So this video is going to be about something called irrational time signatures, time signatures that have a denominator
That is not a power of two. Now traditionally you'll have things like 2/4
Which takes the same amount of time as two quarter notes or
5/8 which takes the same amount of time as a 5 8th notes
But what about this one?
This one doesn't make any sense because there's no such thing as a twelfth note so how could you have eight of them?
But check this out:
[Music Playing]
This is a piece of music for big band called "Don't Analyze",
Composed by my friend Brian Crock. Recently we sat down and talked about it and talked about his use of irrational time signatures
BRIAN: I envisioned this starting
Off as sort of like a drunk beat scenario
you know the the pocket, like the backbeat was really solid, but all the information between the downbeat and
The backbeat is really complex
And so I almost wanted to sound like part of the measures getting lobbed off. The first time I saw
irrational time signatures like this in a score was in a Asyla by Thomas Adès who is a
Relatively young British composer who's I think amazing
I was hesitant to use irrational time signatures because
Everybody who sees this it's like what the *beep* is that and is really confused and you have to explain it
You know every time signature the denominator
Starts from a whole note and so in a measure of 3/4
you're dividing a whole note into four bits and those happen to be quarter notes so when you're
Singing 3/4 you divide the quarter notes, and there's three of them. In the irrational time signature the denominator number is
Still coming from a whole note so the measure of a 8/12 is
Divided into 12 bits, and if you divide a whole note into 12 you get eighth note triplets right so
You would subdivide your eighth note triplets, but there would be eight of them in a measure of a 12
I mean what an irrational time signature really is it's just metric modulation
But it's sort of a simpler way to look at it
What I could have done is over every eight 12 measure written the measure of 4/4 and said
Eighth note triplet equals eight note right there
You know, but then I'd have to do it every single time. That's a lot of information to look at
And also psychologically the person interpreting the music would
Change the reference of the beat so if it's a metric modulation all of a sudden we filled this 4/4 at a faster tempo
And I wanted this all to feel continuous.
The culmination of this whole piece is in the drum solo
Shout out to Josh Bailey badass drummer
who who he has to play over this
Really complicated man.
He has to solo over an irrational time signature
[Josh Bailey Solo]
The concept is each the irrational time signature gets consecutively smaller and smaller
So this measure is 8/12
Then the measure of 7/12, measure of 5/12 and a measure of 4/12
And so it feels like more and more of those measures are getting chopped off kind of like a drunk, hip-hoppy
So this would sound like I'll just go through the whole thing.
I'll give you a little
Sing-along finger all right, okay?
I'll ignore the *irrational time signature speaking*
*you get the idea*
Nice, yeah
It's even harder to explain
[Nah that's great man] but it's actually not that complicated
And I think it makes sense as a notation device
And I have the feeling it's gonna start to become more common
You kicked off the trend man
That's awesome
BASS