Day 31: April 17 - Fascinating Rhythms
Music filled with hemiolas: odd rhythms where 3=2 and 2=3! (I have a degree in music, not math!)
Leonard Bernstein - America
This classic tune from Bernstein’s West Side Story perfectly demonstrates the hemiola. Each bar changes between divisions of six: ‘I want to be in A-’ (3 + 3) ‘mer-i-ca’ (2 + 2 + 2). Really try to feel the groove and all the changes. From the original motion picture recording.
Johannes Brahms - Klavierstucke, Op. 76: V. Capriccio
German Romantic composer Johannes Brahms (featured yesterday as well!) quite literally lived for hemiolas (maybe hyperbole). Much of his music’s character, mercurial, powerful, and ever-shifting, comes from the way he managed rhythm. America put the hemiola front and center. Brahms puts them on top of each other and then laces larger unequal groupings throughout the piece. Listen to the difference between the right hand melody and the left-hand bass at the opening: there are 3 notes in the right hand for every 2 notes in the left hand. In addition, Brahms displaces the accents in the voices, so that they seem to be misaligned. This rhythmic tension pervades the piece, creating a thick, complex, unsettling texture which climaxes at the in 5 note ascending patterns within the six-note meter. Played here by Jozef De Beenhouwer.
Bill Withers - Ain’t No Sunshine
Bill Wither recently left us, leaving behind a magnificent legacy. His biggest hit, the mellow, moody Ain’t No Sunshine, features a hemiola when Withers repeatedly sings ‘I know.” The ‘I know”s take three sixteenths (there are sixteen sixteenth notes in a bar), but there are 4 sixteenths in each beat (listen to the hi-hat). This type of hemiola was in the end of the Brahms, but it was 5 notes for every 6, and there was more going on at that moment, so it was obscured. But listen to how the groupings and the back beat are misaligned. Such a tune.
The Beatles - Happiness Is A Warm Gun
This classic Beatles features a sort of sectional hemiola: first, when the guitar solo comes in after ‘national trust,’ the beat changes from two-eighth notes (4/4) to three eighth-notes per beat (12/8), creating that lilting lullaby feeling. It then jumps faster. Stay with me here: the old beat becomes the new bar, so instead of 1 bar with 4 beats of 3 notes, we get 4 bars of 3 beats worth one note (3/4).
| 1 te ta 2 te ta 3 te ta 4 te ta |
| 1 2 3 | 2 2 3 | 3 2 3 | 4 2 3 |
It then goes back to the first meter, 4/4. So, throughout the song, there is a constant eighth-note pulse and the Boys from Liverpool just change how many of those they count for each beat, from 2 to 3 to 1 back to 2, form 4/4 - 12/8 - 3/4 - 4/4.
Pycard - Gloria
This piece comes from the Old Hall Manuscript, a medieval collection of music which, thankfully, survived not just time, but also religious censorship (after Henry VIII established the Church of England, the English tried to get rid of all Catholic worship). This work, written by an unknown composer only referred to as ‘Pycard’ features some classic medieval metrical mayhem: the music starts in a manic 12/8, but the actual rhythms at the opening features almost constant rhythmic hijinks, from Brahmsian syncopations to the changes from 6 to 3 from West Side Story, to really fine melodic flourishes. The time signature then changes, like in Happiness Is A Warm Gun into a slower 4/4. After a cadence, the music picks up again, bringing back the syncopation from the beginning that obscures the meter. I really rate this piece, which just seems so ahead of it’s time and shows that music doesn’t necessarily ‘progress,’ but instead that we are just in a long dialogue with other musicians who are creative and innovative and responding to their time and place. Performed here by the Folger Consort.
Leonard Bernstein - America
You’re welcome.