + 4), the finale of the Piano Trio freely alternates between 54 and 74, and the main theme of the finale of his Sonata for Violin and Cello is in "quasi 74" (notated as a recurring 24 + 24 + 34).
[34] An example from after the Second World War is found in Part I of Leonard Bernstein's The Age of Anxiety: Symphony No.
7 by the Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev, which is in 78,[38] and Sensemayá, for orchestra, by the Mexican Silvestre Revueltas (predominantly in 78, with occasional interruptions in 716 time and a brief 7-bar interlude at rehearsal 23 of 98 (34 + 38))[39] are particularly well-known instances.
[40] Other examples from the middle of the century include the 74 third movement, "Très Animé", of the Fantasia for saxophone, 3 horns, and string orchestra (1948), by Heitor Villa-Lobos,[41] "In the First Pentatonic Minor Mode (En el 1er modo pentáfono menor)", no.
5 from 12 American Preludes for piano by Alberto Ginastera, in 78,[42] and "Old Joe Has Gone Fishing" by Benjamin Britten (from the 1945 opera Peter Grimes), which is written in 74,[43] with the beats grouped as both 3 + 2 + 2 and 2 + 2 + 2 + 1 in a round.