Nice, though the 7 is a bit ham-fisted with the clapping, I’ve heard more subtle odd time signatures from brubeck. Still very nice when the piano plays.
‘Odd’ time signatures are used not nearly enough in western music. As someone who has played a lot of greek/bulgarian folk music I know the west needlessly limits itself to variants of 2,3, and 4.
Right on!
Some of my favorite New Age artists have some music in strange key signatures. Michael Gettel has a track in 7/8 time, and Yanni has several songs as well: Nostalgia is in 10/8, and a few others in 5/x and 7/x.
Or a french walz in 5. Which is actually easier than the normal 3 version because you have 4 extra steps for each 360 degree revolution.
And the greek 7/8 are very nice (and not hard ) to dance as well.
I love that piece!
Note: With just a little care when listening, one can identify a little of this and a little of that being used in his score for the ‘Peanuts’ TV cartoon.
Addendum: YIKES! @edgar already got there. Great minds…
“The Nice” (of which Keith Emerson was a member) covering Brubeck’s Rondo:
BTW: Brubeck liked their 4/4 signature interpretation here.
Eh… following that logic, every piece is just in 1/4 or 1/8 with some interesting phrasal structures. What makes a melody 6/8 instead of a fast 3/4? The tempo? The phrase lengths? Maybe there’s no such thing as meter at all, right?
Just because odd-numbered meters divide unevenly doesn’t mean that they’re “not really” in 5 or 7. 4+3 is just how they divide instead of 2+2 or 3+3.
I’m not sure why you’d apply a logic used for a single piece of music to “every piece”? I certainly never stated or implied that. This particular piece, however, is obviously broken into the following phrase pattern: 1234123, repeat.
Also, your 2nd sentence seems to imply (maybe I’m reading too much into it) that you assume melody dictates “meter”. I wonder why you think that?
Finally, when I said “this piece is not really…odd”, the last term “odd” I used was meant in the poetic sense, not the numerical.
Hope this helps clear up my intention.
BTW, as to your statement that there may be “no such thing as meter at all” - you are right. It’s a cognitive process applied to a piece of music after-the-fact, an attempt to understand the structure. It’s a numeric fantasy. But it helps.
I’ve wondered that myself, but figured it had to do with how convenient it is to write it out and/or read it, in one signature vs. the other. Similarly that it’s more elegant (I guess?) to write eighth notes (or dotted quarter notes, etc.) in 12/8 instead of writing a quad of triplets in 4/4.
My music collection sports Time Out and Time Further Out but the other two were unknown to me, so thanks for that. I guess I’ll have to find a way to check them out to see if they are worth it or if they are more a case of diminishing returns from milking a theme.
Having taken music theory in university… Yes: I’m familiar with the concepts of simple and compound time.
I was merely asking rhetorical questions of Slant’s approach. 7/4 is essentially uneven compound time. Just because it’s uneven doesn’t make it alternating meters.
Combining time signatures like this (or Pink Floyd in Money) doesn’t really lead to brutality, but mixing actual rhythms would. Playing 7 beats to a measure against 4 to a measure, now that’s messing with time. But then each dancer could choose to dance to one rhythm or the other, and it might make for a pretty cool piece.
“Take 5” was one of the albums I grew up on – it was among my grandfather’s favorites, and my parents really liked it, and I fell in love with it young.
At one point during my second attempt at getting a college degree in the late 90s, I was hanging out in downtown Boston and saw that Dave Brubeck and his sons were doing a concert at Symphony Hall, doing jazz pieces with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, based on pieces by JS Bach, CPE Bach, JCF Bach, and those all – the program was called something like “Brubeck and Sons Cover Bach And Sons”.
Anyway, I had some time to kill and was wandering by and saw that they had just opened up a student rush ticket…
The point is that, for ten bucks, I sat in a balcony overlooking the stage in a position that would usually be considered a terrible seat which is why it was part of student rush, in which I was looking down on Dave Brubeck’s keyboard over his shoulder, probably thirty feet from his hands. One of the greatest musical experiences of my life.
Time Further Out. One of the all time greats.
The good bit is at the end, but the whole song is fun.
Who choreographed this? Who are the dancers?
My students get a good foundation in decoding and encoding rhythm because I think
literacy in any language is a really important thought organizer in that language, but when I’m on my own making a lead sheet, 9 times out of ten I’m just writing words and slicing them up with barlines.
The way that conventional notation uses numbers gives the false impression that each unit being counted or labeled is equal to every other unit with the same label, and that’s just not the case.
Sometimes I think that the point of Rondo a la Turk is that in terms of math, every measure is equal to the others, but in terms of music, something entirely different is going on. He’s thumbing his nose at math.
Meter provides a context of heavy and light pulses. Choosing 6/8 vs 3/4 is about putting em-PHA-sis on the right syl-LA-ble. Notating something as 12/8 vs triplets in 4/4, is about conveying to the reader how each beat is typically subdivided within itself during that piece.
Did anyone’s mention Devo’s song Jocko Homo with what I think is 7/4 time… or is it alternating 3/4 and 4/4 time. I don’t know music theory. Anyway the main verse of the song is like 123-1234-123-1234 https://youtu.be/hRguZr0xCOc
