Materials of Music - Rhythm

We know our heart beat, not quite a duple meter: 1, 2, 1, 2, ... but close enough. Walking produces a nice duple, a march a 2/4 or 4/4 meter, but count to the alternate foot and you can get a triple meter. Meter is the basis for dance and dance plays such an important role in music that particular dance rhythms become associated with complex social interactions, social status, rank, and privilege. In the Eighteenth century the Gavotte and Minuet had definite connotations as to class. The former being the mark of a noble and stately personage, quite often a wealthy baroness or countess. While other dances signified people of lower rank. Mozart's operas show this ranking by dance form quite clearly.

In later music and popular music complicated rhythms are the norm, some of these get extremely complex. We can begin with compound meters involving groupings of smaller duple and triple clusters together. The most simple of this is 6/8 time which plays on an ambiguity between two groups of three beats being played as duple and them reverting to two triplets and other combinations of the six notes. The complexity goes up from there adding duple or quadruple groups to groups of three, for example 5/4 time can be a group of four followed by a group of three. The Jazz Standard "Take Five" by Dave Brubeck is an example of exactly this. And there was a cover of that song that added a beat to make it a dance mix. It should have been renamed "Take Six", then.