Who needs barlines?

[gregh]

This isn't strictly about piano, but people here know all kinds of stuff. Here's something I just read in Zeitlin's Basic Recorder Lessons:

"The Renaissance (1350-1600) was a time of much experiment and discovery. The barline had not been conceived of as yet nor was there a need for it, since the music of the period did not necessarily conform to set groups of three or four beats."

Can anyone expand on that? Are we limiting ourselves stylistically by cramming our music between barlines? Do we accommodate that sort of thing in a different way today? Were they just not very at good music back then? I'm trying to figure out what that means.

[j_menz]

Are we limiting ourselves stylistically by cramming our music between barlines?

Some modern composers don't cramp their style that way - they just change time signature every bar or so. Eric Satie dispensed with bar lines in some of his works (some of the Gymnopedies or Gnossiennes).

Bars structure rhythm, and where rhythm is important, barlines are good. The less rhythmic, the less the purpose of them. They do assist with accidentals, though!

[nystul]

Certainly dance music in the Renaissance would have had a strong meter, even before the notation had evolved to illustrate the concept.  In sacred music you have influence from the chants of earlier periods, where melodies were created to fit the words of the mass.  But even there I think there was an evolution in the direction of regular meter as harmony developed.

If you haven't heard much Renaissance music, look up some and give it a listen.  Palestrina is a good place to start.  Beautiful polyphonic choral works throughout that time period. 

[gregh]

I'm getting more curious now. It would be nice if there was some kind of "Lectures on CD" with musical examples, or a theory book with "play this, now play that", or even somebody's dissertation on the subject. But I suppose not every question I come up with has a lecture series prepared to answer it.

I do remember a hymn with a short-lived change in time, but I haven't seen much like that. Are there examples in popular music? I could imagine Don Ellis doing something like that.

[quantum]

I believe the bar lines are editorial, meant for modern eyes:

Check out the isorhythmic motets of Machaut and de Vitry. 

Mensural notation may also be of interest.

[keypeg]

I'm studying music history right now, and just got out of Early music and into the Renaissance.  It evolves and changes.  In the earliest time the formal music (which we can keep track of) was church music.  They chanted the sacred words in religious ceremonies -if you are reading a text then you won't be rhythmic about it.  Later they added a second and then a third voice, lining the notes up above or below the original chant.  You might hold one note while dancing another one around it so then you have some notes that are longer than other notes, but you're not thinking in terms of rhythm.

Then you have dance music, which needs to have some kind of regular meter for the sake of the dancers.  The songs behind the music start becoming more regular - what we take for granted in a lot of poetry where each line has the same number of beats, rhyming schemes, these were all innovations at one time.

Written music gets developed gradually.  When they get lines and spaces so that each diatonic note can be accurately represented, that's a big breakthrough.  But for a long time rhythms can't be notated.  The first version is "mensuration", where they have symbols for groups of notes.  Imagine "dum-diddle dum-diddle tatata diddle-dum" where there is a symbol for "dum-diddle" and another for "tatata" etc.  They had groupings of notes that went into three's and two's, and divisions that were roughly like our 6/8 or 9/8 in regards to proportion.  We still have reached the Renaissance.

Music got more and more regular.  Then a big innovation came in notating time: symbols for notating the value of a single note which comes very close to our modern half notes, whole notes etc.  You could write down a note that was twice or three times as long as another note.  They were no longer trapped by the limits of mensuration.  Someone said "Whatever can be sung, can now be written down."  One of the types of notes (Italian? French?) had these double dots that could function like bar lines, sort of.

At the end of Early music (there isn't really a cut-off from one to the other), you had highly trained musicians, and their aristocratic patrons with deep knowledge of music.  They went nuts going fancy, to show off that they could sing complicated rhythms that were now written down, and creating intellectual riddles for their patrons.  At this point you had 3 or 4 voices lined up under each other, notes starting at different times for syncopation, and you can see some hypothetical bar lines for these groupings.  You get something akin to two or three meters going on at the same time.

Then we get into the Renaissance.  They've just had the Black Death which decimated Europe, Constantinople is now owned by the Turks and the Ottoman Empire, so that all the stored knowledge of the Greeks flows into Western Europe for new ideas - People are looking for regularity after the calamity, and they are also engrossed in these Greek ideas.  This is when they start seeking regularity and order in their music.  The first thing we get is an aim to stop being so dissonant, and a lot of the harmony rules that we learn in harmony theory in textbooks start here.

But they haven't invented bar lines yet.

(That's as far as I got in my studies so far).

It appears that a lot of the rules that they started inventing to get a "sweet sound" (limit dissonance) are the rules that musicians later tried to break out of or expand past.

[justanamateur]

Eric Satie dispensed with bar lines in some of his works (some of the Gymnopedies or Gnossiennes).

I don't listen to much Satie and I've only played the first Gnossienne, but I feel (I'm probably way off) that Satie did conform to traditional bars, only he didn't bother putting them in. Gnossienne 1, for example, felt like a 4/4.

[gregh]

Speaking of sweet sounds, I had read about the struggle toward equal temperament. And it was a struggle! The western scale goes back to the Greeks who found certain intervals pleasing, particularly fourths and fifths, plus the octave. (Then the English got into the third around the year 1000 AD.) The wavelengths (or frequencies) are related by fractions of simple numbers like 2/3 and 3/4. The western scale was really based on playing those intervals from this note or that note. That's just intonation. But you can't complete the octave by going up by thirds or fourths or fifths, and the other intervals don't mesh. Bad news for lutes and keyboards. But if you add a few cents here, remove a few cents there, you can fit them in and you're fine, as long as you don't start a song on a different note. The intervals are different, B-flats are different notes than A-sharps, if you transpose a song it will sound like wolves howling. Equal temperament was, in a way, forced by the things that musicians wanted to be able to do. But then we lose the ratios of small numbers that the Greeks found so enjoyable. Except when strings or brass are playing together-- a skilled ensemble will bend their notes into those ratios and it will sound like it came down from heaven. One trumpeter said it sounded like Gabriel came down to jam with them.

Speaking of making and breaking rules, breaking rules always seems to be an intense source of innovation-- but first you need rules to break. I think more in terms of math than music. I think of Riemannian geometry, the geometry of curves surfaces (which itself breaks Euclid's rule that parallel lines never intersect). It has rules like the distance between two points is zero or positive, and is zero only if they're the same point. What do you get if you break them? The pseudo-Riemannian geometry that's commonly applied to relativity. Naturally mathematicians have gone right down the list, breaking the rules one at a time, to see what they get.

Music can be like that. It comes out that rock tends to be 4/4 with certain characteristics in their chord progressions, etc. What if you do rock with weird time signatures, "angular" chords, and otherwise break the conventions? They call it math rock, meant to be a derisive term, and not all of it is good. It's part of the process. The song "Take Five", by Desmond, proved that jazz in 5/4 time can be beautiful and catch the public's fancy.

So, what's to come in the next few hundred years? Or has musical notation reached perfection in our era?

[outin]

So, what's to come in the next few hundred years? Or has musical notation reached perfection in our era?

Perfection is only possible because of the limitations of our minds: We haven't figured out (yet) how something could be better.

[awesom_o]

One of my composition teachers actually encouraged me to write music without barlines.

 

I didn't think it was a great idea-the piece was certainly not one of my finer creations.

I've since come to find barlines rather useful. They help me organize my thoughts both as a composer and a player!

[yale_music]

Notation was just beginning to emerge then, and the majority of music was performed in a quasi-improvisatory manner. The training at the time taught musicians how to do this. In the modern day, ensembles would have a very difficult time staying together without bar lines, though it's not impossible.