6 INTRODUCTIONSeeger’s “Chinaman, Laundryman” (LG 13.1), a song about racial and economic
oppression, may strike you as anxious or jittery.
Most music presents these rhythmic patterns against the backdrop of a
steady pulse, which divides musical time into equal units or beats. (The term
beat can mean different things in different contexts, by the way, as can many of
the terms discussed here.) Relatively long units are perceived as a slow tempo,
or rate of speed, short units as a fast tempo. Music intended for dancing tends to
express the beat emphatically, often with the use of drums or other percussion
instruments. The zydeco band playing “Ful il sa” (LG 21.3) features a prominent
drum set pounding out the fast, energetic beat. In Gil Evans’s arrangement of
Summertime (LG 16.3), the even notes of the string bass create a steady, relaxed
underpinning for Miles Davis’s expressive trumpet playing.
But not all music features a steady beat. Singers, especially when unaccom-
panied, may stretch out some notes for emphasis and hurry through others,
constantly speeding up and slowing down, with the result that no clear sense of
tempo emerges. Instead, the rhythm may more closely resemble the irregular
patterns of speech. Such rhythmic elasticity, or rubato, can be heard to varying
degrees in “The Liberty Song” (LG 2.1), “The Gypsy Laddie” (LG 9.2), and “Only a
Pawn in Their Game” (LG 17.6).
An important feature of music with a steady pulse is its tendency to group beats
into larger temporal units called measures or, more informally, bars. The fi rst
beat of each measure tends to carry the strongest accent, or emphasis; that initial
beat is called the downbeat, by analogy with the downward motion an orchestra
conductor makes with the baton to indicate it. The beat that precedes it (i.e., the
last beat of the preceding measure), by a similar analogy, is called the upbeat.
Typically, all the measures in a piece of music have the same number of beats.
The number of beats per bar determines the music’s meter. Two beats per bar—
the familiar “one, two, one, two” of a military march such as John Philip Sousa’s
Stars and Stripes Forever (LG 7.1)—signals a duple meter. Three beats per bar, or
triple meter, lends a waltz-like feeling—“one, two, three, one, two, three”—to
songs such as “After the Ball” (LG 7.3). Four beats per bar is the most common
meter for all types of popular music of the past century; it can be heard in songs
as different as Count Basie’s fast-tempo Lester Leaps In (LG 15.4) and Curtis May-
fi eld’s medium-tempo “Superfl y” (LG 19.3). Some musicians prefer to use the
term “quadruple meter” for music with four beats per bar, but we won’t make
such a fi ne distinction in these pages. The difference between two slow beats per
bar and four fast beats can be hard to distinguish, so we’ll use the term “duple
meter” for both.
Just as beats are grouped together to form a larger unit (the bar), bars can be
grouped to form an even larger unit, the phrase. And just as bars can consist
of varying numbers of beats, phrases can encompass varying numbers of bars.
That repeating seven-note rhythmic pattern in “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”
fi lls two bars of duple meter (four beats per bar) and can be thought of as a two-
bar phrase. Notice that each musical phrase corresponds to a line of the lyrics.
Here are the fi rst two phrases:measure: 12
fi rst phrase: Twin-kle, twin-kle, lit-tle star
beats: 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4172028_00b_001-017_INTRO_r3_ko.indd 6 23/01/13 9:47 AM