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Post by dronetuner on Feb 20, 2011 14:54:57 GMT
Hi all,
Just a quick question about something I'm not quite understanding about time signatures. Its about Cut-common time. I see that the music is written in what looks like 4/4 but is then cut to speed the tune up, giving it 2 beats to the bar. Couldn't this just be written in 2/4 with all of the notes cut anyway?
Thanks,
Dronetuner
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Post by greginlondon on Mar 3, 2011 9:51:04 GMT
Yes, it could be, but in older times, the timed signature gave an idea of speed. You might just have asked why the music is not written in 2/2 time (which was not uncommon), but way way when, that would have meant quite a slow tune. Relatively speaking anyway - most 3/2's I know don't seem to be played that slowly.
In settings from late C19 and early-mid C20 I can see tunes written either way, presumably for the reasons you suggest, but there really is a rhythm in a cut-common time reel which gives two main beats and then some other rhythm in between that just would not have been described so well by calling it 2/4. Then consider that if you wanted a cct reel to have clusters of four semi-quavers to a beat and some of them are dotted and others crossed, your getting visual confusion with gracenote lengths and quite cluttered music potentially.
Throw into the mix that 2/4 marches were becoming prevalent in pipe music, there's no hard and fast rule, but 4/4 seems to have become the most (ahem) common way of writing it.
Sorry if that is a bit garbled - I've freely switched between examples from English traditional and pipe music - but I hope that's at leasta partial explanation.
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