Uncommon Time Music

I'd like to learn more about those Uncommon Time thingies. There's something about them that can make songs... addictive. Does this one belong to the category?

I believe not... I'm fairly ignorant about time signatures, but this seems to be just syncopation to me.

[dumbass hat] What's syncopation? I keep hearing about it, especially in jazz contexts...

Also, what about this?

On the subject of syncopation

Anyways, time signature is a different matter, and marks how many beats there are per a measure. 3/4 would mean three quarter-note beats per a measure, 9/8 would mean nine eighth-note beats per a measure, and so on.

edited 10th Jan '13 1:19:46 PM by Sparkysharps

Obligatory.

Here's an example: Dustin Lynch's "Cowboys and Angels" is in 7/4 time for most of the verses. Count out 1-and-2-and-3-and-4-and-5-and-6-and-7-and.

"Syncopated" just means that the melody doesn't fall squarely onto the beats — it can be any number of things. This song also has minor examples of that.

edited 10th Jan '13 1:41:11 PM by Twentington

Yes's "Changes" provides a good example of mixed meter ( ||4/4|6/8| 4/4|12/8||, I think. Don't quote me on that) in its intro and closing, which you can contrast with Common Time of much of the rest of the song.

edited 10th Jan '13 2:53:39 PM by Sparkysharps

Also, to the OP, I'm pretty sure that song's just 4/4. It's kind of hard to tell though, since some of the syncopate parts are played more heavily than the main beat.

Syncopation is, as Twentington said, a matter of messing with where a beat is emphasised. This can be done by subdividing the beat evenly and accenting certain off-beats, or through polyrhythm—the setting of a different beat of a given length against another beat, like having three beats where there would be four. To demonstrate:

fig. 1, straight eight

—beat—beat—beat—BEAT—beat—beat—beat—BEAT

fig. 2, dotted quarters

—beat—beat—BEAT—beat—beat—BEAT—beat—BEAT

fig. 3, triplet vs. straight eight

—-beat—-beat—-BEAT—beat—beat—beat—BEAT

And there you go.

Now, back to the subject at hand. When it comes to the subtle but distinctive use of an odd rhythm as a hook in and of itself, this song always leaps to mind for me:

Listen to the main guitar riff. Listen closely. Now count the beats...

One of my pet quirks in music, both as a listener and as a creator.

Here is a short little sweet song that perfectly encapsulates how well 7/8 sounds.

And it demonstrates a simple concept behind any "odd" time signature. Any sort of asymmetrical time signature is in fact a combination of 2 and 3 groups of beats. 7/8 can thus be expressed as 3+2+2 (As done here) etc.

edited 11th Jan '13 12:16:15 PM by Yachar

^ Similarly, "Cowboys and Angels" is 3+4+3+4 etc.

Love the hedge clippers in 7/8 time! The working title for that song was “Clipping the 8th.”

RE: syncopation. You can do a lot with it. King Crimson’s “21st Century Schizoid Man” is in 4/4 time throughout, but good luck in counting it that way!

edited 12th Jan '13 12:31:49 AM by Bananaquit

I often write songs unknowingly using Uncommon Time. Then again, that shouldn't be surprising, considering this song basically represents my default position for rhythm:

One of my friends, knowing next to nothing about music theory at the time, actually wrote a brief piano piece in 14/16. Not 7/8, but 14/16—more specifically, (3+3+3+2+3)/16. We have a recording of it somewhere...

edited 12th Jan '13 8:52:55 AM by JHM

One of the great things in music, playing with tempo, time signatures, rhythms.

My favorite band in the realm of time-bending acrobatics has to be Snd though...

Most of there tracks actually have a defined tempo and structure but they keep playing with it and subverting it. (finding their tracks on youtube is a b*** by the way) I'd encourage anyone willing to hear more to start with tenderlove which is probably their most accessible album, and then move on to the more abstract like Atavism or stdio...

Don Ellis did a lot of big band jazz music like this:

edited 12th Jan '13 12:34:45 PM by Erock

I tend to throw in occasional 2/4 bars so that a line will go 4+2+4+4+2.

The Canterbury bands were lousy with this kind of thing:

What a shame I can’t find the live performance on British television, in which John Greaves (the bass player) dumps a drawer full of silverware all over the stage!

The suspect was staring at the watching policeman and humming.

The suspect has not spoken a single word since he arrived in this particular cell. He has only been humming.

The humming started as a simple children's lullaby, the one that in begins, Lullaby, and goodnight...

This tune was hummed, without variation, over and over, for seven minutes, to establish the underlying pattern.

Then began the elaborations upon the theme. Phrases hummed too slow, with long pauses in between, so that the listener's mind helplessly waits and waits for the next note, the next phrase. And then, when that next phrase comes, it is so out of key, so unbelievably awfully out of key, not just out of key for the previous phrases but sung at a pitch which does not correspond to any key, that you would have to believe this person had spent hours deliberately practicing their humming just to acquire such perfect anti-pitch.

It bears the same semblance to music as the awful dead voice of a Dementor bears to human speech.

And this horrible, horrible humming is impossible to ignore. It is similar to a known lullaby, but it departs from that pattern unpredictably. It sets up expectations and then violates them, never in any constant pattern that would permit the humming to fade into the background. The listener's brain cannot prevent itself from expecting the anti-musical phrases to complete, nor prevent itself from noticing the surprises.

The only possible explanation for how this mode of humming came to exist is that it was deliberately designed by some unspeakably cruel genius who woke up one day, feeling bored with ordinary torture, who decided to handicap himself and find out whether he could break someone's sanity just by humming at them.

The policeman has been listening to this unimaginably dreadful humming for four hours, while being stared at by a huge, cold, lethal presence that feels equally horrible whether he looks at it directly or lets it hover at the corner of his vision -

The humming stopped.

There was a long wait. Time enough for false hope to rise, and be squashed down by the memory of previous disappointments. And then, as the interval lengthened, and lengthened, that hope rose again unstoppably -

The humming began once more.

The policeman cracked.

I seem to remember another Canterbury band, Egg, had a song called "Seven is a Jolly Good Time", written in... well, the clue is in the title. (As those who click in the link will hear, the 7/4 bars are written as (3+2+2)/4 or (2+2+3)/4, but the whole purpose of the song is to celebrate Uncommon Time, so there are passages in 5/4 and 11/4 as well as 4/4.)

One of my favourite anecdotes about songs in Uncommon Time revolves around the introduction to the Allman Brothers Band's 1969 song "Whipping Post". Of the two Allman brothers, Duane was well versed in music theory, Gregg not so much (at the time, anyway). Gregg wrote the introduction to "Whipping Post" as (3+3+3+2)/4 simply because the shift back to the tonic required two beats instead of three, and later recalled that when he played it for Duane for the first time, he said, "That's good, man, I didn't know that you understood 11/4." According to Gregg, "Of course, I said something intelligent, like, 'What's 11/4?' Duane just said, 'Okay, dumbass, I'll try to draw it up on paper for you.'"

edited 14th Jan '13 5:40:16 PM by mlsmithca

In the little aside that I made about syncopation, I forgot to mention polymeter. It's one of my favourite rhythmic devices, but explaining it (like playing it) is somewhat tricky. Animal Collective's "For Reverend Green" is an excellent demonstration of the principle:

The song begins with an apparent 4/4 cycle of eighth notes with a tom beat emphasising a kind of 2/4 rhythm, but then the main guitar and vocals come in, using the same note durations but cleaving to a steady 7/4 or 14/8 pattern. The tom continues to punctuate each half-note, but a cymbal or high-hat is struck at the end of each measure of 7/4. The chorus drives this weird circularity home even harder, pitting the fluid 14/8 of the massed vocals and guitars against the ardent quarter-note pulse of the high-hat part and the ambiguous cycling eighth notes in the electronics. This later allows for a smooth transition into 4/4 for the song's coda—and, on the album, into the skittering triplets of "Fireworks".

It doesn't hurt that I love the hell out of this song, either. I honestly think that it's one of the band's best next to "Fireworks", "The Purple Bottle" and "Banshee Beat".

edited 16th Jan '13 5:43:02 AM by JHM

Is this uncommon or just syncopated? It sure trips me up a lot. I spend the whole song feeling imbalanced, getting things where I don't expect them.

There's a hymn in the Episcopal Hymnal that has the right hand playing in 11/8 over a left hand playing in 5/4. How any organist can get through that without going insane, I will never know. And how any congreation can manage to sing it...

I made a remix of Non-Aggression from Sonic Advance 3 playing time signatures, going from 7/4, the original's 6/4, switching between 6/4 and 7/4, and finally switching from 7/4 to 9/4 which just ended up becoming 4/4. And the rest of the song is just in triplets. Here.

Can't have an uncommon time thread without The Dance of Eternity: