Here's a bit of it now (the introduction to the 5th song):
For those of you who can't read music, this is what it sounds like: (clicky) (If the link doesn't work, right click, copy link location, and paste the URL in a different window/tab. Let me know if that still doesn't work.)
For the life of me, I can't remember what I was going to say about that. But I made the image and sound file, so there must have been something. There's one more image involved:
For those of you who can't read music, if you want to hear what that sounds like, click the previous link. Because it sounds exactly the same. So it would seem that what I really wanted to talk about wasn't rhythm, but notation of rhythm. We've got two ways of writing something, both of which sound the same.
Well, not really. They're actually very different. The biggest difference is that in the first one, each measure (arguably) has 1 beat. (Maybe the 4/4 measure has two beats; it's not clear from the score.) And in the second one, each measure has 4 beats. (Maybe. That's also not clear from the score, but to be fair, if I were actually using the second version I would go to the trouble to insert extra dotted barlines to clarify where the beat divisions are, and there would be four beats in each of those measures.)
Traditionally, having multiple beats in one measure tells you something about those beats. For instance, beat 1 is the strongest and beat 3 is the second strongest. So by notating this the way I did (the first example), I took away that information. So you might think, in keeping with the deliberate vagueness I talked about last time, that I notated the rhythm the way I did in order to deliberately remove information. But that's not so. That never even occurred to me until just now.
When most people write something with rhythms like this, they'll use the second example's style of writing it. Or they might use a hybrid: the shorter note values of the second, with one beat per measure. So why use the larger note values? All else being equal, there is no musical difference between a half note in a dotted-half-note-equals-48 tempo and a quarter note in a dotted-quarter-note-equals-48 tempo.
I think what it comes down to is this: If I see varying beat lengths with an eighth-note pulse (for any non-musicians still with me, that's what the second example is; "pulse" here means something like "the basic rhythmic unit"), it feels mathematical. (Sure, the composer said something in the performance notes about "no need for metric precision," but these are precise, complex rhythms, and I'm gonna get it right.) On the other hand, if I see a page filled with almost nothing but quarter notes and half notes, it just looks easy. That might sound demeaning to performers, to imply that they wouldn't realize that the two different versions are actually the same, but that's not what I mean. I mean that an eighth-note pulse and a quarter-note pulse are actually different, the way two words with identical dictionary definitions have different implications. Notating it in a way that looks superficially "easier" is a sort of subconscious way of saying, "play this as if it were easy."
I never actually thought about this before. I knew that I had made a choice to notate "The Wind in the Willows" (all of the songs have the same rhythmic "language") a little strangely, because it "felt right" that way, and that's about it. I think that's neat how talking about stuff I thought I already knew is fun and educational. Hopefully more of my posts here work that way. [Cue the "The More You Know" jingle.]
Okay, I promise next time I'll actually write about music and not just about notating it. ...Probably.
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