It’s good to be irregular

It took the 19th century to escape the straitjackets of metrical symmetry in music

We need more fives, sevens and elevens in our music, says Tom Service, who believes that irregular time signatures are hardwired into our DNA

What do the following pieces of music have in common: ‘Mars’ from Holst’s The Planets, the second movement of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony, and the main theme of Howard Shore’s score for The Lord of the Rings?

They all use the time signature of

5/4, five beats in the bar, rather than the conventional symmetry of two and fours (with occasional visits to waltzing three-time) that the vast majority of classical music is composed in.

Useful for a pub quiz, maybe, but it begs a bigger question: why are groups of other numbers apart from two, three, and four so uncommon in our music?

In the early 18th century, the writer Charles Burney knew the answer.

When Handel dared to write a few bars of five-time to dramatise the moment in his opera Orlando when the title character is on the edge of psychological breakdown, Burney criticised Handel for using ‘a division of time which can only be borne in such a situation’. Music made in bars of fives or – heaven forfend! – sevens, could only suggest music on the edge of reason.

And yet there are musical cultures that have been obeying a rule of five for centuries: Russian wedding songs, Bulgarian folk dances, the rhythmic cycles of Indian music: five-time isn’t an aberration for those traditions, but a musical everyday, a feeling as natural as the fingers of our hands.

But it took the 19th century to escape the straitjackets of metrical symmetry in classical music: the slow movement of

Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 1 is a sighing song in five-time and Brahms wrote a spooky vocal quartet in five; but it was Russian composers, from Musorgsky to Rimsky-korsakov, Tchaikovsky to Stravinsky, who really released the metrical genie from the bottle.

And in so doing, they revealed the truth that there’s nothing ‘irregular’, still less insane, about music in five

– or higher numbers, like seven. The finale of Stravinsky’s Firebird is an unforgettable tune in a seamless seven, as is Bernstein’s ‘Oh, happy we!’ from his operetta Candide.

And there’s a riff in 11 quavers, four crotchets, and another seven quavers that we’ve been singing along to for decades as one of the most natural hypermetric groupings in the world: the chorus of The Beatles’ ‘Here Comes the Sun’.

Which proves we’re all capable of instinctively feeling groups of time made from other metrical schemes aside from the marching straitjackets of twos and fours. That asymmetric richness mirrors the interacting cycles of time in the rest of our lives: from our ever-changing heartbeats to the seven days of the week, or the 1,461 days in the leap-year cycle: our music should be as dynamic as the grids of time on which our lives are composed. So, enjoy the wild ride of fives, sevens and 11s, and feel the freedom from the tyranny of four!

Tom Service explores how music works in The Listening Service on Sundays at 5pm