study on 7/4 over 3/4 playing,

Hello composers, recently i've been digging into the art of Konnakol, the rhytmic alfabet of india, and whilst doing that i've come across a lot of interesting topics of rhytm, I will definetly do more studies in odd timings. here I just have one simple 7/4 melody which keeps repeating over and a little 3/4 accompaniement. I think it sounds really good, that is why I uploaded it.

what else? as you can hear/see the melody and the accompaniement seperate from the beginning, but at measure 7, they reunite. this will always be the case with such type of contable rhytmes, but what if you would use irrational numbers on the top? like pi/4 over 3/4. they will never truely unite as Pi is an irrational number. if there is irrational rhytmic music you know of, please link me!!

as for harmony i tried some techniques I know of.

Interesting. I find it a little peculiar that you wrote something mostly simple and neoclassical based on Indian rhythms, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. I think it would be interesting to attempt combining contrapuntal lines in two different meters, and see where that goes.

As far as irrational time signatures go, Conlon Nancarrow is your man. He wrote highly experimental music for player piano, meaning he could write things in his music that would be impossible for a human performance to realize, like irrational time. Of course, the result is only an approximation since truly irrational rhythm is impossible, but it's as close as it gets. Here's an example with a time given by the composer as (1/√π)/√⅔

Argh @fishyfry you took my piece suggestion! :) I think this is also a bit out there:

As far as your piece goes, Casper, Indian (especially north Indian) music is heavily based on the splitting of various ancient tala, which I'm not sure came out perfectly, but the polyphony did line up relatively nicely. I'd expand on this idea, and not just keep it so simple.

Hi Casper,

This is a really interesting idea, I like to concept very much, the piece however, as Monarcheon said, is very simple, which is not a bad thing and as an experiment in rhythm, it worked well enough, but as a piece to grab the attention of it's audience, I would have liked a much more developed melody and harmony, I didn't get a very Indian feel either but I don't really know any Indian composers so that's probably more to do with me, than your music.

I might even play with this idea too at some point.

Loving the Silvestre Revueltas by the way, much more than the Nancarro.

Best regards

Mark

@fishyfry thanks for the suggestions, Conlon is amazing, i can imagine that when he was working on the person piano, you dont have to work with rhytmic note values anymore. I can imagine him sitting with an ruler and penicl, pointing out how long the measures are he would write in.   

On the stylistic elements, yes it's mostly neoclassical/simple, because well, that's what i learned for now, so as you can understand I am devouring information right now to get this to an higher region.

I will definetly try different things with this 7/4 study, i will give an update on it in the future. I can say that now I've gotten some true indian flavours added!