At 06:21 AM 11/6/06 -0500, dhbailey wrote: >the Light >Cavalry Overture is very evocative of horses (certainly for those of us >who don't ride horses) in it's 6/8 section which has this rhythm: 2 >16th-note pickup into a measure built of >8th-note/8th-rest/2-16th-notes/8th-note/8th-rest/2-16th-notes/ which is >repeated over and over. The 2 16th pickups and the final 2 16ths >(pickups into the next measure) are a rising melodic line while the 2 >16th-notes at the end of the first group are repeated on the same pitch.
Yes, that's the gallop rhythm, which is a clustered group of four sounding footfalls closely associated as three to the ear in the rhythm you illustrate. At a moderate gallop it sounds like 6/8. I'd guess it's the most familiar horse imitation (aside from the walk in "Grand Canyon Suite") and gets done with inverted paper cups at family dinner tables. :) The article on horse gaits (Introduction to Gait Analysis) is on line: http://cvm.msu.edu/Dressage/Upload/Clayton%20archives%20for%20WWW/USDF_Dec01.pdf The reference to rhythms and beats is to the arrangement of footfalls, and the diagrams show how it works. The gallop is not part of dressage, so it's only briefly mentioned in the article ... as a 4-beat rhythm. None of this is really helpful to the original question, though, which has to do with the layperson's perception of a horsey sound. (One of my other hats is very, very occasionally writing dressage music -- not about horse gaits, but for them. Most riders like to pull from established tunes, so http://equestrianmusic.com/ gets very few customers. It's a pain to write for canter, but walk and trot aren't hard. The nasty stuff is the piaffe and passage, which is a real test of rhythm in the horse-ride combination.) Dennis _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
