Music Notation Variety

(entry for 8/16/2024)

This blog series is mostly about music notation, and many musicians find this kind of information valuable. But it’s also important to remember that a lot of really good music is created without any notation at all. Notation is only one way of indicating what a performer is to do. There are many other ways. Some really excellent musicians have no idea how to either ‘read’ or ‘write’ music.  They may do it 'by ear' or by emulating the way some other musician did it. Or just make it up as they go along!  However, that doesn’t mean that notation isn’t valuable. It can be very useful, even if not strictly necessary.

One of the fascinating things about music notation, when you get into it in any depth at all, is that there are always at least three different ways of writing the same exact musical passage. It’s important to remember that the music is actually the sounds, not the notation. The notation is just a way of telling the performer what sounds to make, and when. The composer or arranger of the music has the duty and privilege of deciding how to show that. Sometimes when you hear some music that you like and then go to the printed version so see how it actually looks in notation form, you may be in for a big surprise. It may not look anything like you expected!

(If you haven’t looked at or understood the five previous posts to this one, covering note shapes, note values, tempos, dynamics, tuplets, duple and triple (or compound) meters, and metronome marks, now would be a good time to go review them. You can do that by clicking HERE. We’re about to take all the concepts from those five posts and mix them up and use a combination of them to do some weird things with music notation, so it’s important you understand them before proceeding.)

Here are six different ways of writing a short musical passage, where all six notation versions will result in exactly the same sounds (same pitches, rhythms, and speed) assuming they’re all using the same clef:

Example a:

Example b:

Example c:

Example d:

Example e:

Example f:

Let’s say you are a composer, writing a piece in 6/8 time, which is a triple meter, and you come to a short bit where you want the feel of the rhythm to consist of duple sub-beats rather than triple (compound) ones. You could, of course, change the time signature to a duple meter, such as 2/4 (see Example ‘b’ above), and then change back to 6/8 again when you want the rhythm to go back to triple. And if the duple passage is of any appreciable length, say nine measures or more, that’s probably what you should do. However, if the duple passage is of only a few measure's length, say three or four, it’s going to be much easier to read if you maintain the 6/8 meter and use something like Example ‘c’, ‘d’, or ‘e’, especially if this is an ensemble piece like something for string quartet or orchestra. (A little later, we’ll talk about why you should probably avoid Example ‘e,’ but for now we’ll treat them all equally.)

The opposite situation is similar. Let’s say you’re writing a piece in 4/4 time and you want a short passage to have triple sub-beats rather than the normal duple. The examples below show three ways to accomplish that: one without leaving your basic 4/4 time and two by going to a different meter.

Example g:

Example h:

Example i:

If the change in rhythmic feel is, say, less than five measures, I’d suggest using ‘g.’ If it’s nine measures or more, I’d prefer ‘h’ or ‘i’. If it’s between five and nine, it’s really just a matter or taste. (The reason for saying ‘nine or more’ is that eight measures is the most common length of a musical ‘phrase,’ unless the piece is ‘Blues,’ when it’s twelve.) There are other ways of doing the same thing, but those three examples would be by far the most usual.

You’ll have noticed that the metronome marks that are involved will change somewhat with alterations in the notation. Sometimes the number portion changes. Sometimes the note type changes but the number stays the same. You may have some questions about that. The explanation involves quite a bit of math, so if math is ‘not your thing’ you may want to skip over the next paragraph and resume with the next one after that. (It’s an interesting detour of sorts but won’t affect your understanding of the main point of the post, so you can afford to skip it if you wish.)

You may question the metronome marks of Examples ‘c’ and ‘d’, for instance. You may think at first glance that the numerals should be different in the two situations. Before I explain why they’re not, let me cover one reason you might have been confused. It’s true that if you want the length of an eighth note to stay the same when you switch from 2/4 to 6/8, you do have to reduce the metronome mark to two-thirds of what it was. For example, if the mark in 2/4 was 120, then to keep each eighth note the same you would have to mark the 6/8 as 80. But we’re not keeping the eighth note the same duration. We’re keeping the beat the same duration. But the beat in 6/8 is a dotted quarter, where the beat in 2/4 is an undotted quarter. So the note-type in the MM is changed, but the quantity (the number of beats per minute) stays the same. That’s why the sound stays the same, between the two examples. 

You’ll notice that the metronome marks in examples ‘a’ and ‘b’ kept the same numerals. But the note type changed from half note to quarter note, the same as the change in beat. If you kept the same note type in both examples, then the number for the 2/2 example would be double the number for the 2/4 example, if you wanted both to sound the same. Like this:

Please don’t think that these speeds are the only possibilities. I just chose these speeds so that all the relationships we talked about would involve whole numbers, not fractions or decimals. (Fractional or decimal MM marks are perfectly legal, but they do give the performer pause!)

So, having shown various ways to create the notation for a given sequence of musical sounds, we can talk about why you’d choose one or another of those methods.

As hinted at before, it makes a difference as to whether the performer is a soloist or a member of an ensemble. In an amateur orchestra, for example, if even one member of the group has trouble reading a passage, it’s going to affect the whole group. Which brings us to an unfortunate problem in the United States. (I don’t know if the problem exists in the UK and other English-speaking countries or not.) And that is the problem of reading ‘dotted rhythms,’ which in turn is a problem with the way music students are taught in this country.

Now above a certain level, such as the members of a major symphonic orchestra would share, professional musicians will not have a problem with any of the types of notating a passage that we have examined. But at lower levels of skill and experience, there is one type of notation in particular that drives the performer ‘slightly nutso,’ as one person expressed to me. And that is the idea of how to perform ‘dotted rhythms.’

Because many music students, particularly those on instruments other than keyboard or strings, are taught to play ‘by rote,’ rather than by understanding what the notation actually means, a dotted eighth or sixteenth note seems to the student to imply a much shorter note to follow. Here are two examples of 'dotted rhythm; a dotted eighth followed by a sixteenth, or a dotted sixteenth followed by a thirty-second:

Theses are very familiar patterns in wind band and full orchestra music. As a result of this familiarity, when the performer sees a dotted eighth note, he or she assumes automatically that the next note will be a sixteenth, because that is what they are used to. So a passage that looks like Example ‘e’ above totally stumps them. I know this by sad experience. I once composed a piece for full orchestra that used the notation of that example rather a lot. Even by the third rehearsal the brass and percussion players were struggling with it. So I re-notated it for them, using Example ‘c’ instead, and gave them new parts to play from. That solved the problem. After the next rehearsal, a trombone player came up to me and said, “You finally got it right. Using duplets is the correct way to notate a passage like that.” Well, excuse me! Yes, it is one correct way indeed. But it’s no more correct than any other of the ways we’ve talked about, all of which are equally correct. I guess the moral of the story is that when a composer or arranger wants amateur musicians to play correctly, they should use the easiest-to-read or at least the most familiar method to get the sound they want! (I find Example 'e' very easy to read, but that's just me, I guess.)

In later discussions with other performers, I’ve discovered that this attitude is pretty much universal among musicians of a certain or lower level. Point taken! I’ll never use Example ‘e’ again. It just causes too much confusion. One might wish that wind and percussion teachers taught their students to understand what various forms of notation mean, rather than just what the usual patterns sound like, but oh well. Explanations of meaning to students who have learned to play by rote are pointless. I know that now, the hard way. An average High School Band in the US, for example, would have no clue how to play Example ‘e.’ They see the dots, and they think ‘dotted rhythm.’  Sigh.

Which brings us to the final point of this post. Which is the matter of how to play ‘Swing’ rhythms.

When the word Swing or Swung is used above an eighth-note passage, it means to play it with triplets, like this:

Why are these triplets? There are only two notes under each bracket! Think of it like this:

When the Swing passage is complete, the indication to return to normal rhythm will be Straight or sometimes, ord., which means ‘ordinary.’

In certain styles of music, the entire piece is intended to be ‘swung,’ even though the indication isn’t there at all. It’s just taken for granted that if you’re playing this kind of music, you’ll ‘swing’ it. In fact, many musicians don’t even know what the equivalent notation would look like. They just know that the music needs to be Swung. Some examples would be: Dixieland, Big Band Jazz, Kansas City Jazz, most Square Dance Music, almost anything written for Banjo, etc.   Bluegrass music can be either swung or straight, which in that context is called ‘Driven.’  Note: Contrary to popular opinion, Ragtime is NOT swung. It is syncopated, which is an entirely different concept, which will be covered in a later post.

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