OK, I’ll bite. Last week Rob Grigjanis mentioned Antonín Dvořák and he indeed is one of Czech composers whose work is dear to my heart. I particularly like his Slavonic Dances, Opus 46. I was looking for a video that I like and unfortunately the only one that I do cannot be embedded, so you would have to head over to Czech TV Website. I hope it works for out-of state too. Other recordings that I have found on YouTube I did not like – right at the first dance “Furiant” seemed either too fast or too bland.
That I make such judgement is slightly ironic and possibly unfair to the musicians. I do not dance at all and I hate it, particularly polka. Surely everyone knows polka, although not everyone knows that it is originally Czech dance. My experience with it is however rather unpleasant – I was always a bad dancer, but it was seen as somewhat required to take dance lessons in highschool, so I did, being awkward and clumsy all the time despite my best effort. And polka was for me the last straw in this string of tortures – at the end of the lesson my disgruntled dance partner has lifted her skirt and has shown me her feet that were kicked and stomped bloody. That put a final crimp in my (non-existent as it was) desire to dance that dance ever again, since I try not to hurt people on principle.
It is not that I do not have a sense of rhythm, but everyone tells me polka has two and a half step (hence the name půlka(half)-polka), however I simply hear three steps and that daft little half-skip just tangles both my brain and my feet. Not that other dances are much better with their inane jumping and turning and all that nonsense. I do not see the point of dancing, really.
But the music can be beautiful and can move me to tap my feet or nod my head a little. That much I admit.
I know very little about the dancing side of things, but polkas are in duple meter. That’s what you should hear: simply two beats per bar.
Apparently, there’s some uncertainty about the origin of the name. The “half” could refer to a short step — that is, “short” in terms of spatial distance, not duration. Or it could be that it’s half of the usual 4/4 time (which is also duple meter of course). Or both. Or who knows what. Anyway, the regular beats definitely come in pairs in a polka, not 3 or 2.5 or what have you. But again, how you should move your feet around is another question and above my pay grade.
Note that the mvt. 1 furiant from your link is in triple meter, like a fast waltz not a polka. (BTW, it was blocked for me, in the US.)
It’s hard to pick a favorite from Dvořák. I’m really only familiar with some of the more famous works, but I know there’s a lot more where that came from. Symphony 9 has to be near the top of the list. Also his Symphonic Variations, the cello concertos in A major and B minor, the other (op 72) Slavonic Dances, the Dumky piano trio, Silent Woods (cello and piano) … lots of good stuff.
@consciousnes razor
I am not able to hear a difference in that. To me, these technical terms are hollow words with no meaning. People tried to explain, I tried to understand, but I do not get it and odds are I never will.
So I am left with enjoying music without understanding it even a tiny bit.
Well, meter is a rather complicated subject, so that’s understandable. But the basic idea here is that “duple” means two beats in each measure (or a multiple of two, although it’s generally “compound meter” when it’s also a multiple of three … and let’s just not get into other types of meters).
It’s a common source of confusion, but you should understand that telling you that the meter is duple (or specifically 2/4, 4/4, 2/2, 4/8, etc.) does not say that the melody (or any other parts) must come in equal-length two-note chunks, or something of that sort. It’s not like that at all: metrical structure is at a different level, abstracted away from such details, although it is based on the patterns which are formed by them. A melody (or whatever) can involve all sorts of rhythmic activity and build up very complicated structures that may come into conflict with perception of meter. Half of the fun for us composers is fucking around with listeners in ways like that. And the theorist in me can have fun with it too.
Like the wiki article says, “Unlike rhythm, metric onsets are not necessarily sounded, but are nevertheless expected by the listener.” Hopefully, that’s not too cryptic. Among other things, it’s a way of organizing your perceptions in time, hearing things in groups of beats, although that rarely coincides with every single rhythmic event. It’s like you’ve got a bunch of mental containers of some size and the notes you hear can go into them; they’re not the container itself.
So, the concept here is that the music fits into a certain kind of temporal/perceptual framework, the meter, which is expressed as a regular (i.e., equal lengths of time) emphasis or accentuation, which is not to say it’s the only type of accent because there are others. It’s similar to (but not the same as) meter in poetry. The actual sounds you hear will normally “agree” with that to a large extent, at least in a sort of indirect way, but they can also subvert it.
In the simplest cases, everything lines up nicely and is easy to hear, doesn’t change over long periods of time, etc. That represents when you stomp/clap/count/etc., in time with the music, most often in groups of two or three or four (small numbers). However, in many cases — Dvořák’s music in general is no exception, although he never did anything too wild — a large variety of factors can come into play such that it’s not so readily apparent what the meter is. Even reading the notation can be misleading (since the same music can be written many different ways), and some music is simply designed to be ambiguous or just plain ametrical.
Even when it is written to be obvious, meter perception can be challenging -- from personal experience, the transition from learning in 2/4 or 4/4 timing to learning a piece written in 3/4 causes a lot of frustration, tears, confusion, and cries of “I can’t do this!” and “What idiot thought this was a good idea!” It was quite interesting to observe, because understanding the meter feels so natural to me (yeah, I know, it’s taught as hell), and I had a hard time explaining how to ‘get’ it. Counting the beats in a bar is one thing, but to play with expression, you have to feel it, and that, I guess, just takes practice. But hoo boy, I hope Youngest ends up being a musical genius and just gets it immediately.
Even to me, that sounds cryptic, but it resonates (ha!ha!) a lot. Like it’s a way of thinking about the music rather than a specific number count. But even that can change between pieces, as some 3/4 makes sense as ONE-two-three ONE-two-three, and sometimes you have to count it as a circle (I find good conductors do a good job of transmitting this difference, and it helps a lot).
Anyway. Not a musical theorist, just a random practitioner, so take my opinion for what it is.
Well, do not take this personally, but to me those explanations are just incomprehensible gobbledygook, since I lack the ability to even start to comprehend them. It could all be another Sokal hoax.
I believe you are doing your best, but I am sorry to say that your efforts are completely wasted on me. Similarities with poetry do not help at all, because poetry is to me complete nonsense. Whilst I am able to at least enjoy music, poetry is closed book to me in 99% of the time and exceptions are rare and far between.
So I still do not have even the faintiest idea what a bar or a meter are supposed to be, unless the talk is about serving alcohol and SI units.
Don’t worry. It’s not about your ability. It requires a bunch of very abstract concepts, which are difficult to communicate in a few written sentences. The normal approach to teaching this stuff involves lots of listening and performing, not just reading. You may not need a “sense of rhythm” exactly, but some clarity about what we’re aiming to accomplish with all of this.
Suppose that these are five measures (AKA bars), separated by the vertical lines:
| some notes | more notes | no notes | one note | more notes |
You should read it from left to right. It represents an ordered sequence of events happening over some length of time, which I’ve divided into “measures.” How much time is it in total? I didn’t say. If I gave you an explicit and definite tempo, it would be in beats per minute (BPM). And then you still wouldn’t know much, but you could use your SI units for everything if you think that would be more convenient (spoiler: it wouldn’t).
Just as we did with the longer passage, each individual measure can be further divided into equal parts, so that they have some number of beats. Let’s suppose those measures each have three beats in them; then, there are fifteen beats in the whole five measure passage. Let’s also say a beat is given by “quarter notes,” so the meter will be written as “3/4,” with the top number telling you the number of beats and the bottom saying that a quarter note is a beat. If we arbitrarily picked something other than quarters (e.g., 3/2, meaning there are three half notes), it would still have the feature that it’s written in a triple meter. So, a beat is a unit duration (not given in seconds for practical reasons), and there are typically multiple such units in a measure. The meter says how many units that is.
Please notice that, at this point, the notation I gave above determines almost nothing about what you actually hear in a performance of whatever-this-thing-is. There’s nothing about the exact duration of it, which notes they are, or the distribution of those notes within that period of time. It’s a very abstract thing, defined by a bunch of conventions and specialized terminology. You can still ask things like this: “what if I picked something else to be the ‘measure’ and the ‘meter’ and so on? How exactly did you come up with those five measures specifically, with those specific beats in each one? What if it’s all a hoax and the emperor has no clothes?” Etc., etc.
If I make some intelligent/practical choices about how to divide that passage up into equal chunks of time, which would help people to describe/comprehend that specific musical material in a simplified (but accurate) form, then we’ll have a nice handy way to represent what’s happening with that bit of music. It’s kind of like you have a tough-looking physics problem, and you are picking a convenient coordinate system to make your calculations much easier. What I’ve given here is a recipe for cooking up a useful one. You could of course pick something else, but it may be a really bad choice, given the musical material in question.
If you’re asking “what will I actually hear?” or “which sounds happen when?”, I should have to specify which notes they are and when to place them in each measure. Everything above is just laying down a few milestones, as it were, so you can orient yourself once I get into the actual details of which sounds happen when. And then if I do give the details, whatever the music’s like, I’m expressing it in terms that are relative to this abstract framework, which divides that period of time into equal chunks. If it’s done right, it should reflect our sensory experiences of the actual sounds we hear and the ways in which our brains process that kind of information (i.e., counting, recognizing patterns and repetitions, breaking things up into smaller chunks and combining them into larger ones, and so forth).
Do you have any truly rational basis for those statements or are your opinions based mostly on subjective memories, emotions and experiences?
@loplpo, what? I thought it is pretty apparent that I am stating my personal opinion baseds on “personal experiences, subjective memories and emotions”.
When it comes to art, there is no “truly rational basis”, unless the talk is about analyzing it from the technical standpoint like consciousness razor is doing with regard to meters and bars etc.