[MUSIC]

That was music from George Gershwin's

1930 musical Crazy Girl and
the song I've Got Rhythm.
We'll we've all got rhythm.
Rhythm along with melody,
harmony, tone color,
texture and
form are the essential elements of music.
We'll be exploring these elements
in our next several sessions.
We'll start with rhythm because
rhythm provides a framework,
a framework in time,
one which sounds, pitches can rest.
We all have rhythm of our lives and
a beat, a heart beat.
And of course there's a beat in music too.
Most music has a regular pulse to it.
Some music Gregorian Chant for
example doesn't have a beat.
Here's a group of singers I organized some
years ago singing Gregorian Chant at
Yale University along
with an image of a chant
manuscript from
the Yale Rare Book Library.
In this
music, there
really is
no beat.
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Very beautiful, but no beat.
Pop music usually has a very strong beat.
That's one of the things
that makes it popular.
We respond almost primordially to a beat.
Here's an example of a pop
piece with a strong beat and
also a strong back beat that
helps us emphasize the beat.
It's a video created as a somewhat
organized or maybe disorganized flash mob
or flash dance recently in the main
library of Yale University.
>> [NOISE] Hey, Macklemore,
can we go to the shopping?
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Pretty good, almost impossible
not to tap your foot to that.
In Classical music, there is a beat,
but it's often suppressed.
It's more subdued.
The rock musician, Brian Eno,
who worked with the Beatles once said,
quote, classical music
is music without Africa.
End quote.
Meaning that music without a strong
music profile.

And for the most part, he was right.

But here's an example of classical music
in which there is a pretty clear beat.
Pomp and Circumstance March by
the classical composer Edward Elgar.
You probably heard it at a graduation.
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It's not surprising that in, in this
classical music the beat is pronounced,
because we're supposed to march
to it during graduate ceremony.
I'd say that in Pomp and
Circumstance we have a medium strong beat.
But here's a much better example of
what I mean when I say Classical music
often has a suppressed beat where
the sound of the beat is weak.
Indeed, where is the beat here?
Can you tap your foot to it like
you could with the Macklemore?
Here's Debussy's
Clair de Lune.
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So, we've heard strong beat, medium beat,
and very weak beat or suppressed beat.
Beats come along in regular intervals.
And are the same duration, regular beat.
However, the western psyche doesn't like
extremes of undifferentiated anything.
We group time into units of seconds,
minutes, and hours to make sense of it.
We group decades and
centuries into periods and
call them the Renaissance and
the Enlightenment to help us make sense of
what would otherwise be
a seemingly endless flow of time.
I'm convinced that in my Toyota automobile
the safety belt alarm goes ding,
ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.
Ding, ding,
if I don't have my seatbelt fastened.
So too in music, we group the endless
flow of beats to make sense of them.
Here's an undifferentiated flow of beats.
We can sound them with this gadget, and
we've been doing that since
the time of Beethoven.
[SOUND] Called of course a metronome and
here's what we instinctively do,
we take these beats and
group them into units of two.
So here are the beats now
grouped into units of two.
Or, we can group them into
units of three and of four.
But in fact, in most, but
not always, music written in four beats
is just a multiple of music in two beats.
So really for

our course we are going to have just

two beat music and three beat music.
Music in dupo or music in triple meter.
Now I've just used the word meter there,
when we group beats into regularly
recurring units we create meter in music.
Meter is simply a pattern of
regularly recurring beats.
The lines that separate the groups
are called bar lines or measure lines.
Each unit constitutes a bar or a measure.
Bar lines tend to make
western music on a grid.
Other cultures don't have
this kind of grid and
as a result their music is
a good deal more flexible.
But we in the west,
we have these measure lines or
these bar lines and it's almost as if
you can't break out from behind the bar,
that you're kept inside of the measure.
Okay.
So we talked about beats and
meters and measures,
your bars and bar lines.
Now, let's take a look at this same
material is a slightly different way.
But before that,
I've got a question for you.
What are the two axes or
coordinates of music?
Again, what are the two axes or
coordinates of music?
Right.
Pitch and duration.
Otherwise said sound and time.
Pitch is represented on
a vertical axis in written form,
and time on a horizontal one.
Here's a graph to demonstrate this.
Now, here's a score of
a piano piece by Beethoven.
This musical score is just
a complex version of this
previous slide's simple idea.
Pitch is indicated vertically,
time horizontally.
How do we get from this simple
idea of a two axes graph to this
complex version of musical notation
that you see on the screen?
Well, we'll look at that
in our next segment.
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