Musical meter

One thing common to all pieces of music is the time signature – the pair of numbers at the start of a musical score, right next to the clef and key signature. The time signature tells us how many of what type of beat we can expect to find in each bar of the music that follows.

But there’s another, more basic layer of timekeeping involved in music, and that’s the meter. The meter tells us how the pulse of the music is counted and how the beats within it are grouped together. Depending on the numbers it contains, a time signature can be identified as either simple or compound meter. And this month I’m going to