Eccentric Flower:200910/The Anxiety Tango

Columbina:

It strikes me, upon looking at the score above, that another stupid quirk of the standard system of notation is the way it handles sharps, flats, and naturals. The score above seems to work on the idea that if they mark a note as sharp, that note continues to be sharp, even if not so noted, until they "change it back to normal" with a natural. Which is fine - as a programmer, this "toggle state" ruleset is fine with me - but under that ruleset, as a programmer, I am offended by the G# which begins the second bar, since that G is already in "sharp mode," as it were, and so the symbol is redundant.

And to add to this confusion, I have seen music where, in the absence of a key signature, every single sharp or flat would be noted and a natural would never be written - e.g. the note is assumed to be natural at all times unless explicitly specified as sharp or flat. That's a different ruleset, which is also fine, but you have to guess which one's in use for a given piece of music!

And I suppose I could have changed the rules entirely by specifying a key signature - had I any idea whatsoever what key it's in.

Anyway the actual notes are
g C E F# G F# G G# A F D b
G# A F D b
F# G E C g
g C E F# G F# G G# A F D b
G# A F D b
D C

where lower case indicates notes below middle C. I think I'll just write all my music in ABC notation from now on.

-- 18:33, 25 October 2009 (GMT)

Columbina:

In fact!

X:1
T:The Anxiety Tango
M:8/8
L:1/16
R:tango
Q:60
K:C
|: G,2CE ^FG^FG ^GA=FD B,2 z2 | ^GAFD B,2 z2 ^F=GEC G,2 z2 |
G,2CE ^FG^FG ^GA=FD B,2 z2 | ^GAFD B,2D2 C2 z2 z4 :|

Stick that in your favorite ABC-notation interpreter and play it.

-- 19:15, 25 October 2009 (GMT)

Peebles:

8/8 is a fine time signature, although it's a little unusual. It would probably have been more traditional to put this in 2/4 and cut the length of your measures in half. I was about to explain why, but it's probably not that interesting.

But the gist is that time signatures are important for a bunch of reasons. One is that it's not just the position of sounds in time that you care about when you perform music, and the time signature tells the musician something about the underlying rhythmic structure of the piece. Another is that the time signature tells the group how much time one beat of the conductor's baton corresponds to; it makes it a lot easier to play in an ensemble.

Same with key signature. In Western music, pitches aren't just pitches; each pitch has a relationship to the key in which the piece is written. (For what it's worth, as written, the melody above is in C, and you got the key signature right.) When you're really playing in tune, the "same" note in different keys will be played at slightly different frequencies. B in C major should be played somewhat sharper than B in, say, E major, for instance.

Accidentals, by the way, get reset at each bar line. (This is part of why I think your melody should be in 2/4.)

-- 20:14, 25 October 2009 (GMT)

Columbina:

2/4. hmm. Yes, I see what you mean. Although that would look strange to me, you've made me aware that there's a part of my brain (a part I didn't realize existed) that sees the bars as, well, sort of like line breaks in a poem. For some reason the half-size measures seem wrong; to me that's not where the phrasing is. In particular the whole run in the first measure seems inseparable to me; the second measure, on the other hand, could easily be two.

I'm dying now to find sheet music for this to see how the composer wrote it and how that compares. Mind you, I could completely be in the wrong key from the original ... I didn't actually haul out the cassette to listen to it.

-- 20:47, 25 October 2009 (GMT)

Bunny42:

This reminds me somewhat of Sean's aversion to control panels. They seem to be fine for people who need to do certain things, customize things within the scope of the panel, etc. He fumes, though, when he wants to do something that the control panel is not designed to accomplish. He makes his change at the command line level, and the damn thing breaks. He wants it to let him do what HE wants to do, not what IT wants to let him do.

Same thing here. You seem to have found a way around it with ASCII. Good for you. It's like Greek to me. I'd just as soon see it in *normal* notation, which I'm trained to understand.

A bar line doesn't indicate a pause. It's not like a comma or something. You should still be able to phrase the way you hear the music, whether it's in 2/4 or 8/8. I know there are subtle differences between, say 3/4 and 6/8, which I have never fully understood. But neither one is ruled by bar lines.

-- 23:48, 25 October 2009 (GMT)

Columbina:

But then what is the point of the bar lines?

See, that's one of my basic gripes. If the notes tell me their relative durations, and an overall tempo is a matter of performance/whim or a metronome reading, then why the hell do I need a time signature or the measures?

I suspect strongly that this is one of those things which has evolved to meet the needs of an orchestra. Since I have never in my life been involved with any kind of band or orchestra - since, in fact, being involved with any sort of group musical activity goes against the grain of my basic personality - this is alien to me. If I have any musical performance background at all it is as a solo pianist: I make my own pace, and while I'm playing everyone else needs to shut up and listen.

"Not a team player" is going to be on my tombstone.

-- 00:01, 26 October 2009 (GMT)

Peebles:

Music in the renaissance didn't use bar lines, and often didn't use time signatures either, if it was in "common" time (4/4). So strictly speaking, you don't need them. But they do help, even in solo playing. They help you understand immediately which beats are supposed to get stress and which ones don't. A good musician will get it pretty easily, but with bar lines you don't need to figure it out for yourself. The use of bar lines and time signatures isn't really artificial, though -- it acknowledges a fact about the rhythmic structure of the music.

The analogy to lyric poetry is interesting. It might help to think of the time signature as a description of the meter, and a measure as a foot -- a measure of 2/4 is like a trochee, a measure of 3/4 is like a dactyl, etc. The time signature is like a little heads-up that the piece you're about to play is some kind of dactylic meter.

-- 01:03, 26 October 2009 (GMT)

Bunny42:

Mine, too. But the bar lines only serve to make order out of the tempo. There are a given number of beats to a measure, and each measure stands alone. It's not meant to influence the phrasing, only the comprehension of the tempo, for those of us who need to be able to sight read and understand where it's going. It's especially important in something such as 5/4 (as in Take Five) which is impossible to count unless you know originally that there are five quarter note-sized counts in a measure, based upon quarter notes (the 4 in the time signature.) I recall the first time I tried to puzzle it out without having seen the sheet. Eeek. But once I knew to count in quarter notes and include five in a measure, it all made sense. Often the downbeat comes as the first note of a measure, with introductory stuff in the previous measure. Okay, now that I think about it, it's more of that same organizational stuff, downbeats after the bar line. ONE, two, three, ONE, two, three makes a waltz. Now we can give it an 85, because you can dance to it. Or, ONE, two, three, four, five, ONE, two, three, four, five, and then you have Dave Brubeck.

Sean asked me recently who made Bach king of harmony, and why are his rules the ones everybody followed for so long. I was at a loss to explain it. I know Bach would spin in his grave if I realized a figured base using an augmented second, but I don't know who put him in charge. All I know is that there are rules, and bar lines are one of them.

-- 01:06, 26 October 2009 (GMT)

Bunny42:

And FYI, there is an edit tab on this page.

-- 01:07, 26 October 2009 (GMT)

Bunny42:

I've been taking folic acid, lately, on the advice of my mother's neurologist, who told me that it reduces homocysteine levels in the bloodstream, the presence of which greatly influences such things as short-term memory. I don't know whether to credit the folic acid, but as I was clearing up the kitchen, I was pondering that whole Bach thing, and it occurred to me out of the blue, that he just might have been the first one to codify the structure of music based upon the laws of harmonics. That, combined with his wanting to teach music to others (Well Tempered Clavier?) may be why he became the acknowledged master of triadic harmony, even though others may well have also known about it and used it. I dunno. It seems to make sense, and I damned sure couldn't come up with anything when Sean first asked me. Hmmm.

-- 02:22, 26 October 2009 (GMT)

Peebles:

So here's an example of why time signatures are important. (I thought of this because the Schubert Unfinished Symphony just came up on my iTunes playlist.)

Imagine that you have a phrase that's got twelve beats in it. If you were a computer and you didn't care about phrasing, and the notes were just pitches in time, you wouldn't care how the twelve beats were organized. But as a human musician, you know that some beats get more stress than others. How are your twelve beats organized?

3/4: ONE-and-two-and-three-and ONE-and-two-and-three-and

6/8: ONE-two-three-Four-five-six ONE-two-three-Four-five-six

The feel of the piece would be completely different. The 3/4 interpretation is more martial and deliberate; the 6/8 interpretation lilts. And it's not just an arbitrary distinction. The composer has made choices about when the harmonic structure changes, about the orchestration, about the mood and timbre of the piece, all of which are interconnected with the choice of meter.

-- 17:48, 26 October 2009 (GMT)

Columbina:

Ok, I'll buy that. In which case 8/8 is probably not best for the Anxiety Tango, with its heavy hits at the beginning of each of four eighths:

ONE two-and-three-and-four-and-FIVE-and-six-and-7 (rest)
ONE-and-two-and-three (rest)
FIVE-and-six-and-7 (rest)

I still might have been tempted, even after cutting the measures in half, to write the unorthodox time signature 4/8 rather than 2/4.

(And in the ABC notation block the "default" note is a sixteenth, simply because it was easier to say "double the few eighth notes" than "halve all the sixteenth notes." That's what the ones with 2 after them mean - twice as long as the default given as L:1/16.)

Sorry for everyone who is reading this and is not especially interested in the discussion. I go on at length here because I feel like I am trying to understand an alien language, and I appreciate your humoring me.

-- 18:04, 26 October 2009 (GMT)

Bunny42:

Peebles, thanks for the explanation of 3/4 vs 6/8. I knew 6/8 was smoother, but didn't really see why.

-- 18:17, 26 October 2009 (GMT)

Danima:

I don't know what time signatures tangoes usually take, but given the hurried feeling and heavy downbeats I get from your count-off above, I'd wonder whether this one should be put in cut time. 2/4 has always seemed a little bit ploddy to me -- a lot of Souza is in 2/4. ONE-Two ONE-Two.

You'd hate the idea of cut time and everything it stands for. In fact, I fear your wrath against cut time so badly that I will leave it to someone else to explain (and, as a bonus, explain why I'm probably wrong).

-- 22:11, 26 October 2009 (GMT)

Peebles:

So, I think Dan is totally right.

On. Uh. Both counts.

-- 23:27, 26 October 2009 (GMT)

Columbina:

Hmm, Wikipedia just says that cut time is 2/2. I don't see how that is any more evil than anything else about time signatures!

The Anxiety Tango is a very odd tango. It's definitely got the tango rhythm underneath, but it you were to listen to it you wouldn't necessarily call it a tango. I did make a MIDI file, but there seems to be a discrepancy between the way the ABC interpreter reads tempo and the way other MIDI players do, so I'm not sure it came out right. Anyway here it is.

-- 01:54, 27 October 2009 (GMT)

Spc476:

Bunny suggested I should link to Star Guitar (http://kottke.org/09/10/star-guitar). The second video includes an alternative musical notation used to create the music video.

-- 00:11, 28 October 2009 (GMT)

Bunny42:

Columbina, you wanted alternative annotation? Sean's post will be right up your alley. (As far as I'm concerned, oranges, beer cans, dominoes, those are as good a way as any to annotate anything techno.)

-- 00:14, 28 October 2009 (GMT)

Peebles:

The reason, Columbine, that cut time should piss you off is that it really is arbitrary. Any piece written in 2/2 could easily be written in 2/4, except that all the half notes would become quarter notes, all the quarter notes would be eighth notes, etc. The only reason people use cut time, as far as I can tell, is because of convention, and the convention is that marches are in cut time.

The piece up above, despite the name, sounds like a march to me; tangos are typically less whimsical and use more interesting rhythmic tricks.

-- 03:34, 28 October 2009 (GMT)

Columbina:

Oh, well, it doesn't piss me off to learn something else about time signatures is arbitrary; on the contrary, I consider that additional evidence for the prosecution.

I cannot see marching to the Anxiety Tango; then again, I cannot see doing the tango to it either. (It's worth noting that when Gomez and Morticia DID tango, they didn't do it to this piece. This piece was almost always heard in the show as a harpsichord solo by Lurch.)

-- 13:27, 28 October 2009 (GMT)