> > Time signatures are crap. They should have switched to a number > > over a note value a long time ago; we could have easily avoided > > abominable travesties like the time signature on the 2nd > > movement of Beethoven's 9th (B needed four over dotted quarter). If > > music notation had been invented by a computer scientist we > > wouldn't be stuck in the current mess in which 6/8 means two > > completely different meters (3 over quarter, or 2 over dotted > > quarter). > > That was proposed by (some great musician from XIX century that I can't > remember) but it's hard to change habits. > The idea was to use: above, number of beats, and below, the note lasting > one beat, *always*. So conventional 6/8 would be 2/"dotted quarter" with a > dotted quarted drawn as itself, not implied by a number. This allows for > more meaningful signatures, like 3+3+2/"eight note" for some Piazzolla > tangos that are now written as 4/4 (but don't have the stress pattern for > 4/4 at all).
Hi! While I wouldn't agree without reservation that time sigs are crap (more like they're making the best of a bad situation) I do agree that number over note value is way better. In fact, the college I teach at starts with time signatures that way (based on Kodaly): 2 over quarter note, 2 over dotted quarter etc. It's amazing how well everybody understands until we switch to 6/8. Then everything falls apart, because it's no longer intuitive. cheers dafydd -- www.sideshowmedia.ca skype: chickeninthegrass -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
