Teaching Cut Time
Taught a lesson to my 8th graders about cut time today. One of my flute players asked a great question. “Why? Why does this exist?” I had a pretty good answer (for on the fly responding about flags and stems and being less visually cluttered) but her response was priceless. “So, you just spent all this time teaching us that a whole note gets 4 beats, a half note gets 2 beats and a quarter note gets 1 beat, and now you’re saying that’s not true? I’m quitting.”
Now, this very dramatic, flute player (hopefully) is not actually quitting, but she had an interesting point. We do spend every rehearsal teaching and reminding students of note durations and if students have spent most of their time playing in 2/4, 3/4, and 4/4, I can understand why this suddenly blows minds. But I went home and did some research on cut time, and what I found was somewhat fascinating.
Writing music like marches and orchestral music, which use a lot of smaller note values, would clutter the page with beams - the lines that connect smaller notes. (Really, beams are more like the shared flags of the smaller note values.) Writing in cut time eliminates one level of the beams being used, and helps to eliminate the clutter than makes reading faster notes difficult. Some composers wrote 32nd notes in cut time as it was.
No one sent out a message in the early 1800s that said “Exactly one year from today I will create the first marching band. Please start composing music so we will have some available the day we get started.” The early bands played transcriptions of already existing orchestra music. And there was a LOT of music to play already. Much of the orchestral music was written in common time, noted by a big “C” for a time signature. Other sources of music included folk songs and church hymns, which were also predominantly in common time. (Hence the name - common time.)
The first marching bands were orchestras without the string players, who had a difficult time playing outdoors — their instruments’ sounds did not carry well, and outdoor weather was hard on the gut strings and wood. So…the rest of the orchestra played outside without them; just the brass, woodwinds, and percussion. Marching bands developed slightly before the first concert bands. The advent of the early marching and concert bands coincided with the invention of the modern valves for brass instruments, the re-configuring of fingerings on clarinets and flutes, and later on, the invention of sax horns.
The problem was — no music was written for bands, yet. Composers like John Philip Sousa composed march music later in the 1870s, 80s, and 90s, and it wasn’t until the early 20th century composers started writing music specifically for the concert band. But when a marching band tried to play the music in common time a problem developed — either the band had to run to keep the tempo up, or march at a normal pace where the music was just too slow. The solution was simply to put a slash through the common time “C” and make it into cut time. Now the band could march at a comfortable pace and the music sounded right (because it was played twice as fast). Yay Cut Time!
If you were reading this hoping I would share some amazing new way of teaching cut time to your students, I apologize. This is not new or amazing. Write it on the board in 4/4. Directly underneath it write it in 2/4 (with the “cut in half” note durations). Clap, count, sizzle, play, do yo’ thang. Repeat until they start to get it. Play music in cut time. More clapping, counting. They’ll get it eventually. Yay Cut Time!
By Stephanie Williamson
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