Michael Edwards wrote: [snip]
[snip]It still sounds wrong: I mean, we say phrases like "on the third beat" - not "on the third pulse". I'm not sure what we call the subdivisions, and a generic term for them doesn't seem to be heard much. Thinking about it, I would probably just say "the third semiquaver", "the second quaver", or whatever was appropriate. I'm pretty sure where I read about the beat vs. pulse thing was when I was a boy, in Percy Scholes' "Junior Oxford Companion to Music". It is a simple reference work for children, but I would have thought Percy Scholes was a reputable reference in anything he wrote. It is a British work: could it be one of those things where U.K. and U.S. usage differ? - that is, what the British (and Australians) call a beat, the Americans call a pulse, and vice-versa? If so, it could potentially be a very confusing difference of usage. At least the "crotchet vs. quarter" thing is not ambiguous.
It actually gets down to the nitty gritty of time signatures, meter and what they really mean.
I teach my beginning students right from the start that the time signature tells them two pieces of information -- the top number is the number of beats that are in each measure and the bottom number is the type of note which will receive one beat.
When it gets time to learn about 6/8 time, I keep the same explanation. At first, of course, they learn counting 6/8 music in 6, but when we start to work on counting it in 2, I invariably get the question about why isn't there a 2 in the top part of the time signature. I answer it by explaining that there still are 6 beats in each measure, they just go by fast enough that conducting each individual 8th note would no longer be possible, so we start getting 2 pulses per measure. It looks like 2 beats, but the performer has to place 3 8th-note beats within each pulse.
Pulse and beat ARE two different things - isn't there an 8th-note pulse in a Mozart or a Haydn 2/4 andante which is conducted in a subdivided pattern One-And-Two-And? If we are trying to say that pulse and beat are synonymous, then wouldn't that be a 4-beat measure, and if so, why not simply beat it in a 4-pattern? Why conduct that with a subdivided 2-pattern? Because the pulse is different from the beat.
I find that my students are much more comfortable playing in compound duple meter after my explanations than are students who start taking lessons with me after learning the "6/8 music has two beats in each measure" way of thinking. Those students are much more mechanical in their playing because they don't understand the underlying music theory behind all this meter/pulse/beat stuff.
-- David H. Bailey [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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