The Measure

 

The measure. All the stuff in between those vertical lines on the staff. If you read music, you've seen the measure in everything you've read, but probably don't give it much thought. Why do we have it? Is it necessary? If we took the measure lines (bar lines) away, would the music sound the same? Do they have some kind of meaning?

Our music (in the Western world) is metric, meaning measured. The easiest way to think of "measured" is  that the sounds you hear are grouped in some perceivable and predictable way.  The sounds of traffic outside are random, thus, not measured. Even most sounds in nature are not measured (one notable exception being birdsong). But music, being a human creation, must, by its very nature, be graspable and understandable by human brains. Apparently, we are not good at making sense of a long string of sounds without some kind of grouping of those sounds.

(Perhaps I should mention that very early music, e.g. from the Middle Ages, was not metric. It took the form of chants which were based on the words. It was more like free-form "talking," with tones, than it is like our modern music. When it first began to be written down, there was no notation to indicate the grouping or the rhythm. The chants were learned by listening to others, and the words helped indicate the "rhythm," such as it was.)

In fact, this grouping is called "chunking." In the early days of the telephone, it was found that people had trouble remembering a string of numbers, say, seven numbers. But if you divide the numbers into a group of three and a group of four, they are much easier to remember. This is how our modern phone numbers came to be as they are. 

Let's say you had a piece of music that was just a steady beat or pulse, with no variation (all quarter notes, say). Even after a short amount of time, your brain would not make any sense of the music, even if, for arguement's sake, the pitches themselves were pleasant. It would just be rambling and the brain would lose interest. If, however, the steady pulse were to be grouped in fours, it would make sense; it could even be a march, for example, something you could walk to. How would this grouping happen, if the notes were steady with no variation? There would have to be a slight emphasis, or accent, on the first note of each group of four. Our brains could then identify the beginning of each new group.

Most music, of course, is more complex and is not just a steady drone of quarter notes. All the other variations of sounds -- sounds that occur in time -- form other patterns, other groupings, which is what we call rhythm. All these other rhythmic patterns do not remove the grouping, they exist within it. You could even say they form groups within groups. 

Whether you are composing, and plan to write down your composition, or improvising it on the spot, your brain, if you have some degree of experience and sensitivity to music, will naturally group things without even thinking about it consciously. If you are new to improvising and notice that your improv is somewhat rambling-sounding, there are several reasons, but primarily that there are either no groupings or inconsistent groupings.

Remember, the ideas and inspiration for the music came first, and notation came later. Musical ideas and themes are conceived with their tones and rhythm being inextricably married. It is completely unimaginable that a composer came up with the tones of the melody and somehow added the rhythm later! After the "birth" of the theme(s), the composer would develop them, spinning them into compositions of varying complexity and length. The grouping of the tones of the themes would be built into the fiber of the composition, therefore, not added as an afterthought. 

Regarding the person playing the music, the grouping must be subtle. The forward momentum and "flow" of the music is paramount; you wouldn't want to hear it chopped up by exaggerating the first tone(s) of the groups. In fact, the grouping is so "built in" by the composer, there is nothing you need to do. The hallmark of a beginner would be the "choppy" sound that would result from over-accenting the first beats of the measure (group).

When it comes to notating the composition, it could be said that the groupings are obvious and no futher notation is necessary. However, after the Middle Ages, as mentioned above, especially when music began to break away from words, adding the measure lines, to explicitly show the groupings, was a great aid to those wanting to read the music. It also meant that, should the composer decide to change the groupings in one section of the composition, it could be shown easily, without confusion.

And so the measure was born. Theoretically, you could remove the bar lines, and the music would be played, and would sound, exactly the same. The compoer Erik Satie did just that in a few of his compositions, but you can still hear it group itself into groups of four. 

But there is an inherent problem, potentially, with the bar lines. With beginning students, I've noticed it seems to make their eyes stop at the line. The music is meant to proceed, unhampered by the bar lines, but for some it creates a subtle barrier to the next measure. The bar line itself has no time value and the listener would not be aware of where there were bar lines in the music. It is incumbent upon the teacher to notice when this is happening with the student and train the student to look ahead to the next measure, and to have a solid rhythmic training.

In a future post I will discuss the deeper meaning and purpose of the measure, how it embodies "going away and coming home" and propels the music forward.