Meter

Understanding the counts: Meter

Meter, or metre if you are fancy and British, when it comes to ballet refers to the counts. These counts are based on the regularly occurring patterns and accents such as bars and beats that create an overall pattern for a piece of music. Frequent meters used in ballet are ¾ and  4/4. They are probably the easiest to understand, however even a ¾ piece of music could be a 2/8. If you know how to work with fractions, it will be even easier for you.

Duple and quadruple meters will usually be a series of even numbers on both top and bottom, with signatures like 2/4, 6/8, 4/4, 12/16. Triple meters will usually have one odd number on top, and an even number on bottom designated each bar is divided into 3 beats. For example ¾, 9/8, But it isn’t just limited to those patterns. When dancing many of the Stravinsky ballets you are going to encounter quintuple meters, sextuple meters, and septuple meters, and have even more complicated changes using musical terms like polyrhythm. One might really suggest, as a teacher, and even more so as a choreographer, to pursue music theory.