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The Time-Value of Notes

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The Time-Value of Notes The Time-Value of Notes Music theory can sound complicated, but you don’t have to be Einstein to understand the important stuff. Notes have three main characteristics: pitch (or frequency), volume, and duration. While the first two are still needed to make great music, even in the absence of both, we can sometimes easily recognize a song simply by hearing the duration of the notes. Read the following out loud three times and see if you can guess the song: Dah, di, dahdah, dah, dah. Dah, di, dahdah, dah, dah. Dah, di, dahdah, dah, dahdah. Dah, di, dahdah, dah, dah. Did you think of birthday cake and candles? Rhythm gives us a powerful way to communicate in music, so it’s important to understand the time meaning of notes when singing. Fortunately, the symbols used in music to record rhythm and timing are easy to understand. To begin, let’s start with some very simple music theory and talk about measures and beats. If you’ve ever waltzed before, you know that the music seems to have a natural heartbeat pattern that seems to repeat every three beats… “Waltz, two, three, step, two, three, step, two, three”. Those natural divisions are called “measures”, and are defined by the “time signature” shown at the start of a piece of music. It consists of two numbers written over each other, like this: The bottom number tells us how we measure the beats (like miles versus kilometers) and the top tells us how many of these units there will be in the measure. In this case, for example, the “4” tells us that the unit of measure is a 1/4th note (I’ll explain quarter notes in a minute), and that there will be three of them per measure – a classic waltz. To make it easier to talk about this, we refer to this as a “Three – Four” time signature. Another common meter is “Four-Four” time, popular with John Phillip Sousa for marches. There are many other combinations (i.e. 9/8 time in several songs by the group Kansas), but we will focus on “Four-Four” time for now. Now, a moment ago, I promised to explain what I meant about “quarter notes”. These are not IOU’s for a portion of a dollar, but instead a quarter of a measure – at least in “Four-Four” time. Remember that our “Four-Four” time measure is made up of four (top number) of these quarter notes (bottom number). This makes counting simple: If I sing for the whole measure, I could call this a “whole” note. If I only want to sing for half of the measure, I could call this a “half” note. One quarter of the measure? Right: the quarter note. To keep track of each grouping, each measure is separated by a single thin vertical lines (or pair sometimes), like this: We also often number the measures from the start of the piece to make it easier to all be looking at the same part of the music at the same time (the same reason we have mile markers on I-94). The notes tell us how long to sing; the numbering just makes it easier to find where we are in the song. Let’s look at the primary “lengths” of notes we use in choral music. Marking Meaning Length (in beats) Double whole note 8 Whole Note 4 Half Note 2 Quarter Note 1 Eighth Note ½ beat Triplets (or more generally, Three notes sung in two beats tuplets) What if we want to subdivide the notes even further? We add “flags” to the stem of the note to cut the note in half. Add one flag to a quarter note and you now have an eighth note; two are a sixteenth note, etc. Stems can point up or down, depending on what is easier to see. Additionally, to make the music easier to read, the flags can be connected (or “beamed”) between two notes, so the two red eighth notes above are all exactly the same length. Our notes, then, from longest (whole note) to shortest (1/32 note, which we rarely if ever sing) would look like: While this allows us to create every possible duration of a note, composers added two shortcuts to make the music easier to read: “dotted” notes. Dotted notes are one and one half time as long as the “normal” note. For example, a dotted half note would last three beats (1.5 times two); a dotted quarter note would be the same thing as a quarter note plus an eighth note. There is also a double dot, which is 1.75 times (a double dotted quarter note is the same as a quarter plus eighth plus sixteenth note), but these are much rarer than dotted notes). Dotted notes look like: Now that we understand notes, rests are easy, since they work exactly the same way. Here are the 16th rest, eighth rest, quarter rest, half rest, and whole rest, with the corresponding note of the same length. Like notes: each flag means half as long. Quarter Rest Half Rest (smaller, Sixteenth Rest so above the bar) Whole Rest (bigger, so Eighth Rest hangs below the bar) Rests and notes, then, can all be measured using this method of dividing and combining the beats (and parts of beats) to make interesting patterns. This raises the question: how long, then, is a beat? We define the “speed” of the beat using a tempo signature. In the sample above, note the circled reference that tells us that we should have 60 quarter notes per minute. This means about one beat per second, or 15 measures in a minute. Composers can define the music using a metronome (beats per minute or BPM) reference like this, or similar to volume, we have a scale of names that tell us the beat “speed” as well. (There is much disagreement about specific BPM speeds, so the numbers below are just to provide perspective, not start arguments!) Here’s one possible list: Meaning MIDI Speed Name (beats per minute) Prestissimo Extremely fast 240 Vivacissimo Very fast and lively 220 Allegrissimo Very fast, “joyfully” 210 Presto Quick 190 Vivo Brisk 160 Vivace Lively and fast 150 Allegro Fast and bright 120 Allegretto Moderately fast (but less so than Allegro) 100 Moderato Moderately 80 Andantino Alternatively faster or slower than Andante 70 Andante At a walking pace 60 Adagietto Rather slow 58 Larghetto Slow 56 Lento Very slow (Literally: “slow”) 54 Adagio Slow and stately (Literally: “at ease”) 52 Largo Broadly, very slow (Literally: “broad”) 50 Lentissimo Slower than Lento 47 Adagissimo Slower than Adagio, but “stately” 43 Larghissimo Very slow 40 Beats per minute taken from MIDI software MIDI Studio 2003, (c) IDD. You’re probably asking yourself who made up this list, since it’s rather imprecise: walking speed? (Our choir director reports her walking speed is 84!!!) The answer is that since the metronome (the musical instrument we use to accurately tick out beats) wasn’t invented until the 19th century, the composer used words try to express both a feeling and a possible speed. Wikipedia has the intriguing story at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempo. The solution is to think about these speeds in terms of feeling, rather than counting. Sometimes, this is stated explicitly by the composer. For example, the "agitato" in the Allegro agitato of the last movement of George Gershwin's piano concerto in F has both a tempo indication (undoubtedly faster than a usual Allegro) and a mood indication ("agitated"). Remember that music is as much about emotion as science. A great performance of Handel’s Messiah doesn’t just mean that the choir sang the right notes at the right time: it means that they were able to musically able to convey majesty, joy, and humility. The Hallelujah Chorus has been used in so many movies (even by those who may not know the Lord God Omnipotent), but you feel majesty when they play the song. Choral music expresses emotions, so many of the original Italian directions tried to convey these directions by tempo words – lively, broadly, stately – and modern composers will often do the same. While the words are helpful to the director to determine how fast the notes will be sung, they are also helpful to us as performers to understand the “feel” of the music. Tempo, then, will tell us how many notes to sing per minute. This is fine if you want to play music to march by – steady, even, unchanging, and unmoved – but makes it hard to express emotion. Think about the Jaws boat scene… da-dunt. (long pause) da-dunt. (pause) da-dunt, dunt-dunt, dunt- dunt, dunt-dunt, dunt-dunt (moving faster and faster). You feel the shark coming at you. Like volume, tempo can also dynamically change to reflect the mood of the music. In volume, we have decrescendo and crescendo; in tempo, we have ritardando (rit.) to slow the pace of the music and capture attention and accelerando (accel.) to speed up and build tension or energy. Like rush hour traffic, though, if everyone does not slow at the same speed, musical “fender benders” tend to be the result. The answer is the same in traffic and in music: keep your eyes up and forward. While we should spend as little time looking at our music as possible, any time there is a change in tempo indicated, make a special effort to keep your eyes on the director and adjust your speed as directed.
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