40: Metric sleights of hand with hypometer and hypermeter

 

The actual meter of a work is not always what it seems like it should be given the time signature. In some cases, the pulse is one pulse per bar—very fast—and in others, it’s felt with a much smaller-than-indicated duration guiding the pulse.

In the case where things are much slower than they appear written, we call this “hypometer.”

Here is an example:

This is the opening of the third movement of Beethoven’s 9th symphony, and it’s marked “Adagio molto e cantabile”—very slow and singable.  That it’s written in 4/4 is quite misleading, because the best way to count this isn’t with subdividing into quarters, as both the metronome mark and the time signature might lead you to believe, but rather by subdividing into eighth notes (a smaller unit than otherwise indicated, as shown by the "violin" part-- which is not actually what the violins play at that time) because the line is so slow. This is hypometer.

The other extreme is where things move so quickly that the whole bar becomes the unit of the pulse, contrary to what the time signature might suggest. Again, we turn to the Ninth, but this time to the second movement. Here, each bar corresponds to one beat because the bars move along so quickly that the following two are functionally equivalent:

What is written:


Which is functionally equivalent to:

When you think in terms of the second version, you see that each bar of the original is one beat of triplets in the modified version.

When something like this happens, where each bar in the original passes so quickly that it really feels like a single beat (what you see in the modified version), we call this “hypermeter.”

When I listen to the second movement, I don’t even count “123 123 123 123” and so on, as if counting in an absurdly fast 3/4 – instead, I count “1-and-a, 2-and-a, 3-and-a, 4-and-a, etc.”—exactly like you count triplets, from the second excerpt.

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