As I was idly looking at our drink shelf
the other day I wondered could I use the
contents to illustrate bar lines in
music and when I say music I mean the
music that I perform as a double bass
play with the orchestra of the age of
enlightenment
so Eurocentric classical music here goes
bar lines from the bar when music was
first written down it looked very
different to today the notes flowed
freely across the page then likely the
old mark to show the end of a phrase the
way that we use punctuation in sentences
like commas and full stops or in my case
to indicate when it's time to go up to
the next glass then Along Came bar lines
which held the notes between vertical
lines dividing them into regular groups
of beats in each bar you might have four
maybe three sometimes two. See what
happens to the top number in our time
signature each time
some composers wrote eight beats in a
bar but then to stop it feeling too
unwieldy would describe them as four
bigger beats. See what I did there? So as
well as having these bigger beats you
could also have smaller beats if I reach
for my beer bottles we can make 6/8 you
get the idea but why? Why did this happen
and why does it matter? Well one reason
is navigation imagine you're playing
keyboard for example the bar lines
really helps see how the music for one
hand lines up with the music or the
other or if you want to talk about the
music having bar lines helps each bar is
numbered so you could say to your friend
see that bit in bar 54 I wonder what
made the composer think of that it's the
same in rehearsals having those numbered bars means we can be sure we're talking
about the same point in the music and
then we're all gonna start in the same
place of course this doesn't matter for
short pieces of eight bars or so but
imagine if you've got a piece of a
hundred bars or a thousand bars those
numbers really help us but it's not just
about navigation it's about the feel of
the piece as well so if I count one two
three four one two three four you might
imagine yourself marching down the road
if I count one two three one two three
you might find yourself beginning to
want to sway your dance if I count one
two one two I don't know about you but
I'm beginning to imagine some sort of PE
and not only is it the feel does the
swing change as we change the numbers
but also what's beginning to creep in as
a sense of regular pulse as we get back
to one each time we're now thinking and
feeling in much shorter units than we
were in our very early written music a
byproduct of what I call this swing or
this regular pulse is that now some
beats become more important than others
the downbeat the one in our counting was
considered highly important in Baroque
times for giving proper energy to the
dances that was so important to them
on the stage, in the courts in the
village halls. Lully the one who died of
the conducting related foot injury he
insisted that all his string players
played the downbeat with a down bow to
give it the proper emphasis it needed so
for my bottles I'm going to need
something a bit more special for the
downbeat one of my jobs as a double
bassist in the ensemble is to support
this down beat emphasis and the liveliness
of the dance
but to give you a better sense of the dance I need help from my colleagues. This 6/8 could be a jig this
3/4 could be a minuet
this 4/4 could be a bourree - hang on a
minute, all bourees start with an upbeat I
need an extra bottle before my first bar
line
it wasn't just Lully who wanted this emphasis on the downbeat others went further
Leopold Mozart father of Amadeus' said not only are downbeats good but so are the half bars the third
beats in are 4/4. Hmm...I need another
bottle of bubbly
Schulz an eighteenth-century theorist and musician
went even further than that saying yes
half bars are also strong but first
beats have got to be even stronger hmm
Bubbly is not going to cut it
so now we have divided our music into small neat
parcels of regular beats which we can
count and which give us a sense of swing
and we've got a sense of hierarchy
across the beats but if we were to
emphasise every bar in the same way it
would get very monotonous it can't be
what it's all about. It reminds me of
George Orwell "all downbeats are
important but some are more important
than others". So what next for our bar lines?
well composers quite often ignored them
a fugue is a good example of this where
different voices enter at different
times and different parts of the bar we
can't all emphasise the downbeat because
our phrases are musically out of synch
some composers love to trick the
audience about where the bar lines are.
Haydn was a past master of this by
putting emphasis on the wrong beats he
made everyone think the bar line was in
a different place other composers wanted
to get away from the straitjackets of
the regular bar lines.
Stravinsky springs to mind, I randomly
opened the score of 'Soldier's Tale' and
found in one patch of 12 bars he changed
a time signature eight times
more recent composers have done away
with the bar line altogether and gone
back to just writing equally important
notes now I don't know if they've done
this with big pieces but I've seen it
done for quartets where everybody can
play off the same page so you don't have
the same issue of navigation other
composers have gone even further and
done away with the normal musical
notation altogether and resorted to
graphic scores. I'm going to leave you
now with an image from an opera for one
percussionist while I tidy up my drinks bar
Cheers
 
