Metre (music)

Making and release

Western music's first rhythmic notation system used rhythmic modes from classical Greek and Latin poetry.^[1] The English word "measure" came to denote a bar of music or an entire melodic verse or dance.^[2] Imogen Holst preferred the term "measured rhythm"^[3] Justin London wrote that metre involves our perception and anticipation of a series of beats abstracted from the music's rhythm surface.^[3]

A metre is generally indicated by a time signature at the beginning of a composition.^[4] The top number in a compound time signature will be 6, 9, 12, 15, 18, 24, or similar.^[5] Hypermetre is large-scale metre where bars act as beats.^[6] Dance pieces like the pavane and galliard were later composed with musical phrases that had a set tempo and time signature to match a fixed sequence of dance steps.^[2]

Rather than using the term "metre", Stewart MacPherson advocated for the phrases "time" and "rhythmic shape".^[3] A metre in which each beat is naturally subdivided into three equal parts is called compound metre.^[5]

What the cited sources add

Justin London's book describes metre as involving initial perception and subsequent anticipation of beats abstracted from the rhythm surface.^[3] Joel Lester notes that once a metric hierarchy is established, listeners will maintain it.^[3] Frank Zappa's composition "Toads of the Short Forest" features multiple musicians playing in different metres simultaneously.^[7] Polymetres are a defining characteristic of the music of Meshuggah.^[8]

Studies on how people perceive polymetre indicate that listeners frequently either create a combined pattern that aligns with a metric structure or concentrate on one rhythmic line while regarding the others as background.^[9]