Time Signatures and Bar Lines, Yea or Nay?

A rough first draft, some random ideas. These ideas are not universal rules, but part of my personal compositional paradigm.

Time Signatures and Bar Lines, Yea or Nay?

Yes, time signatures and bar lines are times needed and at other times not needed. It is not a simple yes or no answer, it is a matter of what best conveys to the performer(s) the intentions of the composer and the best way of realizing it in performance.

Gentle reader please forgive me for not having the time to fully research the following, What follows is some thoughts on time signatures and bar lines and other related ideas. Please do not judge me too harshly as my command of the English language is less than perfect, and my thoughts which seem organized in my head tend to get all scrambled up once they are put to paper, but I digress.

I think we need to keep in mind that there are two main branches that Western music descended from, Sacred and secular. But more important to his discussion, two types of music, vocal and dance music.

With vocal music the rhythm and pulse of the music can be organized by the natural rhythms of the language of the words being sung. With dance music a regular and discernible pulse to the music is required. With the former time signatures are, one could argue, not needed, with bar lines (or some other mechanism) used simply as “milestone” or point of reference. And this works as long as the “complexity” of the music remains below some sort of threshold. Below is two settings of the same piece of the text, the music is the same, but it have been noted first with time signatures and then without time signatures. I will leave it to the read to decide for themselves which one works better. And whether it has crossed the threshold of complexity.

In my setting of the poem Anthem for Doomed Youth by Wilfred Owen I originally notated it using changing time signatures, letting the rhythm of the text dictate the rhythms and the time signature (two different things). Wither I correctly interpreted the rhythm of the words is another issue, what I am referring to here is my process of letting the words being the driving factor in choosing time signatures and rhythms.

Anthem for Doomed Youth (Alt. Version)

I later removed all of the time signatures and bar lines in the piece, rhythmically the piece as not altered. I will leave it to the reader to decide which is a better way of presenting the material to a group for performance.

Anthem for Doomed Youth

When there is but a single performer the complexity of the piece can be raised and one is one hindered by the need to coordinate the performance of several players.

My short piano piece “San Antonio Rainbow” is traditionally notated with time signatures and bar lines. However I have removed the final bar line to convey to the performer a sense that the piece does not end with a definite end, but just fades away. Is this notation consciously perceptible to the listener? Most likely not, but it does try to convey to the performer my intentions for the performance of the piece, and this objective might be, if only at a subconscious level, perceived by the listen because of the way the perform both plays the piece, and when in front of the audience his body language as he plays the piece. Perhaps a piece like this should have the bar lines and time signatures removed, that I will leave for the gentle reader to decide.

San Antonio Rainbow Version 3.0

In music that is intend to be danced to (or traces its roots to such music) a regular and discernable pulse needs to be present to dance to. The use of time signatures for this type of music seems to be apparent. In such pulse driven music "the tyranny of the bar line" is not a issue. The time signature gives us a reference to the pulse of the music and the bar line should help reinforce the “clave”(1) of the piece.

My first piano sonata makes use of neither time signatures nor bars lines, except for the fugal sections in the last movement. Here we have a more complex music than the later example, but still for solo performer. In the fugal sections I have resorted to using time signatures and bar lines due to the complexity of the music and the rhythmic character, pulse, and clave of the section. In an early version of the last movement I did not have time signatures or bars lines in the fugal section. I was lucky enough to have it performed in concert while at university. When I go the score back after the concert I found that the performer have penciled in bar lines as “road markers” to help facilitate his performance. (I should point out he had my permission to mark on the score for the performance.) So what we have here is a piece that is transitioning between the “free flowing” character of vocal music, and the more “exacting” character of dance music.

Epsilon Ba Bootes: 2nd Movement: Yugiri
Epsilon Ba Bootes: 3rd Movement: Hoshi

When we get into music that is highly pulse orientated the use of time signatures becomes necessary to convey the intentions of the composer and to provide a mechanism to keep the performers in “sync” with each other. The time signature that we as composers choose should not be taken lightly as the time signature conveys to the performer(s) and sense of the underlying pulse and clave. In my piece 59,620 YEARS
The opening section could possibly be realize with out a time signature, the only real reason for it is for the coordination of the players. However starting just after letter A on page six and running to Letter E on page 12, the time signatures play a vital roll not only in coordinating the player’s performance, but of conveying to the (astute) performer the underlying pulse and clave of the piece.

59,620 YEARS

Other pieces where I feel that the time signature provide essential information to the performers from the composer.

Wasuremono
Insomnia
Doctor EM
Urban Gale
On that Summer Day


(1)

Things I have not touched on that probably need to be talked about are
1. What I mean when I say “clave” of a piece.
2. Why I use the word pulse instead of rhythm
3. Why I think Gregorian Chat is highly rhythmic
4. Why I feel that there is a major difference between say 7/4 time and 7/8 time, between 4/4 time and 2/2, between 12/8 time and 4/4 with a bunch of triplets, et cetera.

I am sorry about using only my own compositions as examples, but it is a habit I pickup up from D.S. :-)