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about Music: Element 2 — Duration (Part 2)
Part 2 “about Music”: the Art of Listening: Element 2: Duration
In my last post we ended with : In Western music, the most commonly used system for representing duration is musical notation. Musical notation uses symbols to indicate the length of each sound or silence in a piece of music.
At the beginning of a piece of music there are usually two numbers that look like a fraction. For example a number 4 over another number 4. What the number at the top is telling the person reading the music is that this piece is divided into measures of four beats. So a 3 over a 4 would have measures of three beats. Any number could be at the top, but 3 and 4 are the most common. The Beethoven we heard and conducted in the previous post had a number 2.
Why would a composer divide up the music like this? It is simply a method to make the music easier to read and understand. Perhaps you could compare this to words on a page. If the words were jammed together without spaces in between, you could still read them, but it would be more difficult. So the use of measures or bars with lines separating the measures, simply helps to focus the eye and the brain. It gives a visual…
