I’m gonna do my best to explain what I mean here. I’m not a musician, but I love listening to classical music. As I’m listening, sometimes I count along with the beats in my head or pretend to conduct the music. It’s always really clear which beat is the downbeat, even with a solo instrument and even if you don’t start the piece from the beginning, but I don’t understand why? What stops you counting the from the 3rd beat instead of the first?
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Now I’m not a classically trained musician, I’m self taught on guitar and bass but I’ll try to explain.
Often it is easy to intuitively know which beat is the first in a bar because the music is composed such that an accented note or a chord change occurs on the downbeat. Think to something like a simple rock beat, often starting on the kick drum and alternating with the snare every beat while a riff or the chords start playing on the first kick. This makes it easy to intuitively know simply by hearing, without needing to think hard about which beat is the first.
However, this intuition is partly built on the common trends we hear in most music with the song (or main melody) beginning on the downbeat. Some people may find it hard to intuitively start counting from the first beat of each bar if the song starts with an anacrusis (a pickup bar, with the composition beginning part way through a bar on the upbeat, before the downbeat).
Examples of anacrusis can be found in songs like “Sex on Fire” by Kings of Leon, “Drive My Car” by the Beatles, or “Invaders Must Die” by the Prodigy (sorry, no classical examples).
In modern music, you can divide the songs in different structures, usually 16/32/64 beats. Most popular songs usually have a 16 best loop repeated twice in each structure, after that they usually have a marker or they add/delete an instrument. Your brain picks on that patterns without you noticing
Unsually, there is more stress on the first beat. It can be played louder, heavier or emphasised in another way. Depending on style, this can be more or less subtle.
A song (or a melody) is usually made with little bits of music stringed together. Al lot of sentences in a piece of lyruc are made to start on de 1 beat or to build up towards the 1 beat. Anyway, the 1 beat is usually the one with the most upmf or importance to it.
Because generally the tonic (root note) which is the (home base) of the song, is on beat one. Your brain recognizes that as the “starting point” and goes from there. If you did something weird where you played the last chord in a phrase longer and didn’t switch back to the tonic until, say, beat 3 of the next measure, it might confuse you as to where beat one is and you might think that is in fact beat 1. Also, knowing that there are (in common time) 4 beats per measure and that it has to start somewhere, your brain can figure that out pretty easily. You just *feel* it, mostly because western music all follows the same conventions that have been ingrained into you from birth and your brain recognizes them pretty easily. Our brains excel at recognizing patterns, and music is all about patterns.
I usually just try to listen to a phrase. Those usually start at the beginning of a bar, so you can use that as a starting point.
It’s not that simple all the time though. Take the main theme from the first movement of Beethovens 5th for example, the one that everyone knows. If you start counting at the first note, you quickly realize that something feels wrong. So you have to figure out how many notes there are used as a starting phrase, which for this phrase is the first three. You can just count 4 to the beginning of the next phrase iteration then.
This of course works best for classical, baroque and romantic music up until the more modern music. You can still try to use it for Schönberg, Strawinsky and Shostakovich, it just won’t be as simple anymore. In the end it’s also a matter of practice, of course.
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