still ot
i was a founder member of british new music group 'icebreaker' - we
often perform scores with times signatures like 4/6 or 5/12 (four
triplet quarter notes to the bar or 5 eigth-note triplets). earlier,
boulez in le marteau would write time sigs like 'two and two thirds
over 4' or even 'two-thirds over 4', which i think is more confusing
than the equivalent 8/12 or 2/12. you find this newer style of time
sigs a lot in music by michael gordon and yannis kyriakides (and
thomas ades too).
name? we never felt the need to give these a particular name - it was
just a 'five-twelve bar'.
things get messy when you have bars that mix say 'twelves' and
'sixteens'. a piece of mine had a bar length of 'four eigths plus
five twelfths plus five sixteenths' - easy enough to play despite the
rather tongue-in-cheek time sig of 59/48.
i can't immediately see how you'd play 3599/11748 but i'd be
surprised if the math that got you there was so hard.
recently i've taken to defining such time signatures by what they're
missing. eg 9/8 - 1/20 rather than 43/40. either way is really an
aide-memoir and can't be 'read' as such, but in the example i'm
thinking of 9/8 -1/20 is less stressful.
i'm truly amazed that lilypond handles this stuff
d
On 27 Nov 2007, at 16:33, Trevor Bača wrote:
On Nov 27, 2007 7:31 AM, Ed Ardzinski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
I did some playing last night and was surprised that you can have
any denominator for a time signature, so my initial idea is
wrong...not that I really understand what 5/9 time would really
mean, but obviously LP interprets it.
OT but entertaining:
:-)
5/9 means a measure of 5 "ninth" notes, just as 5/8 means a measure
of 5 "eighth" notes.
What is a ninth note?
A ninth note is a note that lasts exactly 1/9 of a whole note (just
as an eighth note is a note that lasts exactly 1/8 of a whole note).
So in the figure ...
\times 8/9 { c'8 c'8 c'8 c'8 c'8 c'8 c'8 c'8 c'8 }
... each of the notes carry the (effective) duration of 1/9 of a
whole note ... which makes each of the nine notes above "ninth" notes.
Now, an absolutely *remarkable* aspect of Lily's duration-handling
is that the following constructions are all valid:
\times 8/9 { c'8 } % a single "ninth" note
\times 8/9 { c'8 c'8 } % a pair of ninth notes
\times 8/9 { c'8 c'8 c'8 } % three of them
\times 8/9 { c'8 c'8 c'8 c'8 } % four
\times 8/9 { c'8 c'8 c'8 c'8 c'8 } % five ninth notes
(Try it; this is one of the things that modern(ist) compers
discover about Lily that works "out of the box" that absolutely
amazes us; try doing this with Finale and Sibelius ... and then
trying doing this with these things crossing *over* barlines ...)
So the meter 5/9 then stands for a measure of exactly five ninth
notes:
\new Staff {
\time 5/9
\times 8/9 { c'8 [ c'8 c'8 c'8 c'8 ] }
|
\time 5/8
c'8 [ c'8 c'8 c'8 c'8 ]
}
(Notice that the bar check passes just fine showing that Lily's
duration math is all caught up at the end of the first measure.)
Opinions differ as to whether the tuplet should draw over such
figures; there seems, in general, to be a preference against
drawing the tuplet:
\new Staff {
\time 5/9
\once \override TupletNumber #'transparent = ##t
\times 8/9 { c'8 [ c'8 c'8 c'8 c'8 ] }
|
\time 5/8
c'8 [ c'8 c'8 c'8 c'8 ]
}
So there's that
There's a separate question as to the use or desirability or
whatever of these types of figure. As with most rhythmic
innovations, folks seem to react violently at first and then get
used to them. Maybe it helps to see such figures as exact tempo
changes lasting for a single measure; or, alternately, as "broken"
tuplets where only the first 5 out of 9 nontuplets appear, for
example.
(What frustrates me is that there's appearantly no *name* for the
class of time signatures of the form m/n where n is *not* an
integer power of 2. In my notes I frequently call these things
"nonbinary" meters ... which seems somehow unfortunate. If anybody
has a good name for these meters, I would love to steal.)
--
Trevor Bača
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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