Here is one of several posts in which I will provide an overview of the information at the beginning of each song post. Eventually, there will be posts about each of these concepts in depth.
Not all beats are created equal. While beats last an equal amount of time at a given speed – "tempo" as we say, they do not receive equal emphasis or importance. And that is what meter is all about. We naturally group beats in our minds and bodies.
There is a traditional, notation-based way of talking about meter and then there's a new-fangled way of talking about meter based on the research of Edwin Gordon. There is some overlap, and, of course, it's not like the notation-based way of talking about meter has no origins in sound whatsoever. Gordon's argument is that notation has created some misconceptions about how meter is actually perceived, which I agree with. There are also difficulties and complications with Gordon's theories. That's why it's always music "theory" and not music "science." It's hard to come up with things that are truly universal when it comes to cultural activities.
Here's what I am using in my chart at the beginning of a song post:
duple for beats grouped in twos
triple for beats grouped in threes
mixed for beats that switch between groups of two and groups of three
How those are notated may differ from person to person, and that's where we start to get into Gordonian concepts, which I often talk about within the post. Macrobeat is the beginning of a beat group, that is, a group of two or three microbeats, the individual beats in a group. If you ask a group of people to clap along to the beat of a song, most likely is that they'll clap to the microbeat, but not everybody. You could clarify and ask people to clap the beats that are the longest, but even Gordon himself says, [Rhythm p37] "All persons will not identify the same beats as longest. Whichever beats you feel to be longest are called macrobeats." It is subjective. All that said, most people can sense the inherent difference between a march and waltz, even if they cannot name the difference in terms of beat.
Gordon posits that macrobeats are paired or unpaired; microbeats determine whether the meter is duple or triple or a combination thereof (more on that momentarily). Subdivisions — pulses that are smaller than microbeats — can be in twos, threes, or fours, but they don't affect the meter. This is where Gordonian concepts differ from notational concepts. For Gordon there is no compound meter, and particularly no triple compound meter (usually notated as 9|8). Gordon also does away with "mixed" and uses a set of increasingly convoluted concepts to replace it — this is where I start to have difficulties with his theories. But there is enough there that I find compelling and useful that I keep coming back and grappling with it.1
With my students, I am using slash notation, in which a slash is the microbeat. In 4|4 this presents a bit of an issue, because then it's less clear that there are two macrobeats per measure. If, as Gordon posits, we have "enrhythmic" time signatures — 2|4, 4|4, 2|2 (and I totally agree with this) — why would we notate anything that is duple meter in something other than 2|4? It's really hard to find a good answer for this. Yet it's also obvious to me that, say, Brazilian samba is clearer notated in 2|4 and rock and roll in 4|4, even though by my own reasoning it should be notated in 2|2 since I feel the half note is the macrobeat. Gordon's own band method book "Jump Right In" starts with 2|4 in which the quarter represents the macrobeat and the eighth the microbeat. I agree that's appropriate for, say, the Sousa marches that band kids are eventually going to get to. For much of the repertoire presented here — coming out of rock 'n' roll — the bass drum serves the macrobeat function, the snare the microbeat function, and the hi-hat the subdivision function. You, however, may feel that the bass and the snare are the macrobeats and the use of the two different drums serves to emphasize the fact that they are paired. I can't argue with that.
The reason I even bother with talking about these beat functions is so that students with less experience playing an instrument have some choices about what to play. Having a problem changing chords on time? Just play the macrobeat and take the next microbeat to move your fingers. While it does remove the grooviness, the trade-off is that at least you can stay involved. Then when it gets easier, we can add in new layers and build up a sense of the rhythmic feel and style of the song. It also helps us to build up to playing a basic "boots, cats" drum pattern on hand drums, as well as understanding how important the hi-hat or shaker is to the feel of a song (those subdivisions make the groove).2
While I do use a form of notation to help make these patterns clearer, ultimately, the point is knowing what to do in a jam session. It's important to be able to navigate these kinds of participatory practices. It makes the difference between having a good time or not, between feeling part of the event or not. Even if one's focus is classical or folk, there are ways in which those musics deal with beat functions, that is less far removed from rock or jazz than you might think at first.
The two things that I think keep his ideas from being integrated into academia — okay, well three, because musical academia could not care less about what goes on in elementary school pedagogy unless you are actually studying music education at the graduate level, but otherwise: a) the aural perception of meter is subjective whereas notation is static and therefore prioritized, and b) his writings do not use any examples from actual musical repertoire — classical, jazz, rock or world folk musics, notated or transcribed from recordings. I find the latter to be the real glaring issue and would love to see some work in this area.