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In scissor bump, a swinging 4/4 and a rectangular 4/4 run simultaneously, but at different tempos. I happened upon this while playing around with a high hat. I played a straight ahead ching-ching-a-ching with the stick while marking a triplet half note with the foot. And, with the oPening and clOsing soUnds of the sock, an unexpected melodic shape emerged.
It caught my ear.
Two tempos were implied, that of the ching-ching-a-ching, and that of the foot, with 4 chings going by in the space of the 3 being played by the foot (that's a 4:3 ratio). To more clearly emphasize the tension/contrast between these two interlocked tempos, I gave the triplet pulse a rectAngular 4/4 accentuation:
Then, thinking about a kenny cox composition recorded by the CJQ, where the band traded with the drums from start to finish, I set the two time feels off from each other in the form of a call and response dialogue where the band plays in the swinging 4 tempo & feel and THe drums answer with thE rectangular 4 tempo feel.
I still had to come up with something melodic and finally arrived at some "bilingual" lines that implied a little of both tempos:
(I STARTED TO NOTATE THE SWINGING 4/4 AS A 12/8 BECAUSE IT WAS EASIER TO READ THAT WAY...)
Then I borrowed an idea from late medieval European composers called ISORHYTHM (Isorhythm is where one crosses a repeating melodic pattern with a repeating rhythmic pattern of different legnths... ...say the melodic pattern has 3 tones and the rhythmic pattern consists of 4 moments, an isorhythm would come out like this:
I took this concept and applied it by the measure instead of by the tone, scripting the trades like this: 123(4 123)4 12(34 12)34 1(234 1)234 (THAT'S 6 x 4/4...) ENTERING AND EXITING at varying moments in the cycle in this fashion shifts its kinetic gravity and also reFREshes the melody, WHERE the differences in starting points each time gives the melodic loop a new face as it unwinds. THIS CYCLE IS FOLLOWED BY 2 MORE EXCHANGES: one measure rectangular 4 : one measure swinging 4 2 measures walking 4 (at rectangular tempo): : one measure swinging 4 THEN, the initial measure is SUStained as a vamp 7 times and the design cyles back to the top for another orbit. |
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