More (sorry!) on triple metre and ballet classes
One of the reasons that I’m very sympathetic to anyone who says they don’t “get” time signature, is that my own hearing and sense of metre can play strange tricks…
Meter vs subdivision: An easy solution to the ballet and time signature problem?
In the course of writing an article about the problems of ballet and time signature recently, I read a lot of books and articles about 18th century theories of meter.…
And now for something completely sextuple
This variation by Mozart on “Ah, vous dirai-je maman”, K.265/300e has turned out to be a real life-saver in class for one of those ballet exercises where you need a…
Counting Tchaikovsky
On the weekend, I was playing the tarantella-ish Prince’s solo from Sleeping Beauty. Then, as every time I play this music, I panicked half way through the introduction – how…
Compound errors
Someone asked me last night what made me want to do a PhD in music in ballet training. I explained that one of the reasons came out of trying to…
Musical surprises #9: Hornpipes are in 3…
Well, sometimes they are anyway. For many people, especially dance teachers, ‘hornpipe’ is synonymous with 2/4 time. But there are also triple meter hornpipes, often notated in 3/2, particularly common…