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[dr_whom]

occultatio has invented an amusing-seeming meme. The rules are as follows:

1. Start up iTunes and set your entire library to shuffle.
2. Listen to the first 50 songs.
3. Write down any songs in that first 50 that are in something other than 4/4 time.
4. Before you start, guess how long your final list will be.

My guess is eight. Let's see what happens.

1. "Still Hurting", The Last Five Years. Sounds like a very slow 9/8. 9/4?
2. "So This Guy", PDQ Bach. The recitative is nonmetrical; the chorus is in 3/4.
7. Overture ("Night Waltz"), A Little Night Music. 3/4.
9. "Emperor Waltz", Johann Strauss. 3/4, though for some reason it doesn't enter 3/4 till a couple of minutes in.
10. "Pretty Women", Sweeney Todd. The song itself is in 3/4; the preceding scene seems to have a variety of meters.
14. "Finite Simple Group (of Order Two)", the Klein Four Group. Sounds like 2/2 (appropriately); does that count?
16. "Whatever Became of Hubert?", Tom Lehrer. 3/4.
24. "Rozhinkes mit Mandlen", the Klezmer Conservatory Band. 3/4.
29. "Sunrise, Sunset", Fiddler on the Roof. 3/4.
32. "And So It Goes", Billy Joel. Sounds like molto rubato 3/4.
43. "Professional Pirate", The Muppet Treasure Island. 2/4.
44. "No One Knows Who I Am", Jekyll & Hyde. 3/4.
45. "Norwegian Wood", the Beatles. 3/4.
46. "Beym Rebn in Palestine", the Klezmer Conservatory Band. The first half is 3/4; the second half is 2/4.
50. "Guys and Dolls", Guys and Dolls. Begins with a nonmetrical recitative; the rest seems to be 2/2.

So, looks like about fourteen or so altogether. I guess the moral is, way more of my music is in 3/4 than I expected.

Comments

[occultatio.livejournal.com]

I suspect that people with higher percentages of non-"popular music" in their libraries will have correspondingly high percentages of non 4/4 music. I've got a bunch of musical theater and such, but I also have way, way more pop stuff.

[timmypowg.livejournal.com]

I completely agree with that assessment. Here's a bad example: looking at the Well-Tempered Clavier gives you the following number of pieces not in 4/4 (each count is out of 24):

Book I Preludes: 10 (10/24 = 5/12 ~ 42%)
Book I Fugues: 9 (9/24 = 3/8 ~ 38%)

I'm not going to go through Book 2. For my 50 pieces, there were 23 not in 4/4, for 46%. On the other hand, the only Weird Al original I can think of not in 4/4 is One More Minute, and that's in 12/8 so it only dubiously counts. I don't know the latest CD at all, but up through Running With Scissors, I'm pretty sure that I actually checked this at some point when I was struck by the time signature common to all his music. I guess for him, 2/2 just doesn't cut it.

[boojum42.livejournal.com]

*Winces at pun.* Because someone had to.