Variable Metre
Boris
Blacher was a 20th Century composer, born in China in 1903 and is
today regarded as one of the most influential musical figures of his time. After finishing school he moved to Germany
and studied composition with Friedrich Ernst Koch before becoming a well-respected
teacher of music. His career was interrupted
by the National Socialist Party and he was forced to leave teaching after his
music was deemed ‘degenerate’ by the Nazi party. Blacher believed that there was a
mathematical link to composing music.
Throughout his career he conducted many experiments exploring the
mathematical nature of rhythm, but most famous was probably his study of
variable metre seen in his Piano Concerto
No.2 (1952).
Blacher’s
experiments with ‘variable metre’ were inspired by Arnold Schoenberg
(1874-1951), an Austrian composer credited with devising the twelve-tone
composition technique (‘note-rows’).
This technique involved ensuring that all 12 notes of the chromatic
scale appeared in a non-repetitive way, but an equal number of times, within a
piece. Schoenberg’s ideas lead Blacher
to begin studying the possibility of shifting the attention from harmony to
rhythm, incorporating Schoenberg’s mathematical theory of ‘note rows’ into his own composition. Along with these ‘note-row’s’, Blacher
devised a system of contracting and expanding measures within a piece using a
variety of changing time signatures to completely alter the mood and structure
of the piece.
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