The most common meter is 4, but that does not make it any more or less complex.
The meter of 4 is by far the most used in dance, across almost all styles I have ever played. A large percentage of the music I grew up with was in 4, and sometimes in 3. It wasn’t until college that I started working in other meters. Most popular music is in 4 and every piece of music software comes with a default meter of 4. When I speak with other musicians about techno and house music, we use the shorthand of “four on the floor”...meaning a kick drum on each of the four beats of a measure in 4.
Although it is the most ubiquitous meter, that does not make it any less or more complex than any other meter. It simply has one more beat than a measure of 3 and two less beats than a measure of 6. I’ve known both musicians and dancers that only ever make work in 4, sometimes even in the same tempo for everything. I think this is one of the best examples of how freeing it can be to work within specific meters and tempos. At the end of the day, it is always how music feels that determines how it can support and not support movement. I want to stress the potential complexity of the most common meter in our community so that we can look at other lesser used meters with a greater sense of simplicity.
This is a great time to bring up another musical term “subdivision”, which means dividing the beat into smaller units. For most situations, beats in a measure are also known as “quarter notes”. When we divide those beats in half, we get “eighth notes”. If we divide the same beats into thirds, we get “triplets”. If we divide that same beat by four, “we get sixteenth notes”…and so on. You can think of beats as “divisions” of a measure and anything smaller as “subdivisions” of a beat. As we said in the last lesson, we will dive deeper into this type of rhythmic music theory in another course. Any movement that is done in a meter naturally has many different complex subdivisions, yet we rarely make a point of articulating or focusing too much on counting them with music notation terms like “sixteenth notes”. Some dance styles are grounded on a solid understanding of complex subdivisions, so I wanted to bring it up to add awareness of how the term works in music.
Similar to last class, come to class with a few pieces in 4. Take time to count each of the tracks together as a class. Check in with everyone and make sure each student feels comfortable finding the pulse, clapping or tapping the beat, counting the meter and deciding if the tempo is fast, medium, or slow. Then ask the students to briefly improvise movement to the music while keeping the count of 4 top-of-mind.
With the remaining time, ask each student to put in their headphones, find a piece of music in 4 and to make a short teachable phrase to that music.