forgot to answer this one...
On Tue, 6 Jul 2010, patko wrote:
If the rythm is played like every step with no accent, no one would make a difference between 11:8 , 4:4, 7:16 ...
I always thought of the metric as something that happens not only with rythmic patterns, but also with melodic patterns. I mean that the melody is making another kind of rhythm. Usually, the bars are aligned with changes of chords and scales : the frequency and phase of the bars is chosen to most closely match the greatest number of chords and scales. That's a lot of the reason why plain 4/4 rock music is written with strong 2nd and 4th beats, instead of shifting the whole bar system by one beat just so that the strong beats be numbered 1st and 3rd.
In fact even in a simple 4:4 bar, the need for a variable metronome is quite necessary for orchestras. Different sections don't play their parts at the same tempo, if you pay attention to it, technicaly a section would play better if the tempo is slower or higher for different parts, that's why there is conductor.
I don't believe that... I mean, for pieces that don't make explicit use of battements.
I always thought that a large part of the reason why the conductor is there, is because on a large stage, if musicians only listen to each other, they will be out of phase due to sound propagation delays, and if we are to be picky about it, then we need a guy in the middle to sync the whole thing in a non-auditive manner. (Of course, a conductor does a lot more than that, but that's not what I say).
(If the stage is 15 metres across, the latency between one musician at one end and one musician at the other end is about 44 ms...)
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