At the Richey Community Orchestra’s last seasonal concert, the winds and brass played an Andrew Lloyd Webber piece from Sunset Boulevard. There was a section in 5-8 time. It proved to be a little challenging. With practice it shaped up and came off well.

The challenge of the time signature made me think of how rarely we have to deal with anything unusual in fiddle music. The most common variance from four beats to the bar and four bars to the section, happens from extra beats added. Think of Cherokee Shuffle as an example.

Current fiddlers rarely follow the example of Jim VanCleve. In his album, Let the Big Dog Eat, he creates a tune, a complete melodic section, that is fourteen bars long. That’s two bars short of a feeling of completion and closure.

The tune sounds like a standard fiddle tune with A and B sections. But, the B part is two bars short. So you feel like you are being dumped back in the beginning before you are ready.

As a musical device, it creates tension. Finally, at the end the tension is resolved with the two bars we have been longing for.

The way I describe this, it may sound as if I don’t like it. But, the fact is I do. It’s creative, innovative, edgy. And, it does resolve at the end.

My point is about how tunes normally work, and how we normally think about them. I observe that music typically proceeds in chunks of four.

Four Beats to a Bar
We say there are four beats to a bar. The reference of ‘bar’ is to printed music. It’s the area between two bar lines. We also call it a measure.

Bar is a visual standard, yet we use it in an aural way when talking about music that we are playing. Measure is more kinesthetic. We use our hands to measure things, whether it’s length or liquid volume. We also can easily measure four drum beats. Imagine the classic western movie drumbeat of the American Indians: Dum-tum-tum-tum, Dum-tum-tum-tum.

Somewhere, I’ve seen a reference to people “marching in stately measure.” This is another reference to physical action relating to music.

To sum up, when we listen to most music we tend to hear the beat in four beat chunks. It’s our default measure of rhythm in music.

Subdividing the Beat
Now, focus on the beat itself. We notice that it can be subdivided into 2, 3, or 4 microbeats. (Microbeats is my term for this. Subdivision is the general musician term.)

Reels and hoedowns have four microbeats per beat. Jigs have three per beat. Waltzes have two microbeats. Sometimes the rhythm for waltzes is swung, which implies three microbeats. But, swinging the eighths in waltzes goes against the grain for me.

Four Beats and Four Bars
We are accustomed by hundreds of years of dance music to four beats and four bars. Even a rhythmic form like the slip jig in 9/8 time has four bar phrases. The 9/8 rhythm creates a continuous rolling effect. The phrases create closure for the music.

Four bars help set up an acceptable feel for our innate musical sensibility. As I see it, we chunk in fours. It’s our nature to group beats in four, melodic figures in four. Maybe it’s only cultural, but that’s what we do.

An example of current music that thoroughly exploits this tendency is the Spa channel on Sirius radio. I often listen while driving because it’s relaxing. The music played on this channel is called yoga music, massage music, meditation music, new age music. It goes harmoniously in four beats and four bars most of the time. That helps the relaxation effect.

This chunking is “chunking up” from one beat to groups of four beats.

Beginning musicians move through a tune one note at a time. After a while they begin chunking notes together. Maybe two or three, sometimes four.

Going on, more and more is chunked together until the whole tune is memorized. Chunks of notes are like bricks in the wall for chunks of melody, which are chunked into a whole tune.

This is the result of chunking up. You also hear teachers speak about chunking down. I’ve heard this often relating to a big project. “By the yard, it’s hard. By the inch, it’s cinch.”

In music practice, chunking down means we seek out the hard part of the piece. We practice that part by itself, vigorously.

We don’t just play through the whole piece, then play through it again and again. And each time struggle with the hard part, and maybe even flub it yet again. That’s a poor practice technique.

When you chunk down you take a series of notes. You play through those notes carefully and mindfully. This is what builds the myelin around your brain cell connections. This enables you to play more surely , and with more speed.