In this section you will learn the bit of musical notation that is necessary for the rest of this course. Most of the material here is about musical rhythm.
Musical notes are written on a stave (or staff), consisting
of five horizontal lines:
Notes can be written on
a line and between the lines. If a note is higher up on the stave, it also
has a higher pitch. Maybe you know that notes have names, like C
or D sharp. I will teach none of that, since talking about dance
music we are largely concerned with only rhythm. 
Sometimes I will show a drum rhythm, and then it is customary to
show higher-pitched or lighter sounding drums higher than others.
A stave of music is not written as an endless string of notes: the
notes are organised in groups, called bars or
measures.
In ballroom music, a bar has two, three, or four
counts. (If you do Balkan-type folk dancing you may occasionally see
five, seven, nine, or higher odd numbers. By comparison, ballroom
music is a bit boring.) The number of counts per bar is indicated by a
number at the start of the composition: .
The curly thing at the beginning of the stave is a clef, in this
particular case a treble-clef, G-clef or violin clef. A clef serves to indicate
how a musician is to interpret notes as pitches. You will find a clef at
the beginning of every line of music; the treble-clef is mostly used for
voice, melody instruments, or for the right hand of the piano: the high
notes in other words. There is also a clef that is used for the low notes,
such as of the bass guitar or the left hand of the piano: the F-clef or
bass clef
. You will
see it occasionally in this course, because the bass is an important instrument
for dancers. (There are more cleffs, but, unless you play viola, even
most professional musicians hardly ever come across them.)
In contrast to what I stated above, these examples actually have two numbers, not one, at the beginning of the stave. The upper number states how many notes there are per bar, and the lower number states what kind they are. The lower number, however, will (almost) always be 4 in this course, stating that the notes are quarter notes. (The exception is the 12/8 rhythm, which will be explained later.) If the lower number is 4, this indicates that the basic unit of counting is the quarter note. Quarter notes will be explained in detail below, but for now just think that they are the beats. (You will learn more about beats later too.) In the first example of this section, the 3/4 time signature then states that there are three beats per bar. The fact that these time signatures are pronounced as, for instance, "this song is in three quarter time" may seem like the musicians are talking about fractions. That is definitely not true: it is a shorthand for "this song has three quarter notes per bar".
The vertical lines in the above examples are the bar lines; they indicate the end of the group of notes in a bar.
A note has both a pitch and a duration. As I said before, we will not talk about pitch much. However, duration is important, since it determines rhythm. In this section we will dig into rhythm notation. Unfortunately, the way rhythm is notated is a mess, born of centuries of evolving notation systems.
Western musical notation is most comfortable with notes that are half or twice as long as another note. For instance, there is the whole note, and the half note which is half the length of a whole note. The quarter note is half as long as a half note, and a quarter the length of a whole note.
Now, to confuse matters, the whole note is not the basis of counting: most of the time we count quarter notes. The half note, therefore, lasts two counts, and a whole note lasts four counts.
The most common durations of notes when we talk about dance are the half note, the quarter note, and the eighth note. Occasionally we will see a sixteenth note; there are further subdivisions, but we will have no need for them.
As if the above was not complicated enough, we need to take into account another concept. In general, you won't hear dancers talk much about quarter notes and such. Rather, they express everything in beats, and more often still in slows and quicks. The translation between these concepts is a murky business. For now, it is safe to say that a beat is the same thing as a quarter note and also the same as a quick; a slow then corresponds to a half note, or two quarter notes or beats. The main exception to this is Samba. Also, in many dances, such as most latin dances and swing, the concepts of quick and slow are never used.
Here is how the bestiary note lengths is notated.
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A whole note is an open ball without a stem. A whole note is as long as two half notes or four quarter notes, and therefore as long as four beats or two slows. This note does not appear much in dance, because apart from poses you never let a step last four counts. |
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A half note is an open ball with a stem. A half note is as long as two quarter notes, or two beats. This also corresponds to a slow, as in foxtrot. |
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A quarter note is a filled ball with a stem. This is the unit of counting; most of the time if people talk about a duration of one beat, they notate it with a quarter note. Most of the time, a quarter note is also the same as a quick. |
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An eighth note is a filled ball with a stem, and a flag on the stem. There are two eighth notes in a quarter note. There is no name
like quick or slow for these notes; they occur for instance as the
first two notes of a triple-step in swing, or the chassé in chacha.
If you want to count a rhythm of eighth notes out loud, you can say one-and-two-and et cetera. Written, that becomes 1&2& et cetera. |
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We also need a notation for "do nothing on this beat". This picture shows you what the quarter note rest looks like, and an eighth note rest. There are rests corresponding to each note type, but these two are the most common. A quarter note rests occurs for instance as the "hold one" of International Rumba or Mambo. The only example of an eight note rest I can up with is a syncopation in West Coast Swing. Generally, rests are more useful in notating music than dance. |
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If two eighth notes appear in a row, they can be written seperately , or tied together with a beam. |
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The shortest note we will need in this course is the sixteenth note, written as a closed ball with a doubly flagged stem. This note only appears in samba. |
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Finally, a note -- or a rest -- gets half again its length by putting a period behind it. In this example, a dotted half note -- recall the half note is as long as two quarter notes -- lasts three quarter notes. You may see this note when we are talking about waltz. Dotted eighth notes appear in samba; there is a short example below. |
Here are a few examples of rhythms and their notation. I will both use musical counts and the various "mantras" that are used to vocalise these rhythms in dancing.
This is a "slow, quick quick", as in foxtrot or rumba. The
time signature states that there are four quarter notes per bar, that is,
four counts. The first note is a half note which lasts two counts and which
corresponds to the "slow", then follow two quarter notes which
are one count each, and they correspond to the "quick"s. Together
these three notes make up the four counts of one whole bar. Movie.
This is a "1 2& 3" rhythm as in certain
waltz patterns. The time signature states that there are three quarter
notes, that is, three counts, per measure. The first and third note are
quarter notes, adding up to two counts together. The remaing count is split
up in two eighth notes, the second and third note. Movie.
This is a "triple step" as in swing, or
a chassé as in chacha. There are three notes in this example, corresponding
to the three weight changes you make on "tri-ple step" or "side
close side". The first two notes are eighth notes, and together they
take up one count. The third note, a quarter note, takes up a second count.
Movie. (Actually, swing rhythm is a bit
more complicated than this. Look in the section about triplets.)
I have not indicated a time signature here, or a bar line to indicate the
end of the bar, because both swing and chacha are in 4/4 time, so with
only two beats this example is incomplete. There is a further complication
in chacha.
The basic samba rhythm
combines a dotted eighth note and a sixteenth, the shortest note we will
ever need. The dotted eight note is as long as three sixteenth notes, that
is, it is three times as long as the following sixteenth note. Therefore,
the dotted eighth note takes three quarters of the beat, and the sixteenth
note takes one quarter. More in the section about samba. The samba rhythm
is pronounced "1a2" or "Slow a slow". Movie. It is
a bit tricky to count out this rhythm; the details are explained in an
advanced section.
In the above examples, whenever I showed a time signature
at the beginning of the stave, there was a whole bar of music in the example.
Sometimes, however, we need to write a rhythm that starts in the middle
of a bar. In that case the number of notes before the first bar line
can be less than a whole bar. For example, here is the 2 3 4 rhythm
of mambo or International Style Rumba. You see that the second bar is filled
out with a quarter note rest.
This is a West Coast Swing syncopation where the normal 12 is replaced by "hold-1 &2". The "hold" is notated as an eighth note rest: it lasts for the first half of the first beat. And since a beat is a quarter note, that makes this an eighth note rest.As you may gather from the terminology of quarter, eighth, et cetera notes, most of the time note lengths are divided by two. It is also possible to divide a note in three, five, or any other odd number of subdivisions. The western notation system can handle it all, but it is complicated and, fortunately, not terribly relevant to dance. We only have to consider the division in three.
Above you saw how a quarter note is as long as two eighth notes. To
make things complicated, if you divide a quarter note in three equal parts
there are no three "twelfths" in that quarter note. Instead we
call such subdivisions triplets, in this case eighth note triplets.
The notation is as awkward as the terminology: a triplet is indicated by
the notes played, with a number 3 under them, and optionally an arc
to emphasise that the notes belong together, as the subdivisions of one
beat.
In other words, in a triplet, every note has 1/3 of the length of the note that was split up. To get a feeling for this rhythm, say out loud one-and-a two-and-a et cetera. Written out, this becomes 1&a 2&a et cetera.
In a rhythm of eight notes (1& 2&) there is one note on the beat, followed by one between the beats; in a triplet rhythm (1&a 2&a) there is one note on the beat followed by two in between the beats.
There is only
one kind of dance music that has triplets, and that is swing music, so
swing is the only dance for which the whole issue of triplets is
relevant*. The way triplets occur in swing
dancings is a bit subtle. While triplet can be easily discerned in
swing music,, a real triplet, in the sense of three steps --
weight changes -- in one beat hardly ever occurs. The only way
triplets occur in swing dancing is as part of the
triple-step. The "step" part is just a quarter note;
it is the "triple" part that has something to do with
triplets.
If you vocalise the triplet rhythm as 1&a 2, and you do not pronounce the &, you are now saying 1a2 et cetera. (This is not the same as samba rhythm.) Now, instead of 1a2, but in the same rhythm, say tri-ple step. The first note, the one where you step "tri", starts on the 1 and lasts through the & of the first beat, that is, it has 2/3 of the length of the beat; the second note, the "ple", has a length of 1/3 of the beat, and it starts at two-thirds of the beat and last until the second beat. Movie.
The time signatures you saw above were all based on the quarter note. There is an important time signature based on the eighth note: the twelve eighth time. A measure of 12/8 music has twelve counts, each one eighth note long. The counts are divided into four groups of three.
The confusing thing about 12/8 time is that a priori you could use one bar of 12/8 time to notate four bars of waltz music. Also, swing music - the kind with "swung eighths" - could be written in 12/8 time.
There is no ballroom music that uses 12/8 time, but there are a few reasons for bringing up 12/8 times. All of these are explained in more detail in the sections about the individual dances.
You may have understood already from the above that note lengths are
relative: 
there is nothing in a
quarter note that specifies how long it takes in seconds. To tell the musician
how fast a piece of music is to played, the sheet music usually has an indication
which states how many (120) of what kind of
notes (quarter) there are per minute. Most musicians then have a metronome,
one of those upside-down pendulums, that will play the desired speed for
them.
Dancers have an other measure for the speed of music. They don't talk about the number of quarter notes per minute; instead they express it in bpm (beats per minute) or mpm (measures per minute). The latter measurement is used in ballroom; country and swing dancers use bpm.
In order to translate between the musicians' count of quarter notes per minute and the dancers' count of either beats or measures per minute, you need to know what the relation between quarter notes and beats or measures are. For most dances, a beat is a quarter note, and there are four beats per measure. However, there are exceptions, which we will see in the section about Beats and Bars.
The rest of this page are some detail matters that you do not need to read at first; they are mostly here so that other pages can refer to them. If you are reading this course sequentially, this is a good place to continue to the next section: Beats, bars, and phrases.
Advanced topics
Occasionally, in music notation, you will encounter "cut time" which means that the music is played twice as fast as you would ordinarily expect, based on the notes. Where normally a quarter note would correspond to a beat, now the half note becomes the unit of counting. Merengue music is usually notated in cut-time; each of the " one two" steps corresponds to a half note instead of a quarter note as you might have expected.
Most of musical notation is severe overkill for what is needed to notate dance rhythms. The Universal Unit System of Skippy Blair uses a simplified rhythm notation that only uses those elements necessary for dance rhythms. It is much easier to learn than the standard music notation, and it works very well in the context of teaching dance. However, since in this course we will be seeing all sorts of nitpicky details regarding rhythm, I am using regular musical notation.
footnotes
A famous violinist once gave a recital, and afterwards received the usual praise from audience members who came up to his dressing room. One lady was particularly gushing; Oh maestro, and all those little notes!How fast you played them! The maestro responded "Oh my dear lady, those were only sixteenth notes. I sometimes play thirtysecondths." The lady was struck with amazement; Oh maestro, could you please play me just one?
It is said that this joke was told in the dressing room of the Concertgebouw and that a musician called out to conductor Bernard Haitink: Say, Hait, can you conduct me just one?
Around one hundred and twenty beats per minute, or slightly higher, is a common tempo for dance music: it is approximately the speed for slow foxtrot, west coast swing, chacha, american rumba, polka, hustle. Does this have anything to do with the fact that it is roughly double the speed of a heartbeat in rest, and therefore in the most literal sense a natural speed? Food for thought.
This file is part of "Feel The Beat", a musicology course for dancers, by Victor Eijkhout (victor at eijkhout dot net), who appreciates being sent additions or corrections on the material in this course. Copyright 2000/1 Victor Eijkhout.
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URL: http://www.eijkhout.net/ftb/text_files/Notation.html
Last modified on: Sunday, May 6, 2001.