Music: The Main Driving Force In Music

Music is composed of many different elements that together give feeling to what we hear. These elements include rhythm, beat, accent, meter, syncopation, tempo, pitch, dynamics, tone color, overtone, scales, melody, harmony, texture, tonality, and mode. Just like with chemical elements, combining musical elements will create something new and exciting, and different combinations will give something distinct to the music. All sixteen elements mentioned are equally important and together provide us with beautiful music. The best way to understand how these elements work together is to look at each individually. Rhythm is known as the “main driving force in music both popular and classical” (Listen: Seventh Edition, p.7). A basic definition would be the general way music transpires in time, but a rhythm refers to the arrangement of long and short notes in a particular musical passage. Along with rhythm go beat and accent. Beats measure time in music, just as seconds measure time in our …show more content…
In other words, a meter is a recurring strong/weak pattern. Each occurrence of this pattern is composed of a primary strong beat and one or more weaker beats (Listen: Seventh Edition, p.8), which musicians call a measure. Western music contains two basic types of meters, the duple meter and the triple meter. Duple meters group beats in twos or fours while triple meters group them in threes. For example, a duple meter would be counted out as ONE two | ONE two and a triple would be counted ONE two three | ONE two three. Listening carefully, it is possible to discern which meter a song is played in. If the strong notes are displaced to sound as one TWO | one TWO, the result is called syncopation. This creates an interesting effect on the music, and sometimes the syncopation occurs when the accent is placed in between the beats. In short, syncopation is emphasis on something other than the primary