The tambourin is a Provençal dance accompanied by lively duple meter music. It is so named because the music imitates a drum (tambour being a generic French term for "drum"), usually as a repetitive not-very-melodic figure in the bass. This was played together with a small flute known as the galoubet or flaviol.
Jean-Philippe Rameau included tambourins in many of his operas, such as Platée, Les Indes Galantes, and Les fêtes d'Hébé. The last gained more fame in a keyboard arrangement from the E minor suite of his Pièces de Clavecin (1724).
The left-hand part, representing the drum-beat, is difficult to play, particularly in the measures in which it must span an interval of a 10th. The piece also contains many ornamental trills as French Baroque music may be ornamented as the performer chooses.
20. letter names vs. solfege revisited; duple meter
We discussed this briefly before, but I’d like to go into a bit more detail here about naming pitches. Different cultures have different ways about talking about the same music. They all have their pros and cons. I am presenting here one way of looking at things that I a) am comfortable with and b) have had success using with my students.
In this system, we use letter names to talk about absolute pitch: G always sounds the same, for example. If you are having a hard time remembering where the notes are on the staff, you should practice saying the letter names of the notes. It is very tempting to print out the music and write in all the letter names of the notes with a fingering chart right beside you. In fact, you may have already done so.
I cannot not urge you enough to stop. I know you think it helps, but what is actually happening is that you are not reading the notation at all. You’re reading the letter names you wrote down. It would be like going through a book and having to draw a little picture for every word or making a little recording of what each word sounded like — Are you really reading anymore? Plus, doesn’t that take an incredible amount of extra time? Part of the reason we started with so few notes was to make reading the staff easier; you only have to remember three things! So if you are writing in letter names, try going back to the first songs we worked on with a fresh, letter-name-free copy and push yourself to memorize the picture, the fingering, and the sound. Say the letter names out loud first, then play, instead of writing them in.
Using solfege to describe melodies helps us hear and understand how melodies work. The solfege syllables are also a little nicer to sing than letter names. We use solfege (do, re, mi, etc.) to talk about how G functions: if G is the musical center of our universe or our musical resting place (which also has another name — the tonic), then G’s function is called do. If F is the musical center of our universe, then G’s function becomes re. The absolute pitch sounds the same, but in the context of a song, it has a different job. These are the kinds of things you instinctively understand from a lifetime (even if it’s a relatively short one!) of listening to music (of the Euro-Ameri-African diaspora — if we talk about music of India, for example, then we need a whole different way of looking at things, but I digress…) — you may have never named these things before and they are rather abstract, so I understand if you are a bit lost already. By naming these musical phenomena, we help ourselves hear them more clearly and deeply.
When we listen to music, we do not make sense of absolute pitches but instead the relationship between those pitches. Not all pitches are equally important and not all pitches will have the same jobs or function from song to song. So we don’t really hear and understand G as much as we are hearing and understanding G’s job in the context of the song. We’ve already discovered this phenomenon by playing the same song with different sets of pitches. “Merrily We Roll Along” still sounds like “Merrily We Roll Along” when we switch from use G-A-B to F-G-A, it’s just that the latter sounds a wee bit lower.
Practice all of your songs naming the pitches with the letter names and with solfege. This will help you read the staff and hear the relationships between the pitches.
In the following songs, we have a new time signature, 2|4, but it's nothing too complicated. We previously discussed how to read the time signature, those two numbers sitting on top of one another just after the clef. If you need a refresher, you can click here. Instead of our usual four beats per measure, we only have two. You might find as you play these songs that they feel very similar to the songs you've played that have four beats to a measure. What's the difference? Well, not much. So what's the point?
Not all beats are the same. Sure, they last the same amount of time, but they are not the same in terms of emphasis. In any group of beats, we have strong beats and weak beats. We automatically do this grouping in our brains and call it meter (similar to poetry). No matter how we group the beats, however, the first beat is always the strongest beat. Why? (Think about this for a moment before you read on. You can pretend we're in the same room talking to each other, instead of communicating via text on the internet. Ah...) The first beat is where the pattern begins again: ONE-two-three-four-ONE-two-three-four... Since we humans like things to be even, the next strongest beat in a group of four is beat three. Beats two and four are weak. So our pattern when we group beats into fours is STRONG-weak-LESS STRONG-weak. If we only have two beats, then it's just STRONG-weak-STRONG-weak, over and over. That said, chances are if you're listening to someone play a song, you won't really be able to tell whether it's two-four or four-four. Notation has been developing for the past 1500 years or so — obviously, many things have changed, but unfortunately, why other things stick around is less clear. Two-four is not a useless time signature and neither is four-four, but the aural result is basically the same: groups of two beats alternating strong-weak. This is called duple meter.
The most important part is the idea of grouping beats. This is one of those things you can (and should!) practice without the instrument: walking, marching, waving your arms, stomping, clapping — moving around somehow. Find ways you can make this feeling of strong and weak beats clear to your ears and body.
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