Today’s topic is the second classification of regular meters: compound meters.
As a quick review, there are a few critical terms necessary for discussing these meters. Meter is the manner in which we organize strong and weak pulses in music over time, and it is from this grouping that we determine the length of each measure. At its most basic, meter tells us two things:
If we imagine meter as a hierarchy, beats are the highest level. Beats are then divided into divisions, and divisions can be further divided into subdivisions. A regular meter is one in which every beat is the same length.
Finally, do remember that meter is somewhat subjective and can be greatly altered by many factors, especially tempo. We will discuss this in the next topic, but where one listener might listen to a piece with four quarter-notes per measure and feel that the quarter notes are the beat, another listener may listen to the same piece and hear the beat in a slow two with the half-note as the beat.