The rythm

It is the musical aspect that organised all time relations. It also organised accentuation.

Because music is organised in a temporal frame, there have to be necessarily some kind of
rhythm.

Rhythm itself put together several musical concepts, so we can organise rhythm in three
separate levels.

1.1 Beat
It is the level of rhythm that controls the speed.

Most of the music we use to listen takes speed control from a kind of inner beats at regular
intervals.

Beat speed can be measured by the metronome and be expressed in a given number of beats
per minute.

Each beat is used to be represented by a note value called quarter in America or crotchet in
the UK.

All music with measured rhythm has a beat, but in some styles this is more visible than in
others. Beat use to be more noticeable in dance music. Commercial modern music use to be
very danceable and it has a strong sense of beat.

Traditional and ancient music for dancing shows very clearly their rhythm as well. It is s
frequent to remark this by mean of percussion instruments.

Free time music

Some kind of music nevertheless, doesnt have rhythm. Then we call it free time music.

In these cases the musical expression relies mainly in melody, and then melody is not force by
any kind of beat. In other words duration of the notes is only controlled by melodic
expressivity.

Very known musical repertoires that use this system are Gregorian chant, tonada montaesa
and asturiana, flamenco and Indian music.

In these last styles is usual backing up a free melody with instruments that remarks clearly
well-defined beats.
1.2 The Time signature
Beats are always grouped. They never sound isolated.

Time signatures are clusters of beats grouped into some weak beats joined to a stronger one.
These groups can be perceived as a rhythmical unity.

Beats could be grouped in an infinity variety of ways in theory, but in fact, real western music
uses very few possibilities.

Basically it works with 2,3 and 4 beats aggrupation of divisions and subdivisions of time
signatures.

Kinds of time signatures

We have these different kinds of time signatures:

By its divisions:
Duple: it is divided in two beats. The first one is strong and the second one weak.
Triple: It is divided in three beats. The first one strong the other ones are weak.
Quadruple. It has four times. The first and the third are strong (the first stronger) the
two others weak.
By its subdivisions
Simple: Each beat is divided into two
Compound: Each time is divided into three.

You can see this in the next scheme:

simple compound

Duple

triple

Quadruple

The time signature we use to hear the most is 4/4 because is the usual in all music related with
rock and pop.

Mixed time signatures

Different musical traditions use different accentuation systems. Some of them can be
represented by the mixed time signatures. These time signatures combined duple and triple
accentuations.
The most typical example is the 5/4 time signature that alternates a with a 2/4 one.

This kind of time signature is used in many traditional music styles as in Castilian or Basque
ones.

In classical music they were used for first time by nationalist Russian composers, as Stravinsky
and Tchaikovsky that introduced in their music traditional rhythms from their country.

Rhythmic modes
They are set patterns of durations or accentuations, which generally dont fit in the idea of
time signature.

Rhythmic modes where very used in Medieval European music. Currently they are use in
eastern music and flamenco.

Flamenco modes are called palos and they are made of 12 beats sets. Each palo has the
stress in different beats.

For example these are four typical flamenco palos.

Weak beats are depicted as points and strong beats are depicted as X.

1.3 The notes value

This is the last level of rhythmic organisation. Inside each beat in a time signature can be notes
of different time value. This value results from divide or multiplies the value of a quarter by 2
(the note value that represents a beat).

Therefor we have the following note values (in the English American denomination)