The other day I was subbing for my friend, Jason M. and conducting his high school concert band. When I got there I noticed that a day or two earlier he had written a “bell ringer” on his board about the choral warmups he was using with his band (Two Chorales, by Sigfrid Karg-Elert).
Why would some composers choose to write a piece of music using 3/2 meter instead of 3/4? Jason’s hint: 3/4 (written today) would have sufficed fine.
What do you think? The answer after the break.
Jason tells me that it’s related to handwritten scores and parts. Ink was (and still is) expensive, so it’s cheaper to write a half note instead of a quarter note. Another consideration is that with thin paper ink can bleed through to the other side of the paper, so if you’re hand writing a score and want to use both sides of the paper a quarter note is more likely to bleed through to the other side. It’s also faster to not fill in every note head and adding extra flags to eighth notes or sixteenth notes adds additional opportunities to mess up your copy work or make it harder to read handwritten manuscript.
There’s also an historical precedence for this going back all the way to the Middle Ages.
Filling in the heads of the notes with black ink involved considerable unnecessary trouble and loss of time. It also may have proved more difficult on thin paper than on the parchment of the earlier manuscripts. Therefore around 1450, the scribes began to leave the notes unfilled.
What do you think? Are there other good reasons for using time signatures with the half note getting the beat over a meter with a quarter note getting the beat?
Thanks to Jason for the puzzle today!
